our previous generations

[zeeprogrammer]

In reading various posts tonight, it struck me just how much experience and knowledge a particular person has...that only comes with years of living (and doing).
It reminded me of a project my wife and her friend did years ago on mid-western farmers (I live in the US).
They recorded interviews with them and so much of what they said and experienced is something to remember as well.
They're all gone now.

I don't remember much of the interviews...but here's a couple of  highlights...

1) If they needed a bolt..they bought a bolt. Not a package of bolts where you had to throw away all the packaging and didn't know what to do with the bolts they didn't need.
2) They didn't need trash pickup. Everything was recycled and the little that couldn't be recycled was in a small hole that lasted their lifetime.
You get my drift.
3) If you needed to know/experience the notion of 'practical'...these guys had it.

I wished they had interviewed the wives as well. They also have a very interesting perspective.

I still remember the days when we saved Christmas paper, used bits of colored lead (no pencil)...pretty much kept anything and everything because you didn't know when it might be useful.

What I'm really getting to...I have issues with today's technology with respect to society, social norms, people and people (if you get my drift)...but...this forum, as many other forums, is a means for our elders (if I may) to impart their knowledge and experience. For that I'm grateful.

It's often little things. Just today, on this forum, I learned the meaning of two words as well as three methods.

That's a big deal considering I'm 65 and know everything...(according to my grand-daughter). 

[b.lindsey]

Well said Zee. The amount of waste we gererate these day is incredible, just to touch on one of your points. When I take the trash out (a daily event) we often joke that trashy people live here.

Would love to have heard those interviews, so much we can still learn from previous generations.

Bill

[Gas_mantle]

I think nowadays far more is thrown away than needs to be because things generally speaking aren't designed for repair and there is a lack of skilled people to diagnose a fault then carryout a repair.

I don't know what the USA is like but in the UK if your TV breaks most people will simply buy another one. My microwave packed up a few days ago. they only cost about £50 over here, I'd struggle to find anyone to repair it and if I did the repair would likely cost as much as a new item. I kind of object to throwing it away but the harsh reality is that is the most sensible (and possibly the cheapest) thing to do.

Mass advertising and constant updates of perfectly adequate products must also play its part. It seems like everyday we get pressurised in to buying a new sooper dooper phone or computer etc because the latest model is so much better. In a lot of cases we end up buying upgrades that in reality offer little improvement and end up throwing away perfectly good items just to keep up with market pressure.

The world has gone mad 

[mklotz]

...
What I'm really getting to...I have issues with today's technology with respect to society, social norms, people and people (if you get my drift)...but...this forum, as many other forums, is a means for our elders (if I may) to impart their knowledge and experience. For that I'm grateful.
...

Ok, here's a bit of elder "knowledge and experience" for you...

Learn to pick your battles.  There's no point in agonizing over conditions you have no chance of changing.  The quality of life decreases monotonically;  life is like entropy.

Do what you can personally to stem the flow and make yourself feel good and not a part of the slide, always remembering that nothing you do matters in the greater scheme of things.

And remember - no matter how cynical you get, you just can't keep up.

[Lew Hartswick]

I don't know what the USA is like but in the UK if your TV breaks most people will simply buy another one.
The world has gone mad 

I can tell you why this is the case. :-)  From a personal lifetime of electronics experience.
I began my working life as a TV repairman in 1950, so if you know what TVs were like then you'd know how they were repaired. Vacuum tubes and many individual components that could fail and be replaced.  Over the years components shrunk and tubes gave way to transistors and then to integrated circuits so things shrunk to the point that a microscope is needed  to even see the parts. :-) So "REPAIR" has become, if not impossible , so difficult as to make it impractical.  The rest of my working life went on in the field to senior engineer and RPE (registered professional engineer) so all the other things of a similar nature can be seen to be related to the advances in miniaturization and automation of assembly methods. For a manufacturer, you have to remember, profit (it's not a nasty word) is what the goal is and all those advancements in those fields results in the situation you have seen. :-) 
   ...lew...

