Products That Can be Worked on: too Much to Ask?

[liveaboard]

Steve, you bought the wrong kind of tractor.
John Deere is GREEN!

[SteveHGraham]

I think John Deere is a cult, like Apple.

[Bill Shields]

reminds me of a British car that I once owned. Before it was over with, I had to literally take the distributor into the parts place so that they could get the serial number from the distributor so that I could get points that fit.

Make model, year and even serial number on the engine was not enough.

[spro]

One could say "that is before you were a machinist". No way, if you could find the proper ones. They are imprinted somewhere in your/our head. Fair precise components to deliver the amps to the coil without shorting out.

[spro]

That came out wrong.Double negative or something. I meant it as a compliment.

[Bill Shields]

i cannot say that i understand either of the comments...but that doesn't mean much at my age.

I eventually dropped the distributor on the guys desk and said ' find me something that will fit'....the teenager's solution to the problem. I didn't have a complete shop available to me at that time..besides which the problem was that the point frame(s) just would not fit inside the distributor

I SUPPOSE that I could have ground the contact points out of the old frame, removed a set of contacts from a 'similar' frame and silver soldered them in place (did that with an old Pierce Arrow about 30 years later)...but in those days, there was a limit to the amount of garbage a teenage was willing to put up with for a set of points that was going to cost MAYBE $5.00

[SteveHGraham]

My oven has a thermal fuse. Of course, it's in the back, so the oven has to be taken out of the wall to reach it. This particular oven has a fuse which is too sensitive, so when you clean it, the fuse thinks the house is on fire, and it shuts off. The fuse has no automatic reset function. In the past, they made fuses that could be reset manually. Now you have to drill a hole in the fuse to turn it into a resettable fuse. You can buy old resettable fuses on Ebay. They screw right in.

If you didn't know the fuse could be altered, you would lose the use of your oven until you got a new fuse, and you would have to buy another one every time you cleaned your oven.

There must be a lot of perfectly good fuses in landfills. I would guess that many people have discarded working ovens, too, just because of the fuse hassle. That's not green at all! It makes vegan unicorns cry tears of fair-trade patchouli tea.

When the oven shuts off, it acts as though the heating elements had burned out, so one wonders how many slick repairmen have sold people new elements.

I know this is not quite relevant, but I got irritated thinking about it, so I posted it anyway.

[Bill Shields]

it is called product lifecycle planning

there are lots of 'engineers' (i hate to admit it), that...well...that is what they do....

[spro]

Some may recall that I have an old Whirlpool fridge made by Roper. I thought it was dead years ago and installed a new circulator fan. That worked awhile but still needed monthly defrosting. The time was ticking then because I have a spare fridge in the garage. Did some basic electrical tblshooting and found some loose connections and the defrost timer wasn't working. So I replaced that and it worked great for years- Until- The motor/compressor was suspended on some spring frame. When it quit, there was a loud bang. This happened over and over until something finally broke under there. The fridge had a noticeable vibration so again thinking about replacement. I just couldn't do it easily and checked its performance. It was doing just fine and continues (until after this post, maybe) These were some heavy cool machines discarded by some minor problem.
The vibration issue has smoothed out.. somehow.

[SteveM]

Our fridge would go below freezing, but not enough to keep the ice cream from softening.

I was cleaning off the coils from the front, then pulled it away from the wall to clean in back. The vacuum hit the fan blade which, to quote Charlie Daniels, "made an evil hiss". The fan motor was seized.

Looked up parts and it was going to be $250.

Checked ebay and someone had a "universal replacement" which just meant that it was a motor with mounting holes for several different models.

Price was $20 delivered. Sent a note to the guy that we needed it fast. Ordered Wednesday night, got here Friday.

Installed it and the freezer went from 20 degrees down to 4.

In one of the seller's reviews, a customer wrote:
"I wonder how many refrigerators ended up in landfills because they needed a $20 part".

Steve

[SteveHGraham]

A repair guy told me all new fridges are disposable garbage, no matter what you pay. I wonder if that's true.

[spro]

Nice to get some confirmation about this stuff. I regularly give my fridge a "pat" as in, "good boy". Silly of course but I had been into it enough to diagnose the problem/s. It keeps working for me and like a tractor after a hard run, a "pat" seems appropriate.