Take Advantage of "Planned Obsolescence"

I want to talk about planned obsolescence and some useful information you could know about it that could maybe save you some money and get you some good tools unexpectedly all right a little while ago I got this here bench grinder from for free from a guy because it wasn't working I think he just got it with the house he bought and he was just cleaning stuff out trying to get rid of stuff and it wasn't working so it was basically a big big paperweight and he just wanted someone to take away so why would I take something that's junk and broken right well I'll explain why in a minute but first I'm gonna tell you my experience with this so I've got this thing home the wheels didn't rotate the switch was missing had been removed and the power cord was cut so clearly at some point someone gave up on this thing stole the power cord to use it for something else the switch was probably gone because they were trying to figure out how to fix it but then just gave up on it now the wheels weren't moving and that made it seem like oh it's just totally dead item so I started looking at it the first thing I realized is that the wheel wasn't working because this guard was pressed against the wheel like someone probably dropped at face-first the guard hit the wheel and then the wheel wouldn't turn so I loosened the guard wheels turn freely no problem so next time to figure out what's what's going on electronically so I opened up the bottom it's just a bunch of wires because it's which had been removed and that the wire was cut off so I found the two wires that correspond to the motor and I got a an extension cord and don't do this unless you know how to safely do it but I took the two wires and stuck them in the extension cord and the things started moving so I knew the motor worked so then it was just a matter of finding a switch that I could put in here and getting a few wire nuts and attaching a new power cord and [Music] yeah works perfectly it actually works better than the one I bought so I'm using this one now so what what is going on here okay this whole planned obsolescence thing it's started as a way for people to make more money because when a company makes something that's reliable and long-lasting you buy one of them and then you have it for the rest of your life but if they make something that breaks in a certain amount of time then you buy one it breaks then you go buy another one it breaks to go buy another one so they can sell them cheaper and they just sell more it's a way of getting more customers without actually getting more people not actually getting more customers you just kind of creating more customers out of the same people at the expense of the earth the environment anyway so what happens is some company will go to a factory Austin a factory in China and then people you know end up saying things like oh it's just Chinese made crap well a lot of times it has nothing to do with the factory in fact making things to break at a certain time is actually kind of a real pain in the butt engineering speaking noise but anyway a company will go to a to a factory and I've actually witnessed this several times that I used to go to China doing manufacturing stuff and they'll say to the factory ok we need you to make this this bench grinder with these specs just like this and we need it to last 300 uses and there's the factory guy will say oh so it just has to last more than 300 uses the guy says no no no it has to last more than 250 uses but not more than 350 uses so right around 300 uses we need it to break and then the factory guys just like so we need to make this thing reliable up to 300 uses and then just break and they're like yes now this is a lot harder than making something that's just reliable and works it's much easier to just say I'm gonna try to make this last as long as it can go so what do they do well they look at the different parts and try to figure out what what single part can cause catastrophic failure reliably so you could say maybe the ball bearings but then it depends on how hard someone's using it or you know if someone's just grinding little bits of plastic the thing is gonna end up lasting years because you're putting those stresses on the bearings and if someone else is grinding metal it's gonna break the first week so that's unreliable the motor while other motor doesn't have any brushes because it's an AC motor if you have a DC item often the brushes that is the thing they they plan the obsolescence with because the we're down at a fairly consistent rate and they can just make little brushes that will last a certain amount of time anyway this doesn't have that problem so going through it they they find okay the switch is the easiest thing to make break and which is probably what happened with this it's probably why the switch was gone and the reason is because the switch doesn't care how hard you're using it while it's going every time every time you connect the switch you get two pieces of metal that come together and touch and it doesn't really do anything in them it doesn't wear them out or anything well then once the electricity is moving through when you disconnect the switch you turn it off and for a split second the electricity is still moving through and it moves through the air it makes a little bit of lightning it's called arcing so as you disconnect the switch it makes this little heat this little lightning bolt and it melts the metal a little bit and the amount of metal it melts varies greatly depending on how thick the metal is and you know just how quickly it comes apart and stuff but this is all things you can plan so they can make a switch that will come apart and they can measure how quickly the metal gets worn down and then they can make the metal a size that will last roughly 300 disconnects and then just make everything else just pretty good quality that will definitely last longer than that so a lot of times when you buy tools or machines most of the most of the thing is actually pretty good quality they just throw in some easy to easy to plan breakage they shouldn't call it planned obsolescence they should call it time self-destruct so they have won this time self-destruct piece in the thing so and that was the switch so a lot of times if you get machines like this use it till it breaks and you know it'll just suddenly stop working you don't know why it's either the switch or maybe some other tiny component in you can actually open it up and just nose around for a few minutes is usually something really easy to fix so a lot of times you can get very very high quality tools if you're willing to do a tiny bit of repair and you can get these tools at a very low price so this is a way you can take advantage to planned obsolescence that's being shoved down all our throats and another another cool thing about the way it works now is that 50-100 years ago there were repair shops and people would repair things so they had to figure out ways to make things break that was hard to repair so they couldn't just have the switch cuz you take another repair shop the guy would be like oh yeah I've seen 100 of these give me five minutes that would be a couple dollars and we'll fix it no problem so originally they made it they had to work really hard to make things difficult to repair but then once the culture of repairing things was gone like it is now no one repairs anything anymore now they just they don't care what they don't care how it breaks they just needed to break in some way that 99% of people will throw it out and go buy a new one but if you're that 1% who takes a few minutes to look at it what's wrong you could really save a lot of money and get some high quality tools

Channel: undefined

Views: 14,839

Rating: 4.8627787 out of 5

Keywords: Jaimie, Mantzel, self, destruct, planned, obsolescence

Id: yyR5i6SRVhg

Length: 8min 44sec (524 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 29 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

This is the giant spider guy

[u/omnilynx]

Seems like most of the time you'd spend more time working on fixing the item than you would just working at your job to get the money to buy a new one.

[u/PM_ME_B003S]

I quit watching because the video was terrible, but it doesn't seem like this has anything to do with planned obsolescence. Just seems like he got a free bench grinder someone gave up on fixing after they mistakenly thought it was broken. Bench grinders are dead simple, even the cheapest ones will last.

Edit: kept watching and this guy is just spewing bullshit. "planned obsolescence" comes from cost cutting measures and lowered acceptable lifespans. No one engineers components to "be reliable for 200 uses but break before 350 uses". Usually it is cost saving measures that reduce the lifespan of the products and companies are fine with making that tradeoff because people obviously still buy the garbage (Harbor Freight anyone?). He even points out that engineering something to fail after a specific number of uses is more complicated. (and therefore more expensive) This guy is dumb for real.

Also the entire basis for this video is speculation on a part that wasn't even with the grinder when he got it. 1/10 complete garbage video all around.

Edit 2: I'm clearly bored - blame the hurricane.