[Jo]

I don't remember much of the interviews...but here's a couple of  highlights...

1) If they needed a bolt..they bought a bolt. Not a package of bolts where you had to throw away all the packaging and didn't know what to do with the bolts they didn't need.

  I normally make one, that's if I don't find that Dave has off loaded some on me previously 

2) They didn't need trash pickup. Everything was recycled and the little that couldn't be recycled was in a small hole that lasted their lifetime.
You get my drift.

  You get your trash collected. I haven't had mine collected for over 5 years there was so little to go that I find it easier to drop it off at the dump rather than find it unemptied or thrown all over my drive when I come home 

3) If you needed to know/experience the notion of 'practical'...these guys had it.

Sounds like a model engine maker 

I still remember the days when we saved Christmas paper, ...pretty much kept anything and everything because you didn't know when it might be useful.

Some of us still do   


Guys you have missed the point we live in a consumer society: if things don't break and need replacing, they can't sell things and there would be no jobs to go round. New technology allows us to make new things that do things differently and people feel a need to own one, they break/are upgraded and the consuming goes on. Some of us know that resources are limited and can project forward for a few centuries and see that things will be very different. I just hope they come up with a 3D printed material that can do everything before then or world economics will be very different...

Jo

[zeeprogrammer]

Some of us know that resources are limited and can project forward for a few centuries and see that things will be very different.

That touches on part of where I was going. When people talk about 'cost to repair' versus 'cost to replace', they usually don't consider that much of the cost is yet to be realized.
Future costs will include cleaning up, moving waste to make space, finding new (willing or not) neighbors to use as waste depots, etc.

And, today's 'waste' may be tomorrow's resource and it will be costly to recover (albeit used to make a profit).

[Tennessee Whiskey]

I’m gonna jump in and start babbling. I understand the “throw away and replace” world because it makes good overall economic sense in terms of advancing technology and keeping a healthy workforce. What kinda ticks me off is when you are “forced” into a new purchase on what should be considered “serviceable items” . Point in case: big commercial confection oven burns out a heating element and although working, the contactor was probably a bit over stressed. $728 for the element and $272 for the contactor for a grand total of $1000 for parts, no labor included: I bought a new oven for $1800. If they can sell a new one for that price, the replacement parts shouldn’t be that high. Now on a separate “generational” angle. I’m really trying to learn more about how they did things when a lot of them had very little. The old canning recipes, how they cured their hams, how they spent the evening as a family and listen to the stories they can tell; cause once they are gone, the stories are also. I just returned from a very emotional auction for me. The guy was a couple of years older than Dad (82) when he past away and the kids had to have the chancery court settle the crap for them because they kept butting heads. The stuff in the auction was very much in the same as what Dad and I have still poked and stashed here on the farm. I just left because it was all just stuff: Mr. Hoge wasn’t there to tell the story that went with it. Ok, I’ll shut up now. Hope you know what I’m trying to say.

Eric

[zeeprogrammer]

The old canning recipes, how they cured their hams, how they spent the evening as a family and listen to the stories they can tell; cause once they are gone, the stories are also.

Years ago I'd asked my grandmother to write her autobiography. Unfortunately it was more of a lineage record, copies of wills, and the like. Very short on stories but it was something. There were certainly some interesting things that went back to the revolution and through the Civil War.

That helped me convince my Mom and Dad to write theirs. Good stories that helped me understand who they were/are, the choices they faced, and the reasons for their decisions. They were born in the late 1920's. Mom is German and Dad was career military who had been stationed in various parts of the world.

So now I'm working on mine. It's a great exercise and fun way to relive my past.

Online stuff is fine but getting it printed into a book (which is not very expensive) makes for a nice gift for the kids.

It needn't be a linear record of time either. I have some of that...mainly for context. But I've been including chapters on various subjects like...

