On 05/19/2010 09:58 PM, Kyle Mcallister wrote: > --- On Wed, 5/19/10, Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <[email protected]> > wrote: >> Well, I can understand, but I don't really miss that. Heathkits >> were cheap, main point for me at the time, I built quite a few, but >> assembly costs are now so low that a Heathkit to do what I can >> easily buy fully assembled and tested, etc., would be much more >> expensive. > > Yes, assembled is cheaper now. Sometimes, late at night, I wonder if > that's really better. Where's it made? In the USA? Or by someone > slaving in a third world nation, with no chance of anything better?
Doesn't affect the "assembled is cheaper" balance. With pick'n'place machines doing the board stuffing, and automated wave soldering, and almost everything designed to use a single PC board, assembly costs are a small fraction of the price. Look at an old Heathkit -- there was a *lot* of hand labor in those things. There's labor in maintaining the pick'n'place machines, there's labor in managing the assembly line and loading the bins, but that's not the kind of labor you can eliminate by shipping it as a kit. And, of course, _packaging_ the kit to be shipped had to be done by hand. Compare that with a modern unit, packed up with two hunks of styrofoam -- shipping room labor is still labor, and there's a lot less of it in a finished product than a kit. Here's one example of "hand-labor-intensive" design that comes to mind that you'd never see nowadays (from Dynaco rather than Heath): The old Stereo 120 had two fat output caps, and the wires from the caps to the terminals had to wound (by hand) around the caps, quite a few turns. That was, of course, to kill the oscillation which the design was otherwise subject to. Can you imagine a modern design that required hand-winding a coil as one of the last production steps? (And that amp also required significant "hand labor" replacing its output transistors, which tended to blow if so much as sneezed on ... but that's a separate issue.) > My dad told me stories of taking the tubes from his old TV down to > the drug store and testing them. He'd replace the bad one, and back > to The Honeymooners it was. Your DAD told you STORIES of that? Geeze, you young whippersnapper, you! And what's so all-fired "old" about the Honeymooners? I used to watch Jackie Gleason regularly (with my parents), back in the day. And did your dad also tell you about the diagnostic brochures you could get at the drugstore, that showed different symptoms (zigzag picture, fast vertical flip, slow roll, black screen, no sound, etc) and told you which sorts of tubes were likely at fault for each one? My dad took me down to the local drugstore and showed me how it all worked, and showed me how to ground the picture tube with a screwdriver before you started working so you wouldn't get blown across the room if you touched it, and I put all that to good use when I got my first TV (second hand -- no, third hand, I think, it had started life as a "modern" set owned by a rich uncle quite some years before, and passed through other family members before it got to me) and it had, shall we say, issues. I have to say it seems like fun looking back, but on the whole tubes were a pain in the neck. I can't imagine using a *computer* built with tubes, for instance. (Never turn it off or the filaments may die, and shotgun all the tubes every so-many-hours of run time... and let's not even talk about the heat it would generate...) It's like slide rules -- I love them, I've collected a bunch of them, but back when I was using them seriously, I was *very* glad to finally get a (four-function) calculator. Extracting a root to 4 or 5 places on the calculator was so easy -- and it was impossible on the slide rule, which gave you 2 places, or maybe 3 if you were careful... > Now, you just go to Wal Mart and buy a > new TV. In some ways, this is good... an electronics cannibal such as > myself finds garbage day to be a great boon to my assets of stuff. On > the other hand, I think we're instilling a sense of nonappreciation > for what has been made. "Screw it, it's cheap, I don't care if I > break it, I'll buy another one." > > Put another way, nothing is made with sockets any more. It's all > hard-soldered. Assembly costs! If there's a socket, somebody must put something in it, and I don't know how good robots are at getting all those niggling little pins into the right holes. If it's hard soldered, OTOH, a robot can just drop it into the slightly oversized holes, then run it through the wave, and voila, done, no human fingers required. And if it's surface mount, it's not clear a human even *can* solder it in place, without a huge amount of effort. Easy for the robots, though. > There are no VCR repair shops any more. Nothing is > repaired, just discarded and replaced. What is the environmental > impact of this? > >> I'm selling