Down With Disposability

"Zachary Oberle" (zacharyoberle) 08/23/2016 at 13:26 • Filed to: None

15

16

We now know that “The Good Old Days” were mostly a time of unbridled !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! and !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! . Nostalgia is often a lie, which is plainly spelled out whenever someone tries to explain why things where better in a time of segregated restrooms. That said, there is no excuse for failing to learn from history. This can sometimes mean looking back on certain innovations and acknowledging them as superior to what we have today.

!!! UNKNOWN HEADER TYPE (MULTI-LINE BREAK?) !!!

Americans hate maintenance. We desire maintenance-free everything. We don’t want to mess with changing fluids or consumables on our cars, so like hell we want to do the same with our appliances. We complain when tires don’t last a hundred thousand miles and forget the idea of regular service intervals on anything other than engine oil.

!!! UNKNOWN HEADER TYPE (MULTI-LINE BREAK?) !!!

This attitude is killing us. Yes, in the old days cars broke down all the time and needed to be highly serviceable. Short, wasteful service intervals are a thing of the past and we’re better off for it. Today’s synthetic engine oil will last in excess of three times longer than the ye-olde 3,000 miles standard. Modern tech has simply resulted in longer-lasting wear components in general. On the other hand, “lifetime” fluids !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! and there are plenty of other features of modern cars which fail to heed the wisdom of our automotive forebears.

This is even more true for appliances. Modern electric tools of both domestic and professional varieties are just pathetically flimsy compared to their grand-pappies. Even in just the past few years, the move to AC brushless electric motors has resulted in tools with “equal” performance to their predecessors that are, in reality, far less rugged and serviceable:

!!! UNKNOWN CONTENT TYPE !!!

While I understand that there’s no need for everything to be hewn from solid chrome as it once was, these classic appliances made many nods to practicality and long service life. Those values are rapidly disappearing from consumer goods, including cars, and we consumers should be pissed .

!!! UNKNOWN HEADER TYPE (MULTI-LINE BREAK?) !!!

While there are countless offenders at which to point fingers, I’d like to offer up my blender as an example.

Second-hand blenders are a shit-show. I’m a broke-ass misanthrope, so I’ve never had the cash for any kind of brand-new kitchen appliance. Despite this, I enjoy a milkshake or margarita as much as the next guy. This has led a number of used blenders to pass through my kitchen. Disappointingly, they’ve all led lives that could easily be measured in minutes. The general theme of failure always seems to be of the bearing variety. The motor wants to turn, but everything which helps it rotate smoothly has failed.

So too seemed to be the case with yet another second-hand blender that I very nearly didn’t buy. I found it at the comically-themed !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! event and asked the owner if I could plug it in. The motor sounded like a pack of rabid chipmunks coughing up bran flakes. I intended to walk away from it, but then noticed this:

Huh. An oiling port. Weird.

I’d seen little oiling ports like this in the past, generally on hefty electric motors. Seeing one on a consumer-grade kitchen appliance piqued my curiosity. After I suggested that it sounded like crap, the blender’s previous owner was willing to part with it for a grand total of two United States Cash Federal Dollars.

I’d like to say that I took it straight home and set to work on it, but in reality it rolled around in my trunk for a month. It would be in a truly desperate moment that I dug the blender back out and pressed it into service.

Three small children were in my house and they had been promised ice-cream for dessert. Those with child-rearing experience will know the sheer panic that filled my body when I opened the carton of promised frozen confection only to discover two paltry scoops’ worth stuck to the bottom.

!!! UNKNOWN CONTENT TYPE !!!

Quick side note: as a kid I was a sneaky, scheming, fraudulent little bastard. I half grew out of it and half learned to use it to my advantage. This strategy has yielded mixed results, but when it comes to parenting there are few better qualifications to have.

Two scoops of ice cream and a handful of strawberries would yield a milkshake which I could easily split three ways. They’d never know the difference! Muwhahahaha!

The catch in this plan was that I would need a blender, and I was far from certain that the one I had was serviceable. So while the kids destroyed some unrelated part of the house, I set to work.

There wasn’t time to go full !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! and tear the thing open. My only hope was to drip in some quality lubricant and cross my fingers. I reached for an open bottle of modern, synthetic oil and dabbed it on there. The motor needs to be running for little oiling ports like this to work correctly. Easiest thing to do is fire it up and let a drop of oil fall on the port. If it works correctly you should see the displaced air bubble up through the port as it ‘drinks’ its fill of oil.

As the quality lubricant whirled around in the bearing the harshness of the noise started to soften. When I picked the motor up to check for airflow out the bottom, I noticed this as well:

Chug! Chug! Chug! Chug! Chug! Chug! Chug! Chug! Chug! Chug! Chug!

