Repair vs Replace; Wasted Resources

[julie_m]

I've never bothered with an electric toaster -- I just stick a couple of slices of bread under the grill. I prefer the taste of gas toast over electric toast anyway.

[PsychMan]

Originally Posted by G6Tanuki

I question the sanity - in energy terms - of running a 55-year-old fridge on a daily basis.

If its a 50s model or earlier 60s, and before the "frost free" models, its likely pretty decent on electricity consumption. I think it was the defrost elements rather than the compressors that ate up electricity. Actually, weren't the older Freon compressors usually smaller in HP rating than newer ones also?

When I rejigged my 50s Frigidaire, I found the compressor rating surprisingly low

[TonyDuell]

I always try to repair something rather than replace it. And I guess I take this to excess sometimes. When a plastic roller failed in a device that cost <£100 and the manufacturers refused to supply spare parts, I took it as the final justification to buy and learn to use a lathe so as to make a replacement roller. Of course the lathe has been used for many jobs since....

By chance my toaster failed a few weeks ago. So I took it apart. It seems to have been made deliberately difficult to dismantle and repair. The cover screws were 5 off pozidrive and one tamperproof Torx. If you wanted to replace the mains cable then you had to dismantle the whole thing (and FWIW the live and neutral wires were soldered to a PCB, whereas the earth wire was connected to the element chassis with a 1/4" faston ('lucar', whatever you call it) terminal).

One interesting (?) feature is that the element was tapped near one end, the tap was connected to a half-wave rectifier to supply power for the microcontroller, etc. I just hope that end of the element never goes open-circuit as it would be spectacular!.

Anyway the fault was burnt contacts on the 'main switch' which consisted of 4 bits of springy metal soldered to a PCB. I would not like to use that to switch 5A at mains voltage, but anyway. A clean-up with propan-2-ol and it seems fine.

[mark2collection]

I always investigate first, then attempt a repair. More often than not with no real effort & great success.

Some I see as a challenge, the latest example, when the garage tells you the motor in your auto-adjusting headlights comes with the headlight, as a sealed unit & 'cannot be repaired' ... At £600 each (if one side has failed, the other will follow, advice) plus labour, it was worth my 90 minutes of careful dismantling, only to find the silver disc in said motor oxidised, so the 'car' didn't know what position the headlight was in vs passengers/load, so went into fail-safe 'staring at the road' mode.

I was very pleased with my efforts, cost me 90 minutes, some contact cleaner, a cotton bud, a cup of tea & 2 dark chocolate digestives, the posh ones!

I guess the years of dismantling/repairing potentiometers in vintage radios, repairing video recorder/cassette tape mechs has helped!

I'm told my most impressive, was repairing a train set from the 1980's. Motor was obsolete, collector wanted £150 for his last remaining motor.

Me? I had a scrap CD-ROM drive, so I removed the tray motor, made a mounting to fit the train & transferred the drive gear(s) over ... Worked a treat, I'm told so much quieter than before, & boy did it shift up the track!!!!

Mark

[turretslug]

Originally Posted by TonyDuell

By chance my toaster failed a few weeks ago. So I took it apart. It seems to have been made deliberately difficult to dismantle and repair. The cover screws were 5 off pozidrive and one tamperproof Torx. If you wanted to replace the mains cable then you had to dismantle the whole thing (and FWIW the live and neutral wires were soldered to a PCB, whereas the earth wire was connected to the element chassis with a 1/4" faston ('lucar', whatever you call it) terminal).

One interesting (?) feature is that the element was tapped near one end, the tap was connected to a half-wave rectifier to supply power for the microcontroller, etc. I just hope that end of the element never goes open-circuit as it would be spectacular!.

A great many appliances seem to be constructed in a truly horrid fashion- snapped/self-tappered together at the factory, never intended to be opened let alone repaired. That's production pragmatism, though- folk have been programmed into ephemeral tastes and fashions in their lives anyway, the toaster is likely to be out of kilter with change of decor and fashion before it actually breaks.

The tapped-down element/dropper business reminds me of the tapped rectifiers in AA5s so as to feed a dial lamp with minimum complication and again could be seen as an exercise in to-the-bone cheese-paring or manufacturing elegance, depending on point-of-view. I'm willing to bet that the smoothing cap was a low-cost type positioned closely to the source of intense heat in the interest of limiting operational life to slightly beyond the mandatory warranty. It's always satisfying to chalk up minor victories against cynical obsolescence, though.

[Paul_RK]

Originally Posted by turretslug

...the toaster is likely to be out of kilter with change of decor and fashion before it actually breaks..

The sovereign remedy against that possibility is to take care that it has nothing to do with either to begin with

Paul

[avocollector]

What I miss is the dedicated craftsman who repaired things for cash but mostly for the love of it - the Freds of this world who beaver away in their workshop rebuilding avo meters for example. We used to have local guys who could rebuild the actual meter movements, or your mechanical watch/clock but many seem to be hitting retirement/giving it away now. The trouble for the rest of us is the time involved and the skill mastery needed - the present age does not allow these.

[turretslug]

Yep, I too have a sturdy steel pastel-and-chrome toaster with clockwork run-back bell and manual lift- I could never fathom the rationale behind the pop-up toaster, so ingenious that the toast was already cooling before you could get to it! Still, it's another flimsy mechanism to fatigue and eventually fail....

