"Rick Brandt" wrote in message
...
Michael A. Terrell wrote:
Yes, my mother used her first clothes dryer for over 30 years. We
replaced the belt three times. A new dryer might last five years,
total.

On what do you base this statement? To claim that (on average) a new
dryer will only last five years is absurd. What, you once knew "a guy"
who replaced a five year old dryer? The dryer has to be one of the
simplest and most reliable things in the home. There just isn't that much
to go wrong.


When you don't compare appliances to the rest of the
machinery/equipment/vehicles that an average household owns nowadays, it's
easy to think that appliances aren't meant to be repaired anymore. Compared
to everything else in your life, reliability and repairability is pretty
much the same, because the consumer has raised their expectations, so the
market adjusted.
I used to get into the points/electronic ignition argument all the time.
The opposing thinking was that points could be adjusted, and that you knew
when it was time to replace them, and mine was that you never had to do
either, and the reliability of electronic ignition was so much higher than
points that you had enough time worrying about other things that you could
afford to think that, instead of spending all your time maintaining things.
Model T's used to come with tools and a manual that guided you through a
complete engine overhaul, because every few thousand miles they knew you
were gonna have to!

Yup, electronic circuit boards aren't as structurally durable as the
spaghetti mess behind most older machines, but I can pretty much assure you
that you won't be messing with it near as often. If you have to repair a
particular brand machine, you will think less of that brand. When there was
only five or so brands, that were all made in the US, the makers didn't mind
trapping the consumer, but now that machines are built all over the world,
competition says that the customer is now highly concerned about
reliability, and won't even bother try to find the most reliable one out of
a selection of crap, but will buy what they don't have to hassle with.
Which one would you pick?

I'm not sold completely on that commentary as it relates to _all_
machinery, however. I won't buy a Toyota Corolla or Honda Accord, or any of
the million clones, simply because everyone else has one, and I can't find
mine in a parking lot. I'm confident that I've acquired a less reliable
automobile that reflects my personal taste in transportation, and when the
mass produced muck has passed on its appeal to much newer cars I'll still be
driving my own car, which retains its own appeal and uniqueness much longer.
It wasn't uncommon to get comments like: "Cool car, what is it?" on my much
older rides, from folks of all ages.