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O Holy Crap

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Re: O Holy Crap

#231

Post by eigen »

RunSet wrote: post #159
mathattack wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quality manufacturing in the Good Ole Days is a myth. The Japanese are our lunch in auto in the 70s due to a lack of Quality. Planned obsolescence is a thing. So is building or making for the short term. There just wasn’t this great era where people made things for the long haul out of pride or something else. People always took the short term view when the market structure or incentives encouraged it.

I distinctly recall the existence of television repair shops, which suggests there was a time when market structure / incentives did not encourage planned obsolescence.

when your $2000 TV breaks in 1985, you get it repaired because the current models cost just as much and are basically indistinguishable.

when your $400 TV breaks in 2022, you buy a new one because its relatively inexpensive and you can get a larger one for the same price.

Re: O Holy Crap

#232

Post by kwhitefoot »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #36
yetihehe wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Metal, vs plastic gears. Sintered metal gears, last only a little longer than plastic and then fail catastrophically destroying half of the device so that you can't repair it. But at least they are much cheaper than proper machined gears.

My KitchenAid mixer ate a gear many years ago. They would lead you to believe they are a high quality brand, no? After disassembly, it turned out to be perhaps the only plastic gear in the thing. It occurred to me that it was perhaps designed to fail rather than the mixer continuing to break the bones of the person who got their hand caught in the paddle. So, I throw the engineer a bone for that one. I was bummed tho…

My Electrolux Assistent N8, from 1978, also has a worm drive. Not plastic though, instead it has an electromechanical stall detector that shuts down the motor if it stalls. No need for sacrificial parts!

Re: O Holy Crap

#233

Post by jemmyw »

mschuster91 wrote: post #193
eternityforest wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reliability now isn't done with the same methods as it was then. Back then, the good stuff might have been good because the motor was big. The modern good stuff probably has a brushless motor that can prevent stalls. It doesn't matter if it's big or small, the computer won't let it overheat, so they can make it smaller to save money that they can spend on whatever part is the actual failure mode. The trouble is findi…

> The trouble is finding manufacturers that actually do that, rather than just using a tiny motor with no computer and plastic gears with no torque sensing. If you design things with old fashioned methods, you need to use old fashioned heavy parts. Oh yeah. Like Surefeed smart cat feeders. They don't use end reed or contact switches to control the lid motor - they use current sensing on the motor and stop it when the…

The old model was impossible to clean. Did the designers never meet a cat?

I've got two sure microchip cat doors. They've been reliable. Same problem, hard to clean. When one of our cats figured out how to break through the door sure sent me a 3d printed plastic part that clipped on over the latch. I think their customer care is pretty good.

Re: O Holy Crap

#234

Post by kwhitefoot »

ekianjo wrote: post #217
vages wrote: post #4

Be aware that survivorship bias may fool you when comparing the quality of new and old items. The single juicer that lasts 70 years may be the only one of its kind to last that long, the others from the same production year being left to rot and rust in a landfill. That being said, I definitely believe that planned obsolesence and unintentional bad quality is a plague on modern consumer items. I am lucky enough to ha…

> I'm glad that the EU is working hard on right-to-repair laws. The EU will just give fines and nobody will care. Regulation is not the best path here.

If you able to tell us that regulation is not the best path perhaps you could enlighten us by telling us what would be better.

Re: O Holy Crap

#235

Post by function_seven »

taylodl wrote: post #175
vages wrote: post #4

Be aware that survivorship bias may fool you when comparing the quality of new and old items. The single juicer that lasts 70 years may be the only one of its kind to last that long, the others from the same production year being left to rot and rust in a landfill. That being said, I definitely believe that planned obsolesence and unintentional bad quality is a plague on modern consumer items. I am lucky enough to ha…

People forget things used to cost a lot of money. I remember when our family bought our first color TV set back in the early 70's. You can buy a 65" HDTV set today for the same amount of money - and that's in today's dollars which are significantly less valuable than the dollars in the early 70's! That TV didn't last 20 years - it was a huge hassle continually testing and replacing tubes. Meanwhile I bought a 55" HDT…

I remember asking for a color 13" TV for Christmas back in 1988 I think?

