Talk Morgan Forums Community The Malvern Arms Built in Repair-ability

A friend of mine was complaining about having to buy yet another toaster which he reckoned must be the eleventh. We still have our wedding present toaster for which one can still buy all the bits after thirty years.

Yes it is Peter. I never buy silly expensive so its always stuff like Hoover or Indesit etc. Spares are available. They do last more than 10 years, and our washing machine runs every day without fail.

And ten years spares is not good enough. I would expect to ba ebale to get parts for a car 20 or 30 years after manufacture as indeed you mostly could when cars were british rather than imports. You can get any part you need for an E type now 60 years later.

The problem is much more one of minor items. For example our paper shredder has a no spares policy. My boat radar is the same. Items like garden furniture or small electrical tools.

Never mind building in repairability. There might be a case for built in obsolescence. Not just with physical parts but also software. If you have items with software such as mobile phones then at some stage the producing company stops supporting them. Two scenarios here, first the hardware may not be up to coping with newer software upgrades ( speed, memory etc) or it is a way to get people to “upgrade” by buying a newer phone.
I can understand some software arguments as the hardware is evolving rapidly. Companies may also decide that they can save money by reducing the need to deal with older versions.
Back in the 1980’s I visited the Hoover factory in Merthyr Tydfil. They were making as much as possible in-house rather than outsource. Even injection moulding their own plastic bits. They had a policy of holding stocks for, I think, about 13 years and certainly over 10 years.
I haven’t seen any MMC policy yet for the trad components after the change to the CX platform. About 5 years ago I was chasing a rear fog control module for the Plus8. After several months via a well known dealer I phoned the factory. The reply was they had plenty???? Aha! What year car? Mine is 2002. Oh! We have plenty of units for 1997 and earlier in stock but they are not suitable for later cars. Can I have one to try it and modify? No. It won’t work. I ended up finding the fault on the pcb and fixing it. If that hadn’t worked it would have been Carbuildersolutions for a controller and sorting out the wiring. GRRRR.
I do wonder with modern cars at how much dealer only diagnostic/repair limitations there are for systems that are not tied into a car wide ecu/eco system.
Last year ’s ipad suffered a major front screen crack and damage to the touch screen itself. Apple don’t do repairs but you can swop it for a recon ipad for nearly £300. Just a smidge under a new unit price. I took it apart to see the option for buying replacement parts. Do-able with parts off ebay but has a new ipad instead. Her smiles were worth it. I am now searching for a new front screen for an older Samsung S2 phone with a cracked glass. So far it’s like looking for Hen’s teeth due to it’s age and non support. Just the glass itself as the touchscreen itself is working fine.

Phones are a fashion/consumer grade item so the vendors want you to move and upgrade as often as possible. In truth the secondhand market after two-three years is where there is a lot of value for money. You can buy 2 iPhone 6s or 7 and expect to get three or four years out of them. If it breaks you can get a decent secondhand one for less than the price of a months payment for the latest model.

Take it to one of the small shops and they can fit a new battery or screen for £30-50. This will become more difficult in the next few years as the displays are becoming seriously high tech with OLED, to-the-edge, bend/flex, ultra high res (higher than your 65" UHD TV, in 6 inches, really????) so they will start to climb a lot.

Mind you when we mention Morgan being great at this anyone tried to score a steering rack for an Aero S1 recently

Alistair .... I fondly imagine that Morgan source stuff like steering racks from mainstream parts-bins hence ensuring easy and relatively cheap future spares .... from your post I guess I imagine wrongly🙂

A thought that crossed my mind is that, as metal 3d printing and cnc machining become almost hobby-shop stuff in the future, they'll set a ceiling on the price of 'rare spares' ...... the price of a virtually unobtainable vintage part will rise til it meets the cost of short run of newly made bits .... the beauty of the new technology is that, although anything can be copied at a price, in the future that price will be much lower.

Or am I imagining wrongly again?? (quite possible, as I spent most of the day servicing the wind turbine at the top of a wobbly scaffold tower in 50 mph gusty winds and survived with very little loss of blood, so my optimism glands are firing on all cylinders!! 🙂)

K

Quite probably true. I went into a company the other day and they have what looks like one of the star trek transporters. You walk in and it 3D scans you and can 3D print a replacement at the other end. Someone close to me may have said "can it iron out the bumps and errors during the process" but I can neither confirm nor deny that we once had a wedding

You are right that the ability to custom clone parts will make a lot of problems begin to reduce but the electrical side remains more of a challenge. You can put a stack display onto a CANBUS system and it can read a lot but the detail bits will need a real skill. However for many years there have been people with laptops tweaking Evos, Imprezzas and Skylines now they do in on AMG, M and RS. We just need to find the right geek for the job. Perhaps one that has been mad enough to dangle from a big toothpick in the 120mph ice cold winds off the Aberdeen coast.

It's just that there have been a few comments on here about access to parts for S1 becoming difficult now. A certain member of our community will become (ever) more valued at finding/making them in the future I expect. I know I have had some surprises and the Coupe is only a 2013 car?

The volumes involved in the Aero cars must make it a bit of a challenge. If Morgan do stop carrying parts then the best thing they could do is provide the exact details of the source and part for part match?

The good news is that where they had the Trad and Aero now they have a single platform with higher (I trust) volumes which justify carrying more parts for longer which is going to benefit those cars given they are a lot more complex electronically than even the Aero was. Oh and some lumps of good old fashioned wood.

True !

A story relayed to me around 15 years ago by someone I was working for.

He owned a company making a component for Worcester Bosch for use in their boilers, after two years he got a call saying they hadn't had a single breakdown involving the said component, that's good he responded, NO, that's not good!
You must make it cheaper so it fails just after the warranty period ends!!! It was a €3 part,

A friend who used to repair our home appliances gave us the advice " if it's repairable then do it, it'll still be going when the replacement you buy has died"

It's a well meaning piece of legislation that's just a vote winner, the manufacturers will find another way to protect their profits, they have to.

Warranties are designed to expire just before the product expires.

We have an ISE washing machine ... cracker of a thing .... designed by engineers and uses the same mechanics as a full-on heavy duty commercial machine but packaged in a domestic sized format ..... been totally reliable for years ... only problem now is that the company who made them had to charge more for them than the run of the mill competition and couldn't stay in business .... hopefully it will be many more years before it fails and there aren't spares for it ..... if this legislation does as intended then the price gap between the 'well made and properly repairable' and the 'cheap and cheerful' will shrink enough for the former to pick up more of the market share .... also the raised awareness of the benefits of appliance longevity may guide peoples choices more and support the better companies.

K