My personal experience with this was with a blender. The mount that held the motor went bad (turns out it was due to incredibly spindly supports that had broken. It probably saved a few cents in material costs but resulted in the whole thing failing years earlier than it probably should have), but luckily, the mounting bracket was available, and at an eminently reasonable price. Unfortunately, during this process, the mounting bracket holding the control board in place also broke (they did not use very high quality plastic), and unfortunately that piece was only sold as an assembly with the entire control board which was priced basically identically to the whole blender. It's currently sitting in a cupboard waiting for me to get the energy to get a 3d printed replacement, since I am having trouble throwing away what is otherwise a perfectly serviceable blender except for 1 small broken piece of plastic.
Unfortunately, this particular problem is not one that I think can be legislated away (or at least not without the legistlation causing more problems than it fixes). The only way it gets fixed is if consumers start to care and start basing their purchases at least partially on repairability (including price). And that kind of culture shift is hard.
Plastic welding is a thing. I doubt they used thermosets so you should be able to melt the pieces back together with a soldering iron or similar (and for some other plastics, CA glue and other solvents will work too.) You can even embed wires or other metal pieces for reinforcement.
3D printing is the "trendy maker" thing these days but don't forget that you can make a replacement out of a suitable material in many other ways, and one that may even outlast the official part. I have in the past repaired plastic parts of appliances by making a replacement out of scrap sheet metal.
There's no need for official parts when many people can figure out how to fabricate replacements --- which is one of the reasons why companies are so against right-to-repair.
You can do a lot these days with some basic tools (also quite cheap) and YouTube videos.
Good to know, I'll research it. In the past, I've attempted fixing plastic items with soldering iron and other sources of heat, up to and including open flame from a lighter - in every case, it resulted in burning and/or smoking and stinking plastic, and at no point the two parts became attached again. Not sure what I was doing wrong.
Epoxy usually works for these situations, it can stink until it sets, don't get it on your hands but it's real cheap. Sub-$2 for the harbor freight tubes.
Even better, most of the plastic housings on things (think plasticky old dell desktop housings or lego bricks) are made of ABS. This stuff you can buy plastic weld that dissolves the outside of the pieces you want stuck back together. This stuff works well for that: https://www.amazon.com/Plastruct-Plastic-Weld-applicator-Bot...
To clarify, plastic welding generally implies melting the plastic not with heat but with specific solvents. It's kind of "gluing" where there technically there is no glue (i.e. some substance that stays between your two parts) but rather a weld, where the edges of the parts get melted and stuck together as the "glue" (solvent) evaporates.
Some plastics melt at a certain temperature (thermoplastics like PETG/PLA) and others don't (thermosets like resin/epoxy). Its possible you just attempted to melt the type that just burns when you heat it.
This is a really good point. It might end up looking janky (I'm bad at the kind of detail level finesse it might take to look good), but slopping a bunch of glue on there would almost certainly hold it in place well enough to work.
Depending on how it's broken, sometime you'll be able to glue plastic parts together (it was recommended to me to use the gel super-glue, not the regular one).
Another interesting material is two part epoxy (like JB Weld). You can even make small parts out of it, for example redo a broken clip on a bigger plastic piece.
Due to owning and repairing a 20yo car with lots of brittle plastics, I've had to expand my plastic-repair skillset, and it's way deeper than you'd initially assume.
I have a stainless garbage can from Kohler that has a ten year warranty. Appx. four years into owning it, the plastic lid hinge snapped.
Costco told me take it up with the manufacturer. Kohler had a page buried on their website helpfully detailing a Kafkaesque process to send them an RMA request to a physical mailing address, with no info on what to send, no forms, etc.
Instead, I modeled a replacement in OpenSCAD in ~30 minutes, and printed it in glass filled nylon (PA6). Can is still going strong.
That's weird about Costco because in my experience their return policy is incredibly generous. I had a Vizio TV stop working 2 years after purchase, just outside their warranty and Costco took it back, gave me the money back and a new TV cost less than the return
I also thought it was weird, I've heard great things about Costco's return policy. I think they wanted me to try the manufacturer first, as they didn't have the can in stock anymore.
It can be legislated away by requiring all appliances of certain kinds to have 15 or 20 year warranties, perhaps with some extra safeguards to prevent Hollywood accounting tactics from being used.