"My Favorite Foods" (which includes a mayo and sweet pickle sandwich)
"Not A Darwin Winner" (stories of dumb things I did like trying to open a golf ball with an ice pick)
"My List of Embarrassments" (More of a discourse on what scares me rather than actual events)
"This Chapter Left Intentionally Blank" (Currently the last chapter in the book)
"Notable Minor Achievements" (Like when I learned how to open a bag of chips or, as some of you are aware, being runner-up in the Miss Snowflake Contest)
"Fruit Issues" (I stuffed raisins up my nose or the day Mom gave my a box of prunes for a day long train ride and didn't tell me not to eat them all)
"Likes and Dislikes"....you get the picture.

It's fun.

I need to add a chapter "Why I'm Right and You're Wrong" 

[Admiral_dk]

A lot of really good comments and insight here 

And remember - no matter how cynical you get, you just can't keep up.

OK - guilty as charged milord ...  (sorry Marv).

[10KPete]

Use it up, wear it out. Make it do or do without.

Pete

[Mike Bondarczuk]

Hi all,

I had just composed a reasonable repose but due to the vagaries of the system was interrupted and am having to write it again.

Jo had hit the nail squarely on the head and we should all realise that we are living in a mass product consumer market place where the onus is on replacement  and not repair.

I started my engineering on Germanium based transistors, then Silicon Planar technology followed by LSI, VLSI and VVLSI platforms but during all that time, which was the late 60's and early to mid 70's, the focus was on board and component level repairs and not random board replacements, which appears to have given away to complete platform replacements.

Without the ready market for replacements the whole global economy would falter, at least according to the government spinners, and hence the in-built redundancy and readily available replacements item market.

Technology drives the product efficiency upwards and marketing maintains the price, so in theory we a have a win-win situation, albeit at the possible expense of the plant we live on.

Mike

[zeeprogrammer]

so in theory we a have a win-win situation, albeit at the possible expense of the plan[e]t we live on.

 

While I think we can all agree that resources are being used up (i.e. expense of the planet)...it's the rate and common good (or fairness to all) that concerns me.

But I can't say I'm doing much about it.

[steamer]

"When a man (woman) dies,  the library closes.

Pass on to your kids or loved ones what you can, they won't take it all, but they'll take away some understanding of who you are.

Had one of those conversations with my son today....did him some good.

Dave

[Art K]

I could respond to a lot of this but Dave your comment on the library closing hits a chord with me. My wife and I have a very good friend who's father passed away a few years ago. Being from the Sheboygan area and a farmer all his life, our friend related to his dad as a library, standing at the fence with a neighbor reminding him of his wife's birthday or anniversary, a fount of knowledge. But now that library is closed. Where is the teary eyed emoticon when you need it?
Art

[Allen Smithee]

If they can sell a new one for that price, the replacement parts shouldn’t be that high.

Hmmm...but there's a bit more to it than that, isn't there.

If you want an availability of spares some years after the original unit was manufactured then they either had to be made at the same time as the original production run and then packaged & stored, or they have to periodically run small batches of parts much later. If you add then to the initial run it still costs more to make the spares than it cost to make them as parts of the original run because they have to design packaging suitable for long-term storage. It then costs money to physically store the parts (warehousing & distribution aren't free). Someone needs to take a guess at how many spares will be needed, and then tie up money in them for years. If they decided to take the other approach they have to store tooling and skills, and I'm sure plenty of people on here know what a pain it is to dig out the prehistoric tooling of an obsolete product to do a run of a couple of dozen spare parts. 

And of course all the time the spares sit on the shelf that's capital tied up against the possibility of a future sale that may never happen (that's why car manufacturers sell off their spares holdings to 3rd-party agents for 30% of book value after a few years - it crystallises the loss and allows them to re-allocate the tied-up capital to things like pay rises, pension funds and investment.

