Failure of mechanical timers on appliances is VERY common, and usually results in the appliance going to the landfill.
Electronic controls, done properly, are far more reliable. Yes, there are some that are done properly!
Reminds me of DVM's with 3 1/2 digit readouts and 1% accuracy. The last digit is just noise.
I have become extremely hesitant to buy any electronics any more. All of the stuff seems to be crap that barely outlasts the warranty. For the first time I actually paid for an extended warranty on a DVD recorder and ended up needing it. I have to look at it now as if it costs $400 (including extended 3 year warranty) then I have to pay $100 per year in order to have the luxury of a DVD recorder. If it last longer than that then it's just luck and I sure don't count on it. My daughter has a Kodak digital camera. It lasted just past the warranty. Kodak wants more to fix it than a new one with more features costs. Meanwhile my old Brownie, Instamatic, and other cheap, bottom-of-the-line Kodak cameras still work fine. The Brownie is probably over 60 years old.
However, he recently rebuilt and
Your friend is a Democrat?
replacement
Yes, I understand, but knowing what we know now would you be willing to pay $50 more for a washing machine if you were confident it was going to last 30 years instead of 5?
LMOA.
A typical mid-range car stereo that sells for around $200 costs less than $2 to manufacture. Everything else is marketing and markups.
Buy a Canon. All three of mine[0] are well past their warranty, & are still going strong. (Including the original batteries!)
[0] An S30 digicam, an EOS-10D & an EOS-1Dmk2.
Sure, but it was the cam/switches that would fail, not the motor.
In theory, sure.
I'm sure that there are, it's just that I haven't run into any.
Exactly. And don't get me started on the low ohms ranges of those meters...
| > >Its the "walmart syndrome" at work. People are trained to think that | > >price and not value is all that matters. So manufacturers do their best | > >to make cheap stuff to meet low price-low value demands. | >
| > Yep. In consumer electronics, for every dollar added to the cost of a | > board, the final product ends up costing about $4 more at wholesale, | > and perhaps $6 to $8 more at retail. Needless to say, keeping costs | > in line is fairly important to the manufacturer. Minimal design and | > component selection is epidemic everywhere. Having worked on some of | > these designs in the distant past, I can assure you that the choice is | > make it cheap or it won't sell. I called it the "NBC" (Nothing But | > the Cheapest) effect. However, think positive. The only thing that | > has prevented electronics from hitting rock bottom in quality are the | > various regulatory and certification agencies, which demand a minimal | > level of quality to insure the survival of the user, not the product. | >
| > Drivel: One of my friends is a rabid advocate for enforced quality in | > product design. He wants minimum Federal quality standards for | > consumer products along with mandatory lifetime testing, mandatory | > warranties, and litigatory relief. His theory is that if the US can't | > compete on the basis of price, it will need to do so on the basis of | > quality. Sounds like a plan. | | I have become extremely hesitant to buy any electronics any more. All of | the stuff seems to be crap that barely outlasts the warranty. For the first | time I actually paid for an extended warranty on a DVD recorder and ended up | needing it.
Buy it with a credit card that extends the mfgr's warranty by up to an additional year and forget the "extended warranty."
Oh, I've seen plenty with a motor that stopped. Regardless, mechanical timers are a glaring weak spot in appliances.
Take a look at a Fisher & Paykel. When they designed it, they started with a clean sheet of paper. They didn't just slap a few blinking lights on a conventional washing machine.
The majority are brainwashed to need a new one every 2 years without question. Any company that builds to last more than 2 years will be competing with itself and others and will fail because no one will pay twice as much for a 4 year old model. Sure it is wrong to generate so much waste, but you go out of business first, OK?
Hmmm, do you think companies WANT their products to last forever? Of COURSE these circuits can be made bulletproof, but have you heard of "planned obsolescence"? Washing machine companies want to sell washing machines. That means people's old washing machines need to irreparably break. So, they design an electronics board with a finite lifespan, produce a finite number of spares at the time of the original production run, and when those spares are gone that machine is junk. Maybe that board is repairable, but the labor involved to fix it is huge. Maybe they've stuck a proprietary IC or 2 on there which fails so it CAN'T be fixed no way no how.
Sounds like the epitaph for GMC! We have neighbours who have persistently bought Chevrolet/GMC pickups an a couple of mid-size GMC cars during the last 30 years we have lived in same area.
The Chevs. a) Don't last as long as our Nissans. b) Take more time/ cost for repairs. And we are not talking heavy commercial/contractor usage of the Chevrolet products, just back and forth on paved roads to work.
In fact our smaller Nissan/Toyota pickups were used for commercial catering work, carrying heavy loads of dishes etc. on a weekly daily basis in all weathers.
Since both our neighbours and ourselves have helped each other do many of the repairs we each have had an inside look at what has worn/needed repairs on both types of vehicles.
But our more recent (Japanese) vehicles have been assembled/ manufactured in the USA and contain more 'Made in Mexico' or 'Made in Taiwan' parts and have not had the quality of of our earlier vehicles made entirely in say, Japan.
Interesting how the Japanese manufacturing went from tin-pot junk in the 1930 to the high quality of today. A relative recently bought a nine year old Lexus; a beautiful car!
Seems to prove that cost and profit and high short term bonuses for auto executives were not the best policy?
And when it comes to home repairs/renovations etc. would one not expect domestic appliance to last at least as long/longer than a well used motor vehicle? However In one mid-eastern country we bought and used a full size US manufactured clothes dryer that was of excellent quality and capability, better than Italian and other European made products.
That is part of what got theAmerican car companies in trouble. Also no one wants to pay more for a good product.
The old Comodore computer company had a replacement policy where you could send the computer to them and they would repair it for a flat fee. They had some unskilled labor to open up the case , throw out the electronics and install new electronics. The new board cost them $ 50, the repair cost to coustomers was around $ 70 to $ 80. Cheeper to throw out the whole exectronics and replace it than the labor to repair them.
"Ralph Mowery" wrote in news:pfGdnfgzhfDjxLjXnZ2dnUVZ snipped-for-privacy@earthlink.com:
often,a circuit board has it's IC's under globs of epoxy;called chip-on- board,and not repairable. They glue the bare silicon IC die(chip) directly to the board and wire-bond to circuit pads,then cover with epoxy.
30 years (or so) ago, GE simply replaced defective electronics with a refurbished unit. The unit you sent in was placed in a pile, to be repaired at a later date. This probably worked well, if a technician worked on four or five identical units at the same time.
I've obtained a lot of electronic stuff for free that only needed simple repairs. I get computer mother boards that cost $100.00 new and all they need is a keyboard fuse that is easy (for me) to replace. A lot of people who claim the title "service technician" have no idea how to repair a circuit board. Many of the problems I see with modern gear are caused by cold solder joints on the circuit boards.
TDD
Hi!
They most certainly are. It's still quite possible to buy (at least in the US) a washer or dryer with conventional, non-microcontroller-based controls. Even some of these fancy-dancy front loaders are made that way:
I've been inside it once, and the internals are what you'd expect of a machine much older. The timer is a simple mechanical one, water level is detected by vacuum, and while the drum motor has an electronic controller, it looks to be well made.
How it's possible to not make the microcontroller-based controls work reliably for years and years is beyond me. Makers of microwave ovens have managed to do so for years. I've *never* seen a microwave oven with a dead control panel.
William
If you are doing it for yourself and do not count your time that is fine. If you are paying someone to repair it, you are looking at around $ 50 or more per hour labor. It may take several hours to get everything set up, do the repairs and test out the finished results. I used to do some repairs and still do on equipment that does not have the smd or other components that take special equipment to work on.
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