This seems like a much neater solution than a right to repair. By making all repairs free for consumers, the repair costs are shifted onto the initial price. This allows for much easier repairability comparisons when shopping (items with high repair costs just become more expensive). It also forces manufacturers to consider product quality much more seriously, as unknowingly releasing a faulty product onto the market, without factoring the repair costs into the price, can significantly affect their profits. It would also significantly help with the "the servers have disappeared and my device is now a brick" issue by forcing manufacturers to keep the appropriate IT infrastructure operational.
Another less radical version of this idea is to force manufacturers to prominently feature a "yearly cost of use", which is basically the price divided by the number of years under warranty (we assume here that the product is designed to be thrown away immediately after the warranty expires). This gives manufacturers an incentive to extend warranties, which also forces more repairability.
The EU kind of sort of does this already, most electronic devices there have a mandatory warranty period, but it's only two years.
I wonder if the result of a twenty year warranty would be sturdier devices that are easier to service, or even flimsier devices that are cheap to replace a couple of times. Resources and manufacturing being cheap, labor costs being high.
Part of me loves this idea. I've had things fail, and would have been happy for warranty coverage. But:
* What about the market for truly inexpensive things? Do I get e.g. my plastic knife replaced every time it gets dull, for 20 years? Does a consumer still have the option to buy a truly inexpensive (and low quality) specialized tool, that they know(/expect) they'll only need once? (Or will they all be expensive, because it's now illegal to make something that won't last for 20 years?)
* How does this affect expensive things? What will a car cost, if I have to pay for all the possible issues that will come up with it over 20 years up front?
* How will this be enforced? Just form a corporation that "goes out of business" every year or two, and is magically replaced by another distinct corporate entity. Sure the warranty lasts 20 years but if the company servicing the warranty doesn't ... (The even more significant proliferation of e.g. HOOLEEZOO branded items?)
I’m a fan of this too, essentially the idea would front-load the cost of repairs into the product as a consumption tax at the point of sale. This internalizes the externalities of this planned obsolescence.
But of course it’s not really a fixed price and the manufacturer is tacitly encouraged to compete in total lifecycle price rather than to do the “cheap out on a structural part to save 2 cents” thing. Which is the ultimate goal.
If what you want is for products to last a while, thats the way to do it. Legislate the lifecycle you want and let vendors compete on optimizing their products for that lifecycle. The free market will happily give you planned obsolescence, we are already in a market failure, and it’s not going to work itself out by just “making consumers more informed” or whatever pablum - if that worked you wouldn’t be in a market failure to begin with. Staying the course and “spreading awareness” has always been a vote against actual change.
Kind of a tangent to your point, but this sounds like the sort of thing I fix with Sugru, not a printed part. That stuff has saved me a lot of money over the years.
Would STLs for parts fix this? We could legislate that buying a product gets you personal access to design files for the purpose of repair or enhancement.
Having full service sheets for electronics, and physical design files would make all but the most compact electronics user-serviceable, at no direct cost to manufacturers.
Also, IP laws should only apply when they are of benefit to society as a whole. So if you have a patent on a part you no longer produce, well, that doesn't benefit society so your patent is done.
That sounds like the "open source" argument, and I doubt it'll do any good[1]; don't forget that we used to be able to repair all sorts of things without the original design drawings, and we should still be able to for non-software things. The real problem is that the majority of people are gradually losing the skills to do so.
Watch machinist channels on YouTube and you'll see those skills in action.
[1] What open source has done is created a whole generation of developers who have never heard of disassembly or binary patching techniques, which depending on the situation can be much simpler and easier than trying to figure out how to compile the source code (and not change anything else). It has effectively produced learned helplessness in the absence of source code.
Skills move with job prospects and the fact is there isn't enough heavy machinery (manufacturing, farming, etc) to support the mass training of fine-machinists. Much of the work there is has to complete against replacements. The same is true in software development, electronics.
And I think the same is true in software development. The languages and performance we have allow the majority of developers to focus on bigger problems. That wasn't the case 30 years ago. It's just following the money. Source availability and APIs do mean we have to hack less interop but that came because that's what the market demanded.
This is how it used to be. When you bought a computer you got a full circuit diagram with it so you could understand how it works. All appliances were like this, and some still are, but the fancier it is the less likely. My stove has a sticker on the back describing how the coils are wired up so a technician can service it better. There's no reason we can't mandate this even if our circuit boards and physical mechanisms are more complicated. It's clearly a net benefit for society.
