Disposable Engineering

It has been a little while since I’ve had a post here. Sorry about that. Jenny has been picking up my slack and trying to get interesting things posted here. While I haven’t been posting, I’ve been thinking about a lot of things. One of those things (or, I guess, a whole lot of things that I’m going to throw under one category heading) is what I’m calling “disposable engineering.” I’ve been reading and thinking about this for a lot of years, I guess. Recently, I’ve read some other people who are thinking along the same lines (Christopher Schwarz comes to mind from the woodworking arena), making me feel slightly less crazy.

There are probably better words to describe the phenomena: The purposeful design and building of things to be disposable. We have all seen it happen in front of us. We go out to get some new small appliance or something to replace an item that we had for a long stretch of time that finally died or was otherwise broken beyond reasonable repair. “We’ll get a new gizmo,” we say, thinking that the new gizmos have new features and are obviously going to be better designed than the old gizmo. “Heck, we got ten years out of that old gizmo, if we get at least that long out of the new gizmo, we’re ahead of the game!” So new gizmo is purchased and installed. A year passes and all is well. The next year, we start to notice things are a little amiss. Maybe it isn’t working as quickly as it did when it was new. Maybe some minor feature that we didn’t even use all that often stops working. Another year passes, and things are now downright awful. Gizmo stops working and emits a cloud of smoke. Gizmo needs a replacement part that costs almost as much as a whole new gizmo. Maybe a major feature of gizmo fails and it is no longer able to fulfill its original purpose. “Guess we need a new gizmo,” we say. Off to the landfill for the current gizmo, and off to the store for us to get a new one. The cycle repeats again, and again, and again.

Why am I thinking about all of this? Why does it matter? Well, the other day, I was getting ready to hang the new coat rack I built for our front hall (there’s an entry on that coming soon). I realized I was going to have to put some 1/2″ holes in the wall in order to get some expanding wall anchors (“molly” bolts) installed. So I went for the cordless drill, and found that both batteries were flat. No matter, I thought–I hadn’t used it in quite a while, so I threw a battery on charge. An hour later, I checked the charger and it was showing a failed battery pack. OK, I’ll throw the other pack on charge. It was a little newer anyway, so it should be OK. Nope. Same problem. So I head out to a couple of hardware stores to see if I can get a new battery pack. Sure I can! a new battery pack was going to be somewhere around $100. I liked to have two, and I could only buy them in a set of two locally anyway, so I was going to be out $200+. A whole new drill kit with two brand new batteries was only a little more than that. The old drill had a few features that didn’t work right anymore anyway, so maybe I should just get the new drill….

Wait. Stop. Why am I dropping $250 or so on a new drill? I have many better ways I could spend $250. On top of that, I know those batteries will last only a few years anyway. The drill is made by a “good” manufacturer, but hmm.. This is sounding awfully familiar. I wonder if there is a better way.

Then I remember that I have my Dziadzia’s (grandfather, for you non Polish types) old bit brace. The power of that brace is limited only by my strength and endurance. It can easily bore big holes in tough material. It’s a 10″ sweep, so there’s a lot of leverage available there. I have augers specifically made for a brace. This will work.

So I left the hardware store without the batteries, and without a new drill. On the way home, my evaluation procedure concluded. I would need a drill for doing smaller work that was not fit for the larger brace. I knew just the tool: An “eggbeater” drill. Yes, this is one of the things with the crank that looks like an old-fashioned eggbeater. I had actually been researching these a while ago, so I knew what I wanted. I wanted a Millers Falls No. 2. EBay to the rescue. For $35, I purchased a drill made in the 1940’s (matching the vintage of the Millers Falls bit brace I have) in great condition. When it arrives, I’ll have to spend an hour or two cleaning and lubricating the bearings, and cleaning and lubricating the main gear. Then, with occasional care, it will be ready for another 70+ years of service. Unless something tragic happens to the bit brace or the eggbeater drill, I have removed myself from the marketplace for drills.

I’ve been pursuing some of these ideals for a while, I suppose. Some of them consciously, and others subconsciously. I try first to buy local, then look for something at least made in the USA, then look for something made in North America. If none of those fit, then I’ll consider buying things made somewhere else. Sometimes, I might be looking for a tool or item that is only made in another country (my chisels are from a centuries-old tool foundry in England, for example, and I have some high-quality German-made tools). Sometimes, I don’t have a choice (my US-designed table saw is manufactured in Taiwan, but it was the only saw that had the features that I needed).

In the end, this is also why I wanted to learn how to make my own furniture and clothing. When I built our new hall table a few years ago, we left the marketplace for hall tables. Unless something tragic happens to that one, we’re not really going to need another one. The same thing can be said for the occasional tables I built, and the shoe rack and coat rack in the front hall, and the blanket chest I’m working on now. I’m putting thought and work and energy into these things, and that is satisfying to me, whether the item is for us or is intended as a gift for someone else. Every item I make increases my skill level a little bit, so the next item takes less time, or is more intricate or complicated. It is a cycle that is satisfying. Compare that to the cycle of consumerism, which is frustrating at best.

