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The Joys of Modern Electronic Appliances
Once a month or so, I enjoy sitting down with friends and wasting time. The last time I did this was a Monday night a few weeks ago. I went to my friend Phil's apartment, and amidst playing incredibly dumb computer games, found out that he had a broken tape player.This tape player held two audio tapes. A tape was stuck in the unit, and neither side would play. So, being handy with tools, I agreed to take a look at it. I took off the cover and began to dissect his troubled tape player, a large stackable-system variety. I needed to see what was going on with it. Since the tape was stuck, I wanted to take the main board out to look at the eject button mechanism. And so I began taking it apart. I didn't have any power tools with me, normally not a big deal. Phil had a worn but serviceable screwdriver.
If I were dealing with a computer, pop out a few screws, and the whole thing comes apart. Each screw on this unit was particularly a pain to take apart, lots of torque needed. I took out 6 screws. It didn't come apart. I went to the next layer of components and took out 6 more screws. It was not locked shut with a slide or tab or anything like that. I kept pulling out screws. Over an hour, a tired back, and 20 screws later, and I had only removed a few support brackets and no real components.
At this point I started to get mad. Somebody had specifically designed a piece of equipment to be difficult to service. My anger gradually turned into appreciation and awe. I was humbled by this piece of equipment. This was not a case of oversight or poor design. This was expert craftsmanship. Someone had invested a lot of time, skill and energy designing it to be very, very difficult to take apart or fix.
I started to study it further. The main motor drive for each tape player was connected to the part that turns the tape by a large plastic toothed gear. The outer ring of teeth of this gear was connected to the inner spindle by three very thin plastic connections. All the rest of the gears were solid. This gear should have been solid. It was not designed to save half a cent by using less plastic. It was designed to break. After a few months or years or use, the accumulated stress on this gear will snap it apart, and then the tape drive won't spin anymore.
Once it breaks, it will take more effort to get the thing apart to replace the $0.02 toothed gear than the unit costs. The only thing you can do with it is to throw it away. It was designed to work for a short period of time and then turn to trash, so that you can buy a new one.
It was probably made in China. The Chinese are destroying their land extracting materials, processing the materials into consumer electronic goods, polluting the air and water, and working in probably extremely poor conditions to make trash for us to bury in a landfill and pollute our water. That makes me sad and frustrated. Everyone in this room, everyone that you know, will eventually die. When we die we should leave the planet better than when we were born, not worse. We should let the next generation inherit a better place.
I eventually returned to my task at hand, the broken tape player. I decided that taking it apart was a lot more difficult than I wanted to deal with. I reversed my direction, I started to reassemble it. About 3 hours and several breaks later, I had it reassembled. I accidentally dropped several screws into the tape mechanism, and they didn't want to come out.
I plugged it in. I played with the little switches that the tape mechanism touches, telling if there's a tape in, if its recordable, if it's a normal or metal tape, etc. I don't know exactly when, but after a lot of random fiddling, the tape popped out. After that, everything worked perfectly. So I fixed it after all. I even told Phil about the lost screws. I was a big hero. We spent the rest of the evening listening to some of his tapes. And I thought that I had some strange views on music.
I wish that I could say that this is atypical, a fluke, but it's probably not. I've gotten coffee pots to work again by removing a small electrical part that seems to have no purpose except to break. I once took a class on car buying from a former car salesman. He says that most people trade in their cars because of the small things that break, not because the car won't drive anymore. Most cars are designed to work for a certain time or distance only. Some of this is to give a lower sale price, but I certainly don't think that car manufacturers have the public's best interest at heart. If the car manufacturers had the public's best interest at heart, they would forget about model and style changes and concentrate design effort on a single part of the car at a time. One year work on transmission, then brakes, then engine efficiency, etc.
How many of those things that we use every day are poorly or just cheaply designed I don't know. But this stereo taught me that there are devices out there designed to fail. I vow that I will never own a piece of equipment like Phil's tape player.