Sure, things used to be different, but why? Well I'd suggest the bottom line is simply reliability. When I was a kid a TV cost half a year's salary to buy, and the richest man in the town was the TV repair man because you'd expect to have to call him out at least 3-4 times a year (consuming spares on each visit). Same with cars - you needed skilled mechanics and lots of spares even for a "new" car (not to mention hundreds of welders to keep the dreaded tin-worm at bay). My current TV (Panasonic 50" HD OLED multi-tuner jobbie) cost well under half a month's salary and is now about 10 years old - it has never missed a beat. My car was over 120,000miles old and finally had an expensive repair (a DPF replacement), but until then the only spares it consumed were "service parts" (filters etc). So if someone had manufactured warehouses full of spares for either they'll probably never see any income from them. At an engineering conference a couple of years ago a paper was presented showing that the "half life" (the age/mileage at which 50% of the cars are still in normal use) had gone from 5 years/70,000 miles in 1960 to 20 years/200,000 miles in 2014. Think of the poor sod who had his money tied up in spare synchro cones for 20 years before someone actually bought one! The costs of packaging and storage for that period could easily exceed the cost of the part many times over.

As basic reliability increases the practicability of maintaining spares stocks gets harder and harder. The fist fall-back is to offer spares of subassemblies rather than components - this mitigates the low demand and packaging/warehousing costs. But they get expensive, and even then they never get bought. Someone mentioned that bolts come in packs rather than individually. This just shows that the majority of the cost is putting the empty bag/box on the shelf in the shop. In most cases the price of a pack of 10 bolts would only drop by a couple of percent if nine of them were taken out of the packet!

The same changes which have made these products cheaper to make and much more reliable in use have made it essentially impossible to maintain spares/repairs capabilities for them. Personally I'd rather stay with this than go back to goods that were expected th break down from the moment you got them home...

YMMV,

AS

[zeeprogrammer]

Personally I'd rather stay with this than go back to goods that were expected th break down from the moment you got them home...

Quite so. This isn't about wanting to go back to the way things were. (Progress is supposed to be better, no?) No, the question is, have we, in the name of progress, lost some things that could have or should have been kept? It just seems too automatic to simply replace rather than to consider how it might be fixed. No doubt you all understand that. You all have shops. It's one of the things I really liked about finally setting up a shop. There are now things I can fix rather than hiring someone to do it...or having to replace it.

[Jo]

Thanks Pete for chipping in on the changes to Logistics. One also has to think about the movement of 'hazardous' substances didn't the old myth go that we could only export an entire engine as the o-ring seals was made of a hazardous substance and EU rules said they can only constitute less than 1% of a shipment 

Jo

P.S. Keep up the good work Pete  remember all your excellent work is contributing towards my pension   

[Allen Smithee]

Personally I'd rather stay with this than go back to goods that were expected th break down from the moment you got them home...

Quite so. This isn't about wanting to go back to the way things were. (Progress is supposed to be better, no?) No, the question is, have we, in the name of progress, lost some things that could have or should have been kept? It just seems too automatic to simply replace rather than to consider how it might be fixed. No doubt you all understand that. You all have shops. It's one of the things I really liked about finally setting up a shop. There are now things I can fix rather than hiring someone to do it...or having to replace it.

For those of us with the equipment (and the time, and the motivation) that might be an option, but for the general case you can't have the increased reliability without rendering repair options hopelessly uneconomic. You can't have one without the other. Our kitchen sink has an ancient mixer tap thingy which my Better Third regards as "treasured". It has tap mechanisms with cast brass helixes and seals that have been giving trouble for years. There are no OEM parts (the last ones probably left a production line some time in the 1920s). Over the years I've converted them from compressed fibre seals to O-rings, and from bronze retaining clips to PB retaining collets just to keep them working. The hot tap side seems to be suffering form some "de-zincing" and is becoming ever more brittle. I had to make and silver-solder-on a replacement splined stub when the original snapped off the helically-grooved operating mechanism. I probably spent 10-12 whole days of shop time keeping these going over the years. If I was doing this for someone else I'd HAVE to charge at least £500/day just to pay for my time and the time on the tools. Do you know anyone who really thinks that an ancient kitchen tap is worth spending £5,000 on, when a top-quality replacement can be manufactured for well under £300 and a serviceable budget one can be bought (retail) for under £60?