Jenny and I have been trying to live by the “buy local” mantra as much as we can. There are places we refuse to shop, and sometimes we pay the price (literally) for those choices. There are items we won’t buy because of their pedigree. We are picky, but not because we are trying to be snobbish. We are picky because when we support local businesses and support their business models, everyone we care about wins. We can’t afford to personally fund the abolishment of child labor in overseas manufacturing operations, but we can refuse to support them and the supply chain that causes those operations to thrive (and, for us, that means everyone from the manufacturer to the point of sale). We can support local farms and grocery stores and restaurants and hardware stores and all sorts of other places. We can support businesses that care about their products and their customers, and help them to have a bottom line that shows them that their good business practices matter to us.

So OK, you can now think we’re crazy or whatever.

Edit: I originally had a little sub-story about some made-up manufacturers and some of the problems with outsourcing manufacturing to questionable companies. Click the “read more” below if you want to read that, too.

Some of the problem with disposable engineering can be attributed to the economies of large companies. If the Gizmo Corporation of America (GCA for short) builds a really high-quality gizmo that does the job for which it is intended and works for 10+ years, how often are we going to need to buy a new gizmo from GCA? Maybe they introduce a model with new features or something or that works markedly better than the original, and we might choose to upgrade. If we are happy with the performance and feature set of the original gizmo, though, we’re probably not going to buy another one until the current one breaks. If it was designed with longevity and serviceability in mind, maybe we’ll choose just to have the current gizmo fixed instead of buying a new one.

So GCA can make income by designing and selling new gizmos to people who do not yet have one or want an upgraded feature set. They can continue to make income on old gizmos by servicing them and providing parts and information. Maybe they even license some of their technology to another company who wants to make some other widget that does some of the same stuff that gizmo does. In any case, they have a sustainable business model that employs engineers and designers to come up with new gizmo and new technology, manufacturing workers to build gizmos, and probably a small host of other people to support the company’s operations. If they are big enough, maybe they also have their own service technicians who are able to service the gizmos, and sales people who help to sell the gizmos to stores and maybe directly to customers. Perhaps they manufacture parts for their gizmos, too, and so need to have a small stock on-hand for repairs. In today’s reality, they also probably have a web presence and so need to employ someone to help maintain that presence. This GCA is a company that is able to employ a fair number of people at a good wage and is able to engender brand loyalty among customers. Employees are generally happy with their employer and see that they are part of an operation that does good work, leading to high morale and employee loyalty.

GCA has a competitor, who we’ll call The Widget Company (TWC). TWC makes a competing line of gizmos. The companies have the occasional squabble over intellectual property, but they’ve both been in business for a while and resolve their issues in time. TWC has always been sort-of the underdog, and is looking for a way to get a jump on GCA. They start looking for ways to get an edge on price. Another company contacts them and says they can build a new gizmo model at a significant discount from TWC’s own cost. TWC pulls the trigger and gets a test run made and shipped to them. They are astounded that for a fraction of the cost, this other company has been able to manufacture the new gizmo to be exactly to spec. They order a huge pile and start to sell them a little below GCA’s price. They start to move fast because of the lower price, and so TWC orders more. TWC starts to phase-out their local manufacturing operation, as everything for the new model is being handled by the new manufacturing company. As TWC is doing this, the new manufacturing company is making a calculated move to lower their cost to build the gizmos. Quality starts to go down. TWC can no longer easily service their devices because they aren’t built by the company anymore, but they are cheap so TWC just starts replacing broken devices with new devices.

This cycle continues, and the hole just gets deeper. By the time someone at TWC finally realizes what is going on and that they are essentially getting scammed by this third-party manufacturing company, it is too late. TWC no longer has the capacity to manufacture the devices themselves in any sort of quantity. They are selling so quickly that to change manufacturers would mean that there wouldn’t be enough gizmos available to meet demand. They are stuck. They have gotten themselves wedged in this relationship with a third-party manufacturer that is prohibitively expensive for them to end.

Meanwhile, GCA has seen their market share shrink, as they simply could not compete on price. Loyal customers know the GCA brand and buy it if they can, but with TWC’s cheaper product that looks like a deal to the average customer, GCA continues to lose customers. They find they have to make cuts to stay afloat, and the situation for them deteriorates. They start to make conscious decisions during design to limit the lifetime of their products and reduce serviceability, thereby forcing more new sales. They might end up feeling forced into making a decision to also go with a third-party manufacturer themselves, just to stay in the marketplace. Now they end up in a situation where they are a known high-quality brand, but they have the same issue with the third-party manufacturer, and quality starts to slip. They continue to get business from the brand name, but that loyalty won’t last forever.