I post this only as as a funny coincidence.
Today I worked on my daughters car (1998 Sentra) and spent part of the afternoon cleaning some old slot-cars from 1970-ish.
Of course a lot of GRM stuff is upgrading, fixing, or altering old stuff to work the way we want it to.
Have a good weekend.
Scott
Scott - What are these old slot cars you speak of?.... :) Hmmm...
Pushrod said:Scott - What are these old slot cars you speak of?.... :) Hmmm...
Aurora Thunderjets.
I think we need to take it a step beyond "right to repair," which should never have been called into question to begin with, and aggressively pursue policy that requires manufacturers to design into each and every product a reasonable "repairability."
Case in point: My new Keurig, less than two years old, suddenly stops heating water. My wife tells me her sister buys a new Keurig every year or two because they stop heating water. I view a couple YouTube videos detailing the likely cause and simple repair. I literally have to rip the outer skin off of this cheesy appliance in order to get to a manual reset thermal cutout that should never have been part of the circuit without having a bright red reset button visible on the outside of the appliance. The problem in this case isn't so much consumerism as a malicious greed among manufacturers that induces them to design products that will readily fail in the hopes of selling additional units.
My repaired Keurig is about six months into its "second life," and still works great. Berkeley Keurig.
In reply to 1988RedT2 :
The problem in this case isn't so much consumerism as a malicious greed among manufacturers that induces them to design products that will readily fail in the hopes of selling additional units.
And bovine consumers.
As WC Fields once said " If God did not mean for them to be fleeced, he would not have made them sheep"
When I was a kid, my mom had this big hardbound book about DIY home repairs. Was very useful in the pre-"just Google it" days.
I forget if it was by Time Life, Reader's Digest, or someone else. I'd recognize it if I saw it. It was like the Big Blue AMA Book but for home repairs.
In reply to 1988RedT2 :
You're talking about a company that designed its one-shot coffee maker to only use their brand of one-shot consumables, too.
Pete. (l33t FS) said:In reply to 1988RedT2 :
You're talking about a company that designed its one-shot coffee maker to only use their brand of one-shot consumables, too.
Sure. I mean, any coffee maker is just a water heater that shoots hot water through ground up coffee. I use the re-usable capsule filled with ground whole bean coffee that I grind myself. I buy some K-cups, but they make up less than half of the coffee that I drink. It's got nothing to do with the fact that their water heater stopped working before it should have, and the nature of the failure made it pretty obvious that a) the manufacturer knew it would fail and b) they wanted it to be difficult to repair.
The Keurig machine is the least of your worries if you are worried about waste.
In reply to 1988RedT2 :
When Keurigs were a new thing, they had an RFID chip or something (I don't remember the details) in their K cups so that you could ONLY use Keurig coffee. If you put an off brand cup or a reuseable capsule in it, it wouldn't turn on.
They lost that lawsuit, which is why you and I can use reusable capsules in the Keurig. (I process about one 10lb bucket of Maxwell House every two or three weeks, at work)
Sorry, I didn't want this to turn into a thread about the Keurig. I only offered that as an example of a consumer product that appeared to be designed in such a way as to discourage repair.
I've had my tea kettle about twenty years and it has never failed. It's not repairable either.
If you want some interesting reading, dig into the John Deere right to repair stuff going on. It's a doozy....
1988RedT2 said:I think we need to take it a step beyond "right to repair," which should never have been called into question to begin with, and aggressively pursue policy that requires manufacturers to design into each and every product a reasonable "repairability."
Preach it, brother!
Brett_Murphy (Agent of Chaos) said:1988RedT2 said:I think we need to take it a step beyond "right to repair," which should never have been called into question to begin with, and aggressively pursue policy that requires manufacturers to design into each and every product a reasonable "repairability."
Preach it, brother!
Then fix a broken glass tea pot.
Automobiles, largely as a whole, are 95% repairable by any shadetree mechanic with basic tools still. The reliance on power this, power that, emissions, et al leads down the path of planned obsolescence.