I'm a fan of this mentality. (Though I'd be happier if the government gets a copy of all designs that are mass produced.) I recently had a 10 year old TV die on me and I was 90% sure that I just needed to swap the power supply. If I'd had some more info I could have tested things on my benchtop before trying to track down an identical replacement board. (Though those options were a bit dubious as well.)
> I recently had a 10 year old TV die on me and I was 90% sure that I just needed to swap the power supply.
If it was the power supply and there was no burnt smell, you should have spent 30m replacing all the caps on it. There is very little else in a power supply that dies.
Perhaps a few cents for whole batch production. A lot of it is planned obsolescence. I've had countless things break on hinges or other tiny moving parts, because they were made from 3mm plastic instead of 5mm plastic. Every time it's moved it's under way more stress than it should. Therefore it'll break after around 3 years.
I don't find planned obsolescence isn't a very convincing theory for something like a blender.
It makes sense for them to cheap out to save money, or to not think too hard about design for reliability beyond any guarantee or statutory warranty period.
But it doesn't make sense for them to deliberately design stuff to fail after 3 years. There is no vendor lock in for a blender. If it fails after three years, the number of people giving more custom to the same manufacturer must be miniscule, surely?
> If it fails after three years, the number of people giving more custom to the same manufacturer must be miniscule, surely?
I'd guess blenders are a commodity at this point - for most of the market, customers are very price sensitive, so since repairability ain't gonna win you any points, you may just as well assume that you get a fraction of the market share, and if your product breaks early, you'll capture that fraction of repeat purchases. Small profit, but if your competition does the same, then it's just pure profit for all of you.
> I'd guess blenders are a commodity at this point - for most of the market, customers are very price sensitive, so since repairability ain't gonna win you any points, you may just as well assume that you get a fraction of the market share, and if your product breaks early, you'll capture that fraction of repeat purchases.
I think I'd call cars a commodity too. I used to avoid buying cars with auto transmissions or turbos. The auto transmission will need a rebuild[1] around 200000km, and the turbo is just an extra thing that could break, and yet new-car buyers vastly prefer to buy autoboxes with turbos.
Some manufacturers (Audi) stopped making manual transmission NA cars back in 2010, without even seeing a dip in sales.
If buyers cared about repair costs, auto transmissions and turbos wouldn't be anywhere near as common as we see.
[1] All cars have clutches. In a traditional auto the clutch plates are inside the box and requires many dozens more hours of billable labour than the clutch plate in a manual transmission.
Along with plastic welding and epoxies (good things to say about JB Weld) also using baking soda infused with cyanoacrylate glue (the very thin kind) can build up material and becomes approximately rock hard. Can be filed. Just be careful around transparent pieces as the fumes can haze them up.
There's also a commercial product called Q Bond that I believe includes a plastic powder as the "host" material but is used in the same way.
> The only way it gets fixed is if consumers start to care and start basing their purchases at least partially on repairability (including price). And that kind of culture shift is hard.
It is not technically hard. Just hit new goods with a sufficient tax such that buyers have no choice but to start caring about longevity and repairability.
Of course, it is practically impossible since people like being able to buy more stuff.
Taxing consumption is much harder to make progressive and achieve the presumed aim here.
Consumption taxes start out heavily regressive, and require modifications to make them neutral or progressive. These might be excluding clothing and staple foods from sales tax or other tweaks to exclude the necessities of life, which lower-income people necessarily spend a greater portion of their income on. (Income taxes are quite easy to make progressive.)
Basically, the IRS only taxes profit, not gross income. In business, if you pay rent, or buy equipment, your income is deducted by those expenses.
The IRS pretends there isn't a cost to wages - that they are profit. You can't deduct any expense accrued to make or keep yourself able to work, nor can you deduct the time lost to make a wage.
In other words, if there is no gain, there is no income, and since wages is a compensation for a person's expense (aka their time and effort of being able to work), it's not income.
The act of charging income tax on W-2 employees is a travesty we let upon ourselves. The sad thing is if most w-2 employees just re-orged as contractors, many of their expenses could at least be considered for deductions.
The government needs to raise a certain amount of money every year, and the rest is pretty much details. So, if wage workers could deduct expenses from pre-tax income, the government would just raise tax rates to compensate.
