Designed to Fail

DIY
Electronics
Repairs
Author

Thomas Hallam

Published

August 14, 2023

DIY doesn’t always work

The missing key?

You may be wondering, what this photo is all about?

Well I’ll let you know to save you guessing, and also avoiding a Very Frustrating Sticky Mess.

Companies are building failure into their products so customers have to dispose of their purchased goods sooner than needed

Here is a example, the internal cutting component from a document shredder (a well known brand!)

Two missing washers are key!

  1. It is Designed to Fail. If you put 1 or 2 extra paper sheets in then the gears may buckle. The plastic housing bends over time and the metal cutters jump off the plastic guardrail. When the 6 loose metal cutters lock up, the motor may burn out

  2. The design makes it (nearly) impossible to repair and reassemble. You would have to take the whole thing apart, get covered in mechanical grease and paper cuttings, yuck! remove all the grease and try to rebuild it. I tried it for say 2 hours, and it still wouldn’t work. Probably needed a special aligner tool as well as other electrical testing devices. Repair is not worth the hassle for a £50 appliance

Any way, designing products to fail like this is really bad for the environment! plastic is not a sustainable choice and the whole product now ends up in landfill or shipped as international ewaste, because what… 2 x little washers (@ ~1p each?)

So next time you go to shred something and it says ‘max 3 sheets’, please save yourself (and the environment) some aggro and just shred 1 sheet at a time!

We need companies to start thinking of the environment when we design, how can we make a things last years? Not just a few months!

Sources


Have you seen other product with failure built in? Interested to here your examples below