4 ms·
That little cog might be more like a fuse -- a part of the system that's relatively easily replaced and designed to fail first.
by sevensor 9y ago
That little cog might be more like a fuse -- a part of the system that's relatively easily replaced and designed to fail first.
- pbhjpbhj 9y agoAnd so the company send a spare one in the box when you buy it, yes? Because they wouldn't be so crass as to make you hunt down a part that cost them a few pennies and disables the machine would they? Same issue for me with food mixer, mostly metal, key part is plastic and gets stripped, can't be replaced. Same with bread maker, rubber belt decays and company don't make the part available.
- sevensor 9y agoRight, that's a fair criticism of the business practice, but from an engineering perspective it might not be a terribly unreasonable design. It's a good idea to design a system to fail predictably. Electrical engineers use fuses, mechanical engineers use shear pins, and so on.
- lopmotr 9y agoPerhaps it was to protect the user, not the machine. If you drop a spoon in, it might break the fuse before pinging it into your face? Or it might have been a sliding contact that needed better wear performance than metal on metal, or it might have been an odd shape that was expensive to make from metal.
- rdeboo 9y agoOutboard motors for boats work like this. If you hit a rock with the propellor, a piece of plastic in the drive train breaks. This prevents the propellor or some other part of the motor from serious damage.