Jeff Liebermann writes:

These days, repair work has changed. In the bad old days, it was
assumed that most items worth repairing were of decent quality. These
days, I can't just repair things. I have to re-engineer the design
and try to improve on what I consider to be crappy design and shoddy
construction. In the past, products were usually designed to be
maintained. These days, they're designed to be non-repairable.

Or at least that's what they specifically claim, in some cases.

When my electric toothbrush's battery refused to hold a charge, I
looked at the insane price of replacements and took the old one apart.

It had an O ring which sealed against water ingress, so reusable with
some cleaning, and had a tabbed AA size NiCd which showed normal
voltage until loaded by the motor so obviously dead.

The battery turned out to be suspiciously light. Probably the deluxe
model had a normal AA while my economy model was really a 1/3 AA
internally.

Tinning an NiMH replacement to allow soldering on the tags turned out
to be far easier than I expected; I shouldn't have dabbed on zinc chloride
flux with a cotton swab because this resulted in tinning of the whole
base, thus heating the battery unnecessarily.
A dab from the end of a cocktail stick would have been better (and yes,
I know it's corrosive but supposedly quick tinning is important to
avoid battery damage).

Actually, it's not repair as much as it is remanufacture.

Don't know how long the repair will last, and recharging may take a
long time, but the motor seems to have a bit more power and the first
charge has given many more days of use.

In some
product areas, it's impossible to buy quality at any price.

Or there's little correlation between quality and price.
The bean counters usually get the blame.

--
Windmill, Use t m i l l
J.R.R. Tolkien:- @ O n e t e l . c o m
All that is gold does not glister / Not all who wander are lost