It just makes me want to............

[Eric Wettschreck]

Haul back and slap an engineer until the dumb falls out.

Case in point, my 15 HP Ariens zero turn mower. It wouldn't start. I start turning wrenches on it and find the starter gear is stripped. Ok, no biggie. I look a little deeper and find the flywheel ring gear is stripped also. THEY"RE BOTH PLASTIC!!!! I mean really, plastic gears.

Makes me scratch my head sometimes.

We've all been there. What experiences have yous guys had that made you go, "Who's the rocket scientist that designed this?"

[OnAFly]

A kid that is 2 years into college is different than an engineer who is responsible for releasing designs. A guy a week into his first engineering job isn't going to be making decisions like material changes without experienced engineers checking his work.

I'm a design engineer and predicting failure can very very difficult. This is especially true when you get forced into using cheaper suppliers that don't necessarily offer the quality of other more expensive suppliers.

BTW - Did you go do MSU? I was there from '02-'07

[TruthWalleyes]

I would agree completely with the suppliers. However, you need to force the well known issues of changing materials and voice the potential failures. It all boils down to the product manager's decision to allow the defect percentage or not.

MSU 03-08

You might have seen me in the Engineering projects lab - i worked there for 4yrs.

[Nick Kuhn]

Do you have the original design and changelog for the design? Engineers tend to build things that work, because that's all they are paid to do. Prototypes often are orders of magnitude more expensive than an actual production part. Often as a product nears market management/marketing will want the production cost to hit $X. At that point the engineer is forced to list options to cut costs, always at the cost of quality. The engineer very rarely gets all the parts he/she desires in a final product.

[Scupper]

I never even considered "Improperly Set Torque Limit's" or "Gears Designed to Strip".

Thanks for pointing that out.

I would of thought that a plastic gear designed to fail to ensure or limit other damage would be sold like a shear pin and not in the form of a kit with many unnecessary items. I don't remember how many items were in the repair kit that I purchased, (more than five) but I only needed the $3.00 dollar gear.

Perhaps this is marketing and not engineering...

Scott

[LightningBG]

Scupper, planned obsolescence. You think they cant make a car that will run 400K miles? Sure they can, but then they wouldn't have you buying cars every few years.

They are going to package all that garbage together so someone only has to grab the same bag over and over and send it to you. Their goal is to make money, and they got ya. They were really hoping that you would just go get a new opener.

[Eric Wettschreck]

Truth Walleyes is among the select few design type fellas I know with practical experience. It's easy for me to say this cuz I know the dude, watched him grow up, know what he did as a youngster, blah, blah, blah.

I've been working on a project for aboot a year now with a couple design guys. They are the polar opposite of TW. I'm surprised they can get their underwear on in the morning. No offense to the rest of yous design guys out there, but I feel before you start designing stuff, you should spend some time in the trades fixing and building stuff.

In the end it would be a benefit for everyone.