Category Archives: General

Too Cheap To Fix

Sorry, had a busy day. Here’s an interesting article at the CSM that says that cars are becoming disposable.

…many new cars today cost so much to fix that it’s becoming harder to justify repairs. The BMW that hit McConnell’s shop had dual front, side, and side- curtain air bags. Federal safety rules do not allow air bags to be reused. So each bag would have had to be replaced with a brand new one. The sensors and pyrotechnics that set them off also required replacement. Add the cost of labor, more than $1,000 for each air bag, and even more for the sensors, and the result is a totaled car.

It’s not just airbags–if it were, we could just chalk it up to idiotic federal regulations.

As the article points out, this is an inevitable (and disturbing, at least to me) trend. I first noticed it over a decade ago when my first “Hi Fi” VCR had the stereo die in it. I took it to a VCR repair place and described the problem to the repairman, upon which he said, “yeah, I can fix it, but you can probably buy a new VCR cheaper.”

This came as a shock to me, because when I grew up, when a piece of high fidelity equipment broke, you fixed it. In the early seventies, I was a radio engineer at the local public broadcasting station (in high school). My step-brother had purchased a Sansui stereo receiver when he was stationed in Thailand during the war, while in the Air Force, and one of the channels had died in it. He had paid probably three hundred bucks for it in Asia (a decent amount of money at the time).

The power output transistors had died, which I determined fairly quickly by determining that they were shorted, using a volt ohm-meter. I pulled them off the heat sink and replaced them with new ones from Shand electronics, and he was back in business. My time (at minimum wage–I think a couple bucks an hour) was a couple hours, to diagnose, go to the electronics shop, and solder in the new transistors. It clearly made sense to fix it.

In the face of the VCR problem, I had a piece of equipment that cost a couple hundred bucks, but the repairman’s time was fifty bucks an hour, and there were few discrete components on it–it probably involved replacing an entire board that would have cost fifty bucks or so. It just didn’t make sense to spend the money since, at that time, the price of a new one had dropped, and would provide much better features. I could spend my own time, but I’d have to get some specialized equipment to do the circuit tracing, and still have to get the original factory parts. It just didn’t make sense.

In one sense, it’s great that things are getting so cheap that they’re not worth repairing. That means that they’re becoming extremely affordable.

But I wonder what it means for the new generation. When I was a kid, it was fun to take things apart to figure out how they worked (and useful to do so to figure out why they didn’t). If there was a problem with a part of it, it was affordable to go buy a new one and fix the de-vice by replacing it.

What does a high-school kid with an engineering aptitude do now? What opportunities are there for him or her to indulge in exploration and trouble-shooting (the root bases of science)?

I’ve got a 1986 Honda Accord with a quarter of a million miles on it. It’s got lots of problems–a windshield wiper switch that causes the wipers to come on when you hit a bump, a sunroof that doesn’t open because it needs a slight adjustment to a tensioner that can only be accessed by completely removing the roof from the car and dismantling it, upholstery that’s ripped and dissipated by age and sun, worn carpet, a slightly schizophrenic fuel-injection system that causes the engine to “breathe” when it idles, varying between 900 and 1500 RPM with a frequency of about 0.5 Hz, a hatchback in which the hydraulic lifts have lift their last, the original clutch (which still seems serviceable). It needs a new right axle, which makes little “click-click-click” noises on turns, due to a failed CV joint, and causes an unpleasant vibration in the front end at highway speeds.

On the other hand, the engine still burns no oil. This would have seemed miraculous to a high-school kid of my generation, when cars needed to have rings and valve-guides replaced at least once per hundred thousand miles. The synchronizers in the gearbox are still fine (including the ones in first gear–an unaffordable luxury when I was a teenager–I didn’t have first-gear synchros until I got my first BMW in the early eighties). These would have had to be replaced in any of my MGs with regularity when I was a kid, to to the point that always double clutched on the principle that it was easier to change the disk than rebuild a transmission, and I always did compression braking to save on brake pads (and especially, in the rear, on shoes).

When I was in high school, I would have killed for a car with this performance and handling, even with all the cosmetic problems and things to fix. What’s it worth to a high-school kid today?

I don’t know, but I may find out, because it’s not worth driving or shipping 2500 miles from southern California to southern Florida, where I’ll be living in a few weeks.