Another oiling port! This baby had oilers for both motor bearings. Unbelievable. I’ve seen five thousand dollar power tools with less serviceability than this crappy little kitchen appliance. I quickly dabbed on some more oil and let the motor spin again.

After just a few seconds, the chipmunks were silenced.

My freshly serviced blender worked well. So well in fact, that it was able to pulverize a handful of strawberries (and a frozen Twinkie!) into a milkshake fine enough to pass muster amid a panel of three discerning grade-schoolers.

Allowing even the smallest solid chunk of strawberry into a pint of liquid dessert should be punishable by death as far as this crowd was concerned. The real-deal strawberries needed to be crushed to a consistency that was indistinguishable from fake-ass strawberry syrup. The elderly Hamilton Beach passed with flying colors, cruising across the finish line like it was a brand-new, $100 appliance.

I was gob-smacked. More than that, I was profoundly irritated with modern kitchen tools. An oiling port is an absolutely trivial feature to add to an appliance from a manufacturing point of view. It costs almost nothing. Yet this minor addition allowed an ancient blender to live through a lifetime’s worth of frequent use, roll around in my trunk for a month, and then spring right back into service; ready for another hard life of abuse.

This simply isn’t about manufacturing cost. Yes, my old Hamilton Beach blender would have been a top-of-the-line unit when it was new. Cheaper blenders from the same era would not have lasted so well. However, that argument falls apart as soon as you start to examine the modern equivalents. Even the most expensive consumer-grade blenders made today feature zero serviceability. They may last a long time, but there’s no way they’ll have the tremendous longevity of their ancestors.

So here we are. It’s 2016 and our lives are filled with plastic trash that we’ll be lucky to see five years of use from. These days, when kids grow up and leave home they don’t take their parents’ hand-me-down kitchen gadgets with them. That stuff blew up decades ago, so they buy cheap garbage from Wal-Mart instead. Failing to inherit quality appliances, or never even being exposed to any, means those kids never develop an eye for quality. They think it’s perfectly normal to buy a new coffee-maker every year and a new vacuum cleaner every two.

Those kids have now grown up into so-called Millennials. While many of them are mired in ignorance, more and more of us are starting to realize something:

!!! UNKNOWN HEADER TYPE (MULTI-LINE BREAK?) !!!

Understanding that something is bullshit is always the first step towards improvement. Much trickier is the second step, in which you must resist the fake reality which the bullshit presents. In this case, that means forgoing almost all modern manufactured conveniences; a tall order indeed.

Nobody could be expected to do this, and nobody wants to be such an insufferable hipster that they’ll only buy vintage appliances.

What’s needed is a cultural change. We need to start acknowledging all the fake, empty, plastic garbage that fills our lives and calling it out for what it really is. You can keep using your crappy Wal-Mart blender, just be sure to tell jokes at its expense and leave a snarky message on !!!error: Indecipherable SUB-paragraph formatting!!! when it inevitably bites the dust.

Despite much grumbling from our elders, Millennials are the smartest, most resourceful generation the world has ever seen. Without doubt, we are set to face problems of epic proportions. There won’t be any simple solutions. However, one of the most straightforward things we can do is demand a return to quality. Our runaway consumerist culture of disposable appliances, cars, and even homes is doing nothing to aid us. It is poisoning our minds just as much as it is destroying our planet.

We need to go back to being OK with owning old things; proud, even. I mean look at that old blender again. It’s magnificent . All polished metal and hammered paint. Its patina tells a story; whispers of gin-soaked parties and wild hook-ups long since past. It is a mathematical certainty that, at some point in its long career, this blender helped someone get laid.

So how is that not cooler than even the sleekest new kitchen gadget!? Being a wing-man is cool. It will never not be cool. Everyone could use a good wing-man in their life.

Let go of your insecurities, America. Nobody important is judging you for still using your Grandma’s waffle-iron. If they are, that person’s opinion is worthless anyway. Refuse to buy into the lie that is disposability. Resist, and discover your own little piece of what once made our tools so great.

For Sweden > Zachary Oberle 08/23/2016 at 13:33

2

neat

Future next gen S2000 owner > Zachary Oberle 08/23/2016 at 13:37

0

I’ve recently started buying cast iron pans and skillets for this reason. Those things will last forever.

random001 > Zachary Oberle 08/23/2016 at 13:50

1

This post here, this post is awesome.