In my business many of our products involve "commodity" IT (workstations, screens, servers, routers etc). In many of the cases we have to assemble a highly detailed case called an IA Case* to show it meets security requirements, and that case is based on the precise details of what is in the boxes. Now as you may know, most IT gear only remains the same for about three months - if you order a second one a few weeks later it will have minor differences (different graphics card, different disk, different software etc) so to avoid having to repeat the very expensive work constructing the IA Case we do our best to buy sufficient spares with the main order to last the intended life of the system (called a "lifetime buy" for reasons which I'm sure will come back to me). But how many do we buy? This kit is extremely reliable, so the dominant failure mode is "damage" rather than "fault", and that's not something you can calculate with a simple R=e^-λt. So we take a guess at damage rates and buy the spares. In all of these cases we find that at the end of system life there are still spares left. In fact in most of these cases most of the actual kit is still working flawlessly - it's being replaced because the function it performs is no longer needed or has moved on to something more complex.

The lesson here is that when reliability gets high the whole concept of supporting using spares & repairs simply doesn't work.

*We* can often repair things. But we do these things because we have the kit for other reasons and don't charge ourselves for the working time. But that doesn't mean that other people who DON'T have the kit should be criticised for replacing rather than repairing. We do it because we can - we're lucky. Most of the population aren't.

AS

* No, I'm not going to expand that, If you don't already know what that means I'd have to shoot you after explaining!

[Jo]

*We* can often repair things. But we do these things because we have the kit for other reasons and don't charge ourselves for the working time.

I do it because I like the challenge  and I don't like to wait the 48 hours for things to arrive in the post   

There is a noticeable difference between the trades person who likes to work with new perfect items as its quicker and the enthusiast who can see possibilities in every bit of scrap recyclable material and is having fun trying to do things with what is available. Which probably accounts for why I like orphaned model engines they have challenges over and above even a set of castings

Jo

[steam guy willy]

Thanks Pete for chipping in on the changes to Logistics. One also has to think about the movement of 'hazardous' substances didn't the old myth go that we could only export an entire engine as the o-ring seals was made of a hazardous substance and EU rules said they can only constitute less than 1% of a shipment 

Jo

Hi Jo ...talking about Logistics ...this is my van  !!

[sco]

There are many joys to visiting Forncett - one of them is to see Willy's van!   

Simon.

[10KPete]

Huh? I think I just got lost.....

Pete

Thanks Pete for chipping in on the changes to Logistics. One also has to think about the movement of 'hazardous' substances didn't the old myth go that we could only export an entire engine as the o-ring seals was made of a hazardous substance and EU rules said they can only constitute less than 1% of a shipment 

Jo

P.S. Keep up the good work Pete  remember all your excellent work is contributing towards my pension   

[crueby]

Huh? I think I just got lost.....

Pete

Thanks Pete for chipping in on the changes to Logistics. One also has to think about the movement of 'hazardous' substances didn't the old myth go that we could only export an entire engine as the o-ring seals was made of a hazardous substance and EU rules said they can only constitute less than 1% of a shipment 

Jo

P.S. Keep up the good work Pete  remember all your excellent work is contributing towards my pension 

Apparently you just moved to the UK... retroactively...

[Jo]

Wrong Pete 

The other Pete (AS) who I was replying to is currently working incognito in Mordor and if he is lucky they sometimes let him come home to see his wife and children for a couple of days .

Jo

[Allen Smithee]

All the best people are called Pete (naturally), but some of us prefer to keep that light under a bushel...

AS

[Gas_mantle]

I'm also getting confused by the number of Pete's here 

Peter