[emeritus]

Our old hair dryer used a tapping off the heating element to feed its 12VDC motor via a diode. After the element had failed O/C in ithe "high voltage" section, rather than bin it, I used it in our motor caravan as a cold air hair dryer and air bed inflater. I hadn't thought about it before, but it would have been interesting to see what happened had it failed O/C in the low voltage tapping!

[Nymrod121]

Originally Posted by Paul_RK

The sovereign remedy against that possibility is to take care that it has nothing to do with either to begin with

Paul

[dseymo1]

I rather like that 'industrial' toaster!
What is it? Looks rather like a Dualit in concept, if not appearance.

[Paul_RK]

Originally Posted by dseymo1

I rather like that 'industrial' toaster!
What is it? Looks rather like a Dualit in concept, if not appearance.

It's a Rowlett Regent. We retired our old flea market Dualit, which insisted on making either 2 or 4 slices of toast, in favour of the Rowlett which is happy to make 1 or 3 instead. Available, though, in versions for anything from 2 to 12 slices, or by special request for the larger family...

http://www.rowlett.co.uk/wp-content/...owlett-1-1.png

The future of ours is secure for as long as the parts stay available: except I could be tempted should Rowlett's 1957 model turn up anywhere, but I suspect my wife, tolerant though she is, might insist on it being somewhere other than in the kitchen.

Paul

[MotorBikeLes]

Back in 1988, I bought a Servis Quartz 600, a very early microprocessor based machine. Motor brushes failed after about 15 years, at least three mains filter caps failed, but otherwise it was excellent. However lack of space and a need for separate fridge and freezer meant it had to go. Enter a Zanussi ZWC1300, the only one small enough to fit the now smaller space. And so, yesterday, after only 6 years use, the very noisy fast spin suddenly became a machine gun from the sound. What a pig to dismantle! Finally got it to bits; the drum is fastened to the bearing hung "Spider" by just three crude tubular rivets. A bit like oversize shoelace eye holes. All three of them were quite slack allowing the drum to wobble and rattle. I think three stainless steel bolts with nyloc nuts are called for.
So, I have moved from a reliable machine that is easy to work on when required to one that is clearly intended to be scrapped when anything fails.
Les.

[Boater Sam]

Don't be too despondent Les, I have the same washer, fits on a boat better than a full size one, and it is one of the better constructed ones.
The modern crap they are passing of as engineering have drum and tub in a single assembly which cannot be separated. So no new bearings possible either.
Those rivets are usually very good at their intended job. Its the slight corrosion of the ally spider with strong washing powders that causes the initial loosening.
Using a bleaching agent accelerates the problem.
Allowing the machine to dry out by leaving the door ajar helps slow the rot.

[G6Tanuki]

Originally Posted by turretslug

I could never fathom the rationale behind the pop-up toaster, so ingenious that the toast was already cooling before you could get to it!.

That's the whole idea: if you keep toast hot after the toasting-process has completed, it goes soft because moisture continues to migrate out of the hot inner untoasted part of the bread and softens the outer toasted part.
Take toast out of the toaster as soon as toasting has completed, then let it cool with each slice kept away from the other slices so air can circulate between them to dispel the moisture [a device has been invented to aid this priocess - it's called a toast-rack] - that way it retains the satisfying crunch!

[other people may like their toast hot but soggy]

[GrimJosef]

Originally Posted by julie_m

... I prefer the taste of gas toast over electric toast anyway.

You'll be telling me that carbon film resistors sound different from metal film ones in your hi-fi next !

Cheers,

GJ

[turretslug]

Originally Posted by G6Tanuki

That's the whole idea: if you keep toast hot after the toasting-process has completed, it goes soft because moisture continues to migrate out of the hot inner untoasted part of the bread and softens the outer toasted part.
Take toast out of the toaster as soon as toasting has completed, then let it cool with each slice kept away from the other slices so air can circulate between them to dispel the moisture [a device has been invented to aid this priocess - it's called a toast-rack] - that way it retains the satisfying crunch!

[other people may like their toast hot but soggy]

Hot and moist (ahem) every time here. Cold, dry toast counts as ordeal rather than food. My perplexity only multiplies at the toast rack, carefully designed to make toast as cold as possible as quickly as possible- a colleague refers to it as "toast sink".

Shows just what a diverse bunch we human beings are!

[Paul_RK]

Originally Posted by G6Tanuki

That's the whole idea: if you keep toast hot after the toasting-process has completed, it goes soft because moisture continues to migrate out of the hot inner untoasted part of the bread and softens the outer toasted part.

I just had to put this to the test. Fortunately a slice of bread was to hand: I put it in the Rowlett toaster, waited until the bell declared that it was ready, then deliberately retired for two or three minutes before retrieving my toast. Result, toast that was both hot and crunchy: quite delicious, in fact. From a pop-up toaster it would have been crunchy enough, yes, but cold as charity.

Doubtless moisture does continue to migrate to the surface to some extent, but, in the bowels of a toaster with still warm elements to both sides of the slice, the toast is surrounded by air that continues to be drawn through the toaster's ventilation slots and warmed by the elements as it passes them. The said warm, dry air effectively prevents any softening of the toasted surface.

Paul

[Station X]

This thread is now toast.