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by krob
2683 days ago
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We haven't lost our ability to mend. What has happened is people used to rely on material way back in the past to teach them how to mend. Today our products are constantly being upgraded / changes in real time. Those tutorials are often for specific types of products and those products now have radically different electronics and people when they see different products don't understand that the patterns in designing them are functionally identical. The circuit boards on the other hand might be slightly different. Long story short, if you want your stuff to last longer, stop buying into features, buy simple stuff. Simple works longer because it has less things to break. When the simple stuff does break, it's easier to figure out how to fix it. Also I used to have DIY books which would have diagrams to help you fix things. Today all of those diagrams are worthless. Nobody has a rotary telephone anymore. No one has washing machines without circuit boards anymore. Even toilets have different flushing mechanisms, and if you don't know which one you have, you get worried you can't replace the original. Repairing VCR -- give me a break -- or a TV? I think the mending culture needs to start teaching people how electronics work, and then people will start to see the errors of their ways. |
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When I was a kid, my Dad and I rebuilt a 1945 Ford 9N tractor from the ground up, including a complete engine teardown. Pistons, rings, valves, carburetor, distributor, points, plugs, the whole shebang. He'd undertaken a similar project in the 70s with his father, and it had served him well, allowing him to do his own maintenance on his used cars, keeping his TCO extremely low. They never had to worry about a car payment, and considered a lease to be for suckers.
Now, though, my car is somewhat more reliable but also hugely more complex. When something goes wrong, I don't need to remove a casting and clean some passage, I need my oscilloscope and some eBay spelunking for the dealer's computer manual.
It used to be reasonable for a home mechanic to be able to keep up with trends in auto manufacturing and be competent at every task they needed to do. Now I'm not sure a professional can keep up, without specializing.
Likewise, I'm an EE, and could probably repair a VCR -certainly done a few stereo recievers in my day. But when my dad (as mentioned above, of the repair mindset) sent me a picture of the PCB from a $30 kitchen appliance, showing an epoxied flip-chip controller and LCD zebra connector, I walked him through checking the batteries and that was reasonably all we could do to fix it. Knowing how to do electronics manufacturing profitably at scale is at cross paths with repairing those electronics.