For months I would grab the Sunday paper and pull out all the ad inserts looking for the perfect TV. It had to be cheap; I didn't want to ask for anything crazy. I finally found one that was under $200 and showed it to my parents. It was some unknown brand. It wasn't "Cable Ready", and it still had separate tuner knobs for VHF and UHF. I didn't care, main use would be for Nintendo.

Parents decided to splurge instead and spent almost $400 on a Toshiba unit with a digital channel display and a remote(!). It also understood cable. I could watch Nick at Nite on it when I went to sleep.

$400 for a 13" TV, in 1988. That's $1,000 in today's money. A 75-inch 4K TV.

EDIT: For a nostalgia hit, I went searching for it. This is the model they got me: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=15wiYAEOYAE

Re: O Holy Crap

#236

Post by escapedmoose »

cfeduke wrote: post #42

The thing in this space that has always bothered me was the simple can opener. (For those not in the US, yes, in the US we still need can openers.) The new ones which can be purchased in the grocery store break within a month or two. I don't even want to think about modern electric openers. I found a used vintage can opener from the 1970s on eBay six years ago and use it practically every day; as it was used it cost…

My cheap ugly turquoise manual can opener from Target has been a pleasure to use for years. I didn’t even realize good can openers were hard to find. Sorry for your bad luck :(

Re: O Holy Crap

#237

Post by escapedmoose »

hammock wrote: post #203
jtbayly wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We got a hand (immersion) blender. Plastic gear to the metal shaft. Stripped out. Non-repairable. Can’t find one without a plastic gear. Meanwhile, mother-in-law’s is metal and who knows how many years old, still working fine.

Weren’t 3d printers supposed to solve this problem?

Our household has solved several similar problems with our 3D printer.

Re: O Holy Crap

#238

Post by kwhitefoot »

cfeduke wrote: post #61
wincy wrote: post #7

My $4000 GE refrigerator has broken twice now in the five years we have owned it, both times in the exact same way. The way the fridge works seems simple: the cold freezer is on the bottom, and then a fan blows air up through a shaft to the relatively warmer refrigerator as needed to keep it just above freezing. Instead, the failure state is that the fan that handles this broke with no warning. I lost a bunch of groc…

I have the original refrigerator the previous owners installed when we purchased the house. It's from the 1990s. It is sometimes loud, but I am afraid to replace it. I am sometimes awed by the new, sleek fridges in the home improvement store but then Admiral Ackbar's voice rings in my head and gives me a +8 to my Will save. So far so good. Every 2-4 years I replace the dishwasher, dryer, and washing machine. The firs…

My washing machine is over thirty years old, a no-name Italian one. Electromechanical controller, so no electronics. The only fault is that the program knob fell off, I tied it back on with a piece of string ten years ago. It looks like it should keep going for another decade or two.

Re: O Holy Crap

#239

Post by chinabot »

mbfg wrote: post #44
derbOac wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it's worth, some things in my lifetime have seemed to get much better, and cars and refrigerators happen to be in that class. Many other things seem to have gotten worse though, like clothes and linens. I suspect there's some pattern to those things that have improved and those that have declined, and everything in between, but I couldn't explain it.

watching many youtube mechanic channels, i get the sense that they seem to think that 2000 era cars were better than today's car. The common missive is that they now have really cheap parts, and the cars are over controlled by computer systems making them brittle and expensive to repair.

and impossible to replace with the same part from a scrapped car due to the module being paired to the specific car and the reuirement for the dealer to install it. All car parts should become open source 10 years after the last one was produced to prevent them just getting scrapped.

Re: O Holy Crap

#240

Post by kwhitefoot »

carapace wrote: post #177
jtbayly wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a joke?! Are you a fridge salesman or something? You do understand that many of us would pay more for that fridge and gladly pay way more in electricity to have it perform its job reliably, right?

The idea is to have inexpensive refrigerators that use less energy and last many decades. (And when they are superseded by even more efficient models there should be a clear recycle/reuse "exit" for the old appliances. I hear they have laws to that effect over in Germany, something like that. Keeps the old obsolete appliances out of the landfill.)

We have laws like it in Norway too. Old appliances can be taken to the local recycling centre or to any shop that sells appliances of the same general type. All shops that sell electrical goods have to be willing to take back discarded appliances even if they did not sell that specific article or even brand.
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