11/34 irks

On Friday 13 October 2006 04:53 pm, Jay West wrote: Being a hardeware repair kinda guy, this has been a pet peeve of mine for a very long time. I have run across some stuff that was designed to be easy to work on, and in some cases which actually got better over time. And while in some cases there may be slight extra costs incurred to add some bits, there are other cases where just a little bit of consideration for such things in the design process can make all of the difference. "Classic" example (and yes, it's over 10 year old :-): I was trying to change out the battery in a Lumina APV. Like a lot of other stuff, there was a brace that ran across from the sides to the front, and you typically unbolted this thing if you had to and swung it off to one side. And in this case you had to because the battery was sitting under it. Only in this case you couldn't just do that, because the bits of plastic that were bolted on top of it had to get out of the way first -- so to put a battery in that vehicle you had to drop the driver's side headlight! Note that this could have been alleviated by simply contouring the plastic to allow the brace bolts to be accessed, and indeed the plastic _was_ countoured -- just not in the right spot. Automotive stuff in general seems to be getting worse and worse as time goes on for being able to work on it, but the trend seems to be in all sorts of manufactured product. Or maybe I'm just getting grouchier about it... -- Member of the toughest, meanest, dealiest, most unrelenting -- and ablest -- form of life in this section of spac, a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed. --Robert A. Heinlein, "The Puppet Masters" - Information is more dangerous than cannon to a society ruled by lies. --James M Dakin