Quote:
Originally Posted by MRX37
Mmmmm hmmmm...
I fixed a car door that fell off because the bolt between the two hinges had been designed with the center much thinner then the rest of the bolt. There was no reason I could find for this choice in design, other then eventual planned breakage. A 25 cent bolt from the hardware store fixed that, and it's still working fine. Lord knows how much the dealership would have charged, and they would have of course used another bolt designed to fail after a few years.
More on topic: pre 1992-1993 Zenith CRT's are still for the most part going strong nearly 20 years later, yet those from 1993 onward are weak and dim, if they're still functioning at all.
I wholeheartedly believe modern products are designed to fail after X amount of hours of usage. I've recapped lots of motherboards with caps that decided to fail right around the time when a new upgrade became available (sometimes as early as 6-8 months)
|
As far as the bolt.. thinner means less material.. multiply that buy hundreds of thousands of bolts, and you've got a substantial savings. It also could have cut the cost of machining because of the design...
Concerning the motherboards with bad caps. This is a world wide known problem. At one point, a recipe for the goo they fill them with was stolen from a company and many other companies started to use this recipe.. what they didn't know is that an ingredient was left out of the recipe, causing most of the caps made with this recipe to fail... Also, many of these caps that failed were counterfeits... The computer industry was one of the hardest hit by this, although other industries were too
Helps to know the history of things, and understand how manufacturing and business works before jumping off the bridge..