Tv's, computers... unless you have an EE degree, it's going to be junk when they die.
DeadSkunk (Warren) said:I've had my tea kettle about twenty years and it has never failed. It's not repairable either.
I'm in the process of repairing my 40-50 year old Norelco coffee maker. TBD if it can be repaired, but I bet it can. 1200 watts of hot water!
In reply to Ranger50 :
Is it though? With google, how hard is it? My tv broke. I googled it. Found the likely culprit, watched 2 YouTube's, and bought a $50 part. Tv works again. Not an electrical engineer or particularly handy either.
Having heard lots of comments about us rebuilding our trailer, I really don't think many people want to spend time fixing stuff. They have other lives that take up their time a lot more enjoyably than fixing stuff.
Like manual new cars, I really believe that the fix it crowd is small enough to not bother with when it comes to making stuff repairable compared to making it cheaper to build.
Coffee makers that break are nothing compare to phones.
In reply to Ranger50 :
Interesting to bring up cars when they are older than they ever have been for the average age. Especially since the emissions laws require them to last so long (150k miles).
Ranger50 said:Tv's, computers... unless you have an EE degree, it's going to be junk when they die.
It may require the EE guy to do it first, but once a fix is found it takes one person to post it online and then it's distributed for the world.
There's a Japanese electronics whiz on the Lexus forums who openly posts what components that go bad on ECUs and center consoles that cause running issues and glitches. Same thing for vintage computers, especially old Apples. I just hope it's true that whatever is put online stays there forever.
In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :
It was this one in our house
alfadriver said:In reply to Ranger50 :
Interesting to bring up cars when they are older than they ever have been for the average age. Especially since the emissions laws require them to last so long (150k miles).
Considering that depreciating asset is costing $1000/mo now.... It's any wonder the average vehicle age keeps creeping up. And if you have a Ford, forget about new OEM parts after 9 yrs still. Vintage only has so much room...
alfadriver said:In reply to Ranger50 :
Interesting to bring up cars when they are older than they ever have been for the average age. Especially since the emissions laws require them to last so long (150k miles).
It's like modern geriatric care. People are living past what are now easily preventable or treated diseases (diabetes used to be a short death sentence, for example) and now are dying of what used to be obscure things. Likewise, cars aren't being sent to the junkyard because they are simply used up, anymore, they are scrapped because of things like failing modules.
I feel that the electrics and electronics in modern cars is waaaay better than 50s/60s/70s/80s. Cars just last longer enough now that they become the weak point.
Ranger50 said:alfadriver said:In reply to Ranger50 :
Interesting to bring up cars when they are older than they ever have been for the average age. Especially since the emissions laws require them to last so long (150k miles).
Considering that depreciating asset is costing $1000/mo now.... It's any wonder the average vehicle age keeps creeping up. And if you have a Ford, forget about new OEM parts after 9 yrs still. Vintage only has so much room...
It's not just Ford. Everybody has to sunset their parts supply sometime. GM used to be really bad for that. There were parts specific to ZR1 Corvettes and Buick Grand Nationals that were never available as replacement parts.
Someone once told me this was a dirty trick to protest your way to a win in autocross. Someone in a ZR1 beat you? Protest that their engine was modified. They can't prove that it is stock, because that would require disassembly, and new parts were not available to put it back together, so they would have to forfeit.
There's also the Fiat model. Make the parts so expensive that you don't bother. Wiper switch for a Dodge Dart is only sold as a $1400 steering column assembly.
Ranger50 said:alfadriver said:In reply to Ranger50 :
Interesting to bring up cars when they are older than they ever have been for the average age. Especially since the emissions laws require them to last so long (150k miles).
Considering that depreciating asset is costing $1000/mo now.... It's any wonder the average vehicle age keeps creeping up. And if you have a Ford, forget about new OEM parts after 9 yrs still. Vintage only has so much room...
Those economic issues really have no bearing on how long they actually last. Cars last longer now than they ever have, and a lot of that does have to do with emission laws that require them to survive to 150k miles.
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