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> 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. 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. |
Professionals get maintenance manuals from manufacturers. They tell them how to unmount the broken part, and then say "OK, now buy a new one." No oscilloscopes involved.