6 ms·

The first repairabilty key is the standardization of parts, witch exists but only limited to VERY common parts, another is the availability of spare parts. But

by kkfx 4y ago

The first repairabilty key is the standardization of parts, witch exists but only limited to VERY common parts, another is the availability of spare parts. But the real key is the fight against crap: you sell a mixer with a plastic gear, easy to speculate that will break after few year, ok, you are allowed to do so, but you get a progressive tax: as much as durable and repairable is your device you pay less. For a mixer that means: 30% of the sale price as tax if it's expected lifetime is less than 10 years of normal usage. Another fraud is "spare parts available ONLY to 'certified technicians'" witch means repair is as expensive a get a new gear. Personally, for standards: - anything "commodity like" must be made of standard parts for anything critical to it's functionality, that means a washing machine must have a water pump with flexible connection and standard threads / diameters and fixing that you do not need an original one but any "common pump" can be found, whiskers with standard whips inserts etc; - all spare parts on sale from the company website, at a reasonable price, witch means buying all cost no more than +10% of the assembled device on sale, no restriction on buyers, no need to be "certified" by the company etc. Spare parts MIGHT have a mark to avoid warranty issues but nothing else; - ALL software MUST BE open sourced, no restriction allowed, no bullshits on IP and so one, any black box can't be on sale in 5 years (to give time to adapt) and the code must be practically readable and usable by anyone; - anyone who can prove planned obsolescence, like technicians from inside the OEM, get rewarded SIGNIFICANTLY for their publication and the OEM so badly sanctioned that the whistleblower get no issue if is cut off some market, the company loose so much that no one want even try.