But while it’s great to see the costs of sophisticated mechanical equipment or electronics (and the tools to repair things, or construct new things) reduced to the point at which almost anyone can afford them, I think that something has been lost when the cost of manufacturing has become less than the cost of repair–the wonder of taking it apart, and the thrill of putting it back together and having it work, particularly when it didn’t work before you took it apart.

And I wonder where our next generation of engineers will come from.

Busy

Sorry for light posting, but I’ve got a lot of stuff to do around here, and I’ve been fighting with my computer all day trying to get a new mouse to work. Why can’t I just plug in an optical mouse and get it to work properly out of the box? I tried a Logitech last night, and it wouldn’t work at all (I’m guessing because it’s a combo USB/PS-2 that I was running into a PS-2 port on my KVM switch). I went out and bought a cheap one from BTC. It sort of works, but I had to install some software to get it to work properly, and when I did, it kept popping up this stupid control panel over the cursor from some program called KeyMeistro every couple seconds, which I had to manually close each time, so it was really impossible to use.

Back to Frys to try something else. Sigh…

My Team Is Undefeated

I’m not much of a baseball fan, but when they’re winning, just out of ancient tribal loyalty, I’m a Tigers fan. And given my experience of the past several years, I can’t help but feel a little schadenfreude for Joe.

7-0 losers. Against the worst team in baseball. On Opening Day. With last year’s Cy Young Award winner on the mound for the Jays. Oh, the embarassment.

As Glenn would say, heh.

Demeaning Men

Glenn is having a little dispute with Josh Chafetz over whether commercials and programs that depict men as fools and/or weaklings (relative to women) are a good or bad thing. While I agree with Glenn’s point, I wonder how much of this is a backlash from previous days when the reverse was true. I’m going to be heretical here and say that I never “loved Lucy.” I never found it all that funny, but moreover, if I were a woman I would be appalled at the image that she represented–she was a perpetual adolescent, with no common sense, and values so shallow that they’d be swamped by a dry lake. I don’t watch the show, but on those occasions that I have, I was embarrassed for her.

On the other hand, this is anecdotal, because I can’t think of any other show, off the top of my head, in which women were depicted as such self-centered idiots as that one. I wonder if anyone has ever done any research on the relative depictions of men versus women on television and radio over the decades, to see if there has been any overall change. Could be a good topic for a sociology thesis.

Categorizing

I’ve had post categories available for a while, but I’ve been very undiligent in using them, and I wasn’t displaying them on the template. From now I will be, as you can see in the rebuilt index page. I’ve gone back and categorized the last two weeks or so, but I don’t know if I’ll ever get around to categorizing all 3500+ posts since the fall of 2001.

Arrivederci

After too brief a tenure, I’ve decided to set aside blogging for the foreseeable future. In part this is due to additional pressures from work, and in part it’s due to reevaluating my priorities, which had skewed rather too far away from family and friends. I’ve enjoyed my stay here, though I wish I’d had more time to post. Fortunately it looks like Rand is back to full speed and in fine form.

Ad Astra,
Andrew

A Wonderful Weekend

Not.

It was one of those household projects where one thing turns into another.

I’m getting the California house ready to rent, and finally getting around to fixing up all the little things that I haven’t gotten around to for years that make it a little more aesthetic and livable. One of these was replacing the faucet and handles on the downstairs bathtub which, due to the hardness of our water, had become so encrusted with various minerals that they were starting to resemble some of the more active parts of Yellowstone Park.

Of course, that meant that they were also difficult to remove. When I tried to pull the handle off the cold-water faucet, it decided to break off the end of the valve stem, rather than sliding off the spline as designed. This occurred, of course, after I’d already been to Home Depot. In addition, the new spout that I’d purchased turned out to be for a half inch pipe, while removing the old one revealed a three-quarter inch outlet.

What had been merely an upgrade in looks had just turned into semi-serious plumbing. I turned off the water, and tried to remove the valve stem. Unfortunately, whoever had tiled the tub had embedded it in grout and mortar, so I spent a not inconsiderable part of the afternoon cold chiseling around it enough to get a socket on it, while being careful not to damage any visible parts of the tile. I eventually unscrewed it until it was turning freely, but it was still bound by too small a hole, so I had to chisel some more, and finally remove it like a recalcitrant tooth.

Back to Home Depot to exchange the spout, and buy a new valve stem. It’s installed now, and I’ve got water back on, so now it’s time to steam an artichoke for dinner. All this by way of explanation of light blogging. I am also working on a piece for Tech Central Station on hypersonics.