Urambo Tauro > Zachary Oberle 08/23/2016 at 13:52

0

I once found an old Craftsman ratchet by the side of the road. It didn’t work, but it had an oil port on it. I disassembled it, cleaned it up, and put it back together with fresh oil. It works perfectly now. The only thing I don’t like about it is that it has only 24 teeth.

My late-model Craftsman ratchet has a few more teeth on it, but the direction switch broke off somehow (despite NOT being left out in the road), and I had to get it replaced. Things that make you go hmmm...

DipodomysDeserti > Zachary Oberle 08/23/2016 at 14:02

0

Great article. After just having the control board on my three year-old dishwasher take a shit, I’m all about going back and using old machines. Of course I also drive a fifty year old truck and a forty year-old motorcycle.

TheBloody, Oppositelock lives on in our shitposts. > Zachary Oberle 08/23/2016 at 14:04

0

When I bought my house the PO left a whole shit tonne of old tools behind, it’s like I hit the fucking jackpot because everyone at the moving sale didn’t buy them because they were “old”. Awww yisss.

bhtooefr > Zachary Oberle 08/23/2016 at 15:00

0

Great piece!

One thing worth noting is that there’s no reason why PMAC/BLDC motors have to be worse than brushed DC as far as durability is concerned - the brushes are a major source of inefficiency, which means heat, and they wear out.

Scimitar7 > random001 08/23/2016 at 15:27

0

I’ve never seen this gif... it is now my favorite for forums and the like

Zachary Oberle > TheBloody, Oppositelock lives on in our shitposts. 08/23/2016 at 16:15

0

Hell yea! I’ve got some old files and other hand-tools from my grandad that are 100x beefier than anything you’ll ever find at Harbor Freight!

Zachary Oberle > random001 08/23/2016 at 16:16

0

As you command, sir!

Zachary Oberle > bhtooefr 08/23/2016 at 16:21

0

“One thing worth noting is that there’s no reason why PMAC/BLDC motors have to be worse than brushed DC as far as durability is concerned”

Oh, of course not. Brushless motors are the future and can be every bit as skookum as the brushed variety. The problem is a lot of manufacturers are using brushless tech as an excuse to cheap-ify the rest of the tool. Brushless is great, but if the gear reduction, chuck, housing, etc is weak and chintzy then you’ve still ended up with a vastly inferior device.

I really, really recommend the video in this article to anyone who even slightly enjoys geeking over mechanical stuff. The author’s beef isn’t with brushless tech per-se, but simply the overall cheapness in build quality from what is still quite an expensive tool.

Levitas > Zachary Oberle 08/23/2016 at 17:54

0

Agreed, bought a 6" Craftsman wood jointer last spring. Did a full restoration, new paint outside, wet sanded the tables, greased the slides, and new bearings on the head. Shockingly, it still had the original set of blades.

Almost near the end I found the manufacture date: 1947.

And once I had it dialed in, it worked beautifully. Finished a chess board and a massive butcher block cutting board. Incredible piece of machinery, cost me less than $200 total.

Zachary Oberle > Levitas 08/23/2016 at 20:17

0

Oh man, do not even get me started on larger power tools. The old stuff destroys modern equivalents. My dad and I did a project much like you describe with a Power-Matic table saw from the 50's. The metal-work on the thing defies belief. The freaking castings they made for the motor yoke and spindle are unreal. The yoke alone weighs 100 pounds and reproducing just that one part would cost more than a brand new, top-of-the-line table saw. You probably couldn’t even cast it these days. It would have to be billet or something nutty like that.

Imma have to do an article on that saw now!

!!! UNKNOWN CONTENT TYPE !!!

The motor on our Power-Matic is a three-phase. All it took was a cheap, 3 horsepower VFD to make it run perfectly on ordinary 220 volt single-phase home power:

Three-phase motors tend to scare a lot of buyers away so tools equipped with them can be had for very cheap. Folks are starting to figure the VFD thing out more and more though, so taking advantage of this detail will get harder over the coming years.

Levitas > Zachary Oberle 08/23/2016 at 21:02

0

Nice, I’ll keep that in mind down the road. I want to get a new motor for the jointer soon, all it has is a 1/2 hp and uses pulleys with gravity as the tensioner.

Yeah I couldn’t believe the castings on the jointer; solid cast iron, and absolutely no plastic on anything. I’m an average build guy and I could hardly move the thing. Each table was easily over 40lbs, and the frame was over 80.

random001 > Scimitar7 08/23/2016 at 21:18

0

I’m glad I could share! I saw it posted, and stole it.

CCC (formerly CyclistCarCoexist) > Zachary Oberle 10/29/2016 at 22:29

0

/r/BuyitForLife.

You’d like it.