bombcar 4y ago
> anything "commodity like" must be made of standard parts for anything critical to it's functionality, that means a washing machine must have a water pump with flexible connection and standard threads / diameters and fixing that you do not need an original one but any "common pump" can be found, whiskers with standard whips inserts etc; This is a huge one for things that aren't phones and laptops - parts should be as "loosely" coupled as they can be, so that similar but not identical parts can be used. This may involve slightly more complicated designs (think: wash machine that has a pump AND a flow valve or switches in the drum to measure how full it is vs just "run this pump for X minutes and it will be full) but allows for much more durability/long lasting. However, an additional thing should be done to encourage these repairs - make it so that out-of-warranty repairs/repaired items sold are VAT-free. Once the financial incentives are lined up, people will be begging for dead items they can fix and resell.
- lotsofpulp 4y ago
  > make it so that out-of-warranty repairs/repaired items sold are VAT-free Customer goes to appliance store. Breaks a $5 part. Store repairs it, and now the customer gets to buy the appliance without VAT plus $5 for the repair? If the goal is to reduce people’s consumption and incentivize them reuse, then simply increase taxes on newly manufactured goods. It will also incentivize people to buy more repairable goods, and hence incentivize manufacturers to make and sell them.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    The idea would be for out of warranty repaired items; in other words, the device was bought years ago and is otherwise destined for the landfill.
    - lotsofpulp 4y ago
      Oh, I see. Still seems like more labor required to verify and audit warranty status. Seems simpler to enforce an excise tax on the manufacturer/importer.
dale_glass 4y ago
Plastic gears that break can be intentional, good design for better repairability. If a mechanism jams, something has to give. This may be the motor, which may survive being jammed indefinitely, or it could burn up, causing a more expensive problem. In a mixer, the motor is probably decently powerful and doesn't tolerate being jammed. If there's enough gear reduction, then a jam can develop enough force to bend shafts or break mountings and other components. That can make the product impossible to repair, if some injection molded bit that was supposed to hold stuff in place was broken. A well placed plastic gear that breaks and saves the rest of the mechanism can make repair far easier and cheaper. And gears are very standard components that are far easier to find replacements for than some weird injection molded thing being made for one specific model of mixer.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  The cheap way to do this (and imo better because much better definition of the breaking strain) is a shear pin.
- nonrandomstring 4y ago
  Great example of why "planned obsolescence" isn't always bad. In this case the weak gear acts alike a kind of mechanical fuse. So long as it's within a context of easy replacement.
- spockz 4y ago
  But then it isn’t planned obsolescence. It is planned obsolescence if the plastic gear wears and breaks down without a jam occurring. In your model it is a fail safe or circuit breaker. In the GP it a part designed to fail sooner (in wall clock time) to make sure you buy a new product.
  - msbarnett 4y ago
    But that's the crux of engineering: these two things are in tension – the part which is designed to fail safely if a jam occurs will, by its very nature, also be subject to wearing down sooner than if it were made of cast iron and caused the entire mixer to fail catastrophically during a jam. In reality, nothing is so simple as waving your hands and declaring "no plastic 'planned obsolescence' parts!". Everything is a trade-off. A more effective way of pushing companies to position the trade-off in a way that rewards long-term durability would probably be to mandate longer warranty periods, rather than try to dictate what gears ought to be made out of in a vacuum divorced from the tradeoffs involved.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
Some ambitious targets there, but I support your general attitude. > sell a mixer with a plastic gear, easy to speculate that will break after few year, ok, you are allowed to do so, but you get a progressive tax A poor quality tax, like a sugar tax, seems interesting. Don't sell crap. Measurement and enforcement isn't so easy. Quality of design isn't trivial to assess. Maybe simple MTBF of finished product. Punish excessive returns. > Another fraud is "spare parts available ONLY to 'certified technicians'" I see that in the US outfits like Tesla and John Deere hide behind "safety" as a shield. "Right to repair" needs to kerb-stomp that whole conceit. Prove that only a highly skilled technician could possibly perform the repair and that otherwise the consequences are extremely likely to be lethal. > must be made of standard parts Mechanical interoperability and "class" part tolerances aren't so unreasonable. The entire electronics industry is built on standard component pitches and package layouts with equivalent component classes published in most cases. Take the 741 op-amp package and you'll find hundreds of pin-compatible devices in any catalogue. We totally can do that for electro-mechanical assemblies. > all spare parts on sale from the company website, at a reasonable price No. I don't like the idea of compelled sales. I don't like compelled anything. How about a law that says if you refuse to manufacture and sell parts at a reasonable price you simply lose your patent/trademark and cannot stop any other business making the part for which there is demand? > ALL software MUST BE open sourced Gets my vote! :) > anyone who can prove planned obsolescence Not sure. Planned obsolescence isn't always a bad thing. It can be a good design trade-off. Comes back to the quality expectations thing. But remote kill switches and "updates of death" should be punished mercilessly.
- adamc 4y ago
  How do you know MTBF for recent (new) products? If they get a waiver, why wouldn't manufacturers make every product model-year-specific to avoid such a requirement?
  - stonemetal12 4y ago
    If it is anything like hard drives, then you just make up a big number that no one ever actually sees in the real world.
w-m 4y ago
Wouldn’t the simplest way to punish selling crap be to bump up the years of required warranty significantly, for most product categories?
- bombcar 4y ago
  Don't some countries in Europe already have this? Minimum warranties because the product must work for X number of years no matter what? A sliding tax that got larger the shorter the warranty was would be interesting, perhaps avoidable if you showed a certain amount of repairability (or longevity of product model; a device that has been made for five years is going to be more repairable than one that changes every year, if everything else is the same).
908B64B197 4y ago
> But the real key is the fight against crap: you sell a mixer with a plastic gear, easy to speculate that will break after few year, ok, you are allowed to do so, but you get a progressive tax: as much as durable and repairable is your device you pay less. For a mixer that means: 30% of the sale price as tax if it's expected lifetime is less than 10 years of normal usage. So the cheaper mixer is now as expensive as the better built one. This means there's no more cheap mixer on the market. How is getting a single mother of three to pay 30% extra taxes to fund some civil servant's pension fund helping anyone? > Another fraud is "spare parts available ONLY to 'certified technicians'" witch means repair is as expensive a get a new gear. Thanks to the internet, this problem tends to solve itself. The factory in China will generally happily sell you some. > anyone who can prove planned obsolescence, like technicians from inside the OEM, get rewarded SIGNIFICANTLY for their publication and the OEM so badly sanctioned that the whistleblower get no issue if is cut off some market, the company loose so much that no one want even try. The problem is what's the bar for proving it? Every design has a component that will wear out first.
- majormajor 4y ago
  > > But the real key is the fight against crap: you sell a mixer with a plastic gear, easy to speculate that will break after few year, ok, you are allowed to do so, but you get a progressive tax: as much as durable and repairable is your device you pay less. For a mixer that means: 30% of the sale price as tax if it's expected lifetime is less than 10 years of normal usage. > So the cheaper mixer is now as expensive as the better built one. This means there's no more cheap mixer on the market. How is getting a single mother of three to pay 30% extra taxes to fund some civil servant's pension fund helping anyone? Is it better to have an invisible "poor tax" that makes your single mother spend 2-3x the price of the cheap one over 10 years since it breaks so much faster instead of having to save up longer initially for the one that probably won't break in ten years? Could do an escrow/deposit style thing so you can get your money back if your cheap shit actually doesn't break faster. So there's an incentive to make things cheaper only if you are confident in your long-term business model and reliability.
  - 908B64B197 4y ago
the-smug-one 4y ago
Poor quality products are typically cheap. Such a tax will hurt poor people, those who most of all need lower priced products. Poor people will need support in buying high quality products.
sokoloff 4y ago
> at a reasonable price, witch means buying all cost no more than +10% of the assembled device on sale I get what you’re trying to accomplish here, but as stated, this seems ridiculous. A washing machine may have 75+ part numbers (with many of those having multiples [like screws and panel clips]). Asking a manufacturer to stock and handle each of them individually for service parts at a loss seems unreasonable. If you bought every part individually to assemble a $25K Toyota, I bet you’d spend over $100K in parts. Why? Because it costs more money to box, label, ship, inventory, pick, and pack a washing machine or a car a part at a time than to load a cardboard box with a whole machine inside with a fork truck or drive a car off a hauler.
nicbou 4y ago
> Another fraud is "spare parts available ONLY to 'certified technicians'" witch means repair is as expensive a get a new gear. It blows my mind that some vehicle repair manuals are basically impossible to find.