I realize you're making a moral argument more than an economic argument, but the economic argument is still a consistent one.
You generally can't deduct more than your basis for something you sold. Your basis in an hour of your labor is $0. That's true whether you're paid W-2 or 1099.
The various US government entities (DOT, EPA, HHS) uses a statistical life value of around $10 million (probably higher now due to inflation).
The average American works ~1800 hours a year, and, if counting from 18 to 68, can work 50 years, or 90000 hours in an average working life.
If you think solely economically, then the statistical hourly value is $111/hour ($10,000,000 / 90,000). That's your cost-basis for an average human's work-hour, per the statistic value of a human life. Of course, the $10 million isn't solely an economic number, since human life is technically priceless and has a moral value, which then brings the argument back to morality.
Right to repair wouldn't be a pigouvian tax. There are no negative externalities to selling a product that is unrepairable — no one but the buyer gets harmed by it — it's just that people buy products before sufficiently informing themselves about what to do when they break.
Instead, a pigouvian tax would be on something like, say, me offering you to punch an uninvolved third-party that you don't like in exchange for money. I may be happy because I made money, and you may be happy because you wanted to see someone punch said third-party, but overall it would still be negative sum because the third-party would obviously not be happier. So one way to fix that is by taxing it. (A less extreme example is environmental pollution.)
Taxing unrepairable products would be much more like taxing addictive drugs that pose no danger to other people, where the legislation protects people from their own bad decisions.
> people buy products before sufficiently informing themselves
I think you are implying that we should socialise losses - informing ourselves is not free. We don't want to become specialists in understanding paperwork. Expecting individuals to invest time to learn how to make the perfect consumer decision is just unworkable. Making complex tradeoffs between conflicting requirements is an expensive and time-consuming process.
A11y: informing ourselves is not accessible. Not everyone is an engineer/economist type that is good at making complex tradeoffs.
I know that I use some gross heuristics and simplifications when making significant purchases (even though I have some training and natural bent towards product analysis).
> I think you are implying that we should socialise losses
I'm not implying or taking a stance on anything political here — I don't have an opinion either way nor do I want to get into right-to-repair arguments — I'm just saying it's not pigouvian tax.
Sorry, I wasn't trying to be political, but cheeky (I actually hate the overuse of the cliché I allude to). I didn't say anything about pigouvian tax.
I was trying to say that "informing" oneself is a very expensive hidden cost.
I felt your phrase "people buy products before sufficiently informing themselves" nonchalantly implies consumers should bear an unmeasurable hidden cost. We have a variety of solutions to help consumers avoid such unfair and wasteful costs (including Fair Use legislation).
No, the relevant pigouvian tax would be about the waste stream from products which aren't feasible to repair and which are trashed, and the environmental damage in producing and transporting replacements. When we all have microplastic _in our bodies_, and we're on a downward spiral of making ever cheaper, shorter-lived products, it seems really bewildering to hear someone claim there are no externalities.
The externalities are on the new products, not the right to repair, so a true pigouvian tax would be on the sale of products that can contaminate our environment regardless of repairability. (Otherwise, people would still be encouraged to just rebuy the product out of convenience even if it's repairable.)
As I said elsewhere, I'm not saying there shouldn't be a tax, I'm just saying it wouldn't be a pigouvian tax.
Well, there are but they are small and better targeted upstream/downstream as either a carbon tax or a waste disposal tax (both things that can, to at least some degree, affect other people). But I agree that appropriately sized taxes relative to the actual externalities seem unlikely to change behavior in this case.
I think this is ignoring the feedback loop between market demand and product design. It is entirely possible for cheap products to crowd out good ones such that good ones no longer exist in the market no matter how “informed” you are. Indeed, as discussed in this very comments section, appliances are already there, pretty much every brand of fridge or washer/dryer is shit now regardless of how much you spend.
It is entirely possible that the overall social optimum is that the very cheapest tier of product needs to not exist in order to get the volume for decent models to have good economies of scale etc.
It's not just that, is it? How do I have any way to know how long a blender will last, besides signals like brand name or price with a rather attenuated relationship to the actual question, before I buy it?
Unfortunately, this particular problem is not one that I think can be legislated away (or at least not without the legistlation causing more problems than it fixes). The only way it gets fixed is if consumers start to care and start basing their purchases at least partially on repairability (including price). And that kind of culture shift is hard.