by kkfx 4y ago

bombcar 4y ago

> anything "commodity like" must be made of standard parts for anything critical to it's functionality, that means a washing machine must have a water pump with flexible connection and standard threads / diameters and fixing that you do not need an original one but any "common pump" can be found, whiskers with standard whips inserts etc; This is a huge one for things that aren't phones and laptops - parts should be as "loosely" coupled as they can be, so that similar but not identical parts can be used. This may involve slightly more complicated designs (think: wash machine that has a pump AND a flow valve or switches in the drum to measure how full it is vs just "run this pump for X minutes and it will be full) but allows for much more durability/long lasting. However, an additional thing should be done to encourage these repairs - make it so that out-of-warranty repairs/repaired items sold are VAT-free. Once the financial incentives are lined up, people will be begging for dead items they can fix and resell.

lotsofpulp 4y ago
> make it so that out-of-warranty repairs/repaired items sold are VAT-free Customer goes to appliance store. Breaks a $5 part. Store repairs it, and now the customer gets to buy the appliance without VAT plus $5 for the repair? If the goal is to reduce people’s consumption and incentivize them reuse, then simply increase taxes on newly manufactured goods. It will also incentivize people to buy more repairable goods, and hence incentivize manufacturers to make and sell them.
- bombcar 4y ago
  The idea would be for out of warranty repaired items; in other words, the device was bought years ago and is otherwise destined for the landfill.
  - lotsofpulp 4y ago
    Oh, I see. Still seems like more labor required to verify and audit warranty status. Seems simpler to enforce an excise tax on the manufacturer/importer.

dale_glass 4y ago

Plastic gears that break can be intentional, good design for better repairability. If a mechanism jams, something has to give. This may be the motor, which may survive being jammed indefinitely, or it could burn up, causing a more expensive problem. In a mixer, the motor is probably decently powerful and doesn't tolerate being jammed. If there's enough gear reduction, then a jam can develop enough force to bend shafts or break mountings and other components. That can make the product impossible to repair, if some injection molded bit that was supposed to hold stuff in place was broken. A well placed plastic gear that breaks and saves the rest of the mechanism can make repair far easier and cheaper. And gears are very standard components that are far easier to find replacements for than some weird injection molded thing being made for one specific model of mixer.

jacquesm 4y ago
The cheap way to do this (and imo better because much better definition of the breaking strain) is a shear pin.
nonrandomstring 4y ago
Great example of why "planned obsolescence" isn't always bad. In this case the weak gear acts alike a kind of mechanical fuse. So long as it's within a context of easy replacement.
spockz 4y ago
But then it isn’t planned obsolescence. It is planned obsolescence if the plastic gear wears and breaks down without a jam occurring. In your model it is a fail safe or circuit breaker. In the GP it a part designed to fail sooner (in wall clock time) to make sure you buy a new product.
- msbarnett 4y ago
  But that's the crux of engineering: these two things are in tension – the part which is designed to fail safely if a jam occurs will, by its very nature, also be subject to wearing down sooner than if it were made of cast iron and caused the entire mixer to fail catastrophically during a jam. In reality, nothing is so simple as waving your hands and declaring "no plastic 'planned obsolescence' parts!". Everything is a trade-off. A more effective way of pushing companies to position the trade-off in a way that rewards long-term durability would probably be to mandate longer warranty periods, rather than try to dictate what gears ought to be made out of in a vacuum divorced from the tradeoffs involved.

nonrandomstring 4y ago

Some ambitious targets there, but I support your general attitude. > sell a mixer with a plastic gear, easy to speculate that will break after few year, ok, you are allowed to do so, but you get a progressive tax A poor quality tax, like a sugar tax, seems interesting. Don't sell crap. Measurement and enforcement isn't so easy. Quality of design isn't trivial to assess. Maybe simple MTBF of finished product. Punish excessive returns. > Another fraud is "spare parts available ONLY to 'certified technicians'" I see that in the US outfits like Tesla and John Deere hide behind "safety" as a shield. "Right to repair" needs to kerb-stomp that whole conceit. Prove that only a highly skilled technician could possibly perform the repair and that otherwise the consequences are extremely likely to be lethal. > must be made of standard parts Mechanical interoperability and "class" part tolerances aren't so unreasonable. The entire electronics industry is built on standard component pitches and package layouts with equivalent component classes published in most cases. Take the 741 op-amp package and you'll find hundreds of pin-compatible devices in any catalogue. We totally can do that for electro-mechanical assemblies. > all spare parts on sale from the company website, at a reasonable price No. I don't like the idea of compelled sales. I don't like compelled anything. How about a law that says if you refuse to manufacture and sell parts at a reasonable price you simply lose your patent/trademark and cannot stop any other business making the part for which there is demand? > ALL software MUST BE open sourced Gets my vote! :) > anyone who can prove planned obsolescence Not sure. Planned obsolescence isn't always a bad thing. It can be a good design trade-off. Comes back to the quality expectations thing. But remote kill switches and "updates of death" should be punished mercilessly.

adamc 4y ago
How do you know MTBF for recent (new) products? If they get a waiver, why wouldn't manufacturers make every product model-year-specific to avoid such a requirement?
- stonemetal12 4y ago
  If it is anything like hard drives, then you just make up a big number that no one ever actually sees in the real world.

w-m 4y ago

Wouldn’t the simplest way to punish selling crap be to bump up the years of required warranty significantly, for most product categories?

bombcar 4y ago
Don't some countries in Europe already have this? Minimum warranties because the product must work for X number of years no matter what? A sliding tax that got larger the shorter the warranty was would be interesting, perhaps avoidable if you showed a certain amount of repairability (or longevity of product model; a device that has been made for five years is going to be more repairable than one that changes every year, if everything else is the same).

908B64B197 4y ago

> But the real key is the fight against crap: you sell a mixer with a plastic gear, easy to speculate that will break after few year, ok, you are allowed to do so, but you get a progressive tax: as much as durable and repairable is your device you pay less. For a mixer that means: 30% of the sale price as tax if it's expected lifetime is less than 10 years of normal usage. So the cheaper mixer is now as expensive as the better built one. This means there's no more cheap mixer on the market. How is getting a single mother of three to pay 30% extra taxes to fund some civil servant's pension fund helping anyone? > Another fraud is "spare parts available ONLY to 'certified technicians'" witch means repair is as expensive a get a new gear. Thanks to the internet, this problem tends to solve itself. The factory in China will generally happily sell you some. > anyone who can prove planned obsolescence, like technicians from inside the OEM, get rewarded SIGNIFICANTLY for their publication and the OEM so badly sanctioned that the whistleblower get no issue if is cut off some market, the company loose so much that no one want even try. The problem is what's the bar for proving it? Every design has a component that will wear out first.

majormajor 4y ago
> > But the real key is the fight against crap: you sell a mixer with a plastic gear, easy to speculate that will break after few year, ok, you are allowed to do so, but you get a progressive tax: as much as durable and repairable is your device you pay less. For a mixer that means: 30% of the sale price as tax if it's expected lifetime is less than 10 years of normal usage. > So the cheaper mixer is now as expensive as the better built one. This means there's no more cheap mixer on the market. How is getting a single mother of three to pay 30% extra taxes to fund some civil servant's pension fund helping anyone? Is it better to have an invisible "poor tax" that makes your single mother spend 2-3x the price of the cheap one over 10 years since it breaks so much faster instead of having to save up longer initially for the one that probably won't break in ten years? Could do an escrow/deposit style thing so you can get your money back if your cheap shit actually doesn't break faster. So there's an incentive to make things cheaper only if you are confident in your long-term business model and reliability.
- 908B64B197 4y ago

the-smug-one 4y ago

Poor quality products are typically cheap. Such a tax will hurt poor people, those who most of all need lower priced products. Poor people will need support in buying high quality products.

sokoloff 4y ago

> at a reasonable price, witch means buying all cost no more than +10% of the assembled device on sale I get what you’re trying to accomplish here, but as stated, this seems ridiculous. A washing machine may have 75+ part numbers (with many of those having multiples [like screws and panel clips]). Asking a manufacturer to stock and handle each of them individually for service parts at a loss seems unreasonable. If you bought every part individually to assemble a $25K Toyota, I bet you’d spend over $100K in parts. Why? Because it costs more money to box, label, ship, inventory, pick, and pack a washing machine or a car a part at a time than to load a cardboard box with a whole machine inside with a fork truck or drive a car off a hauler.

nicbou 4y ago

> Another fraud is "spare parts available ONLY to 'certified technicians'" witch means repair is as expensive a get a new gear. It blows my mind that some vehicle repair manuals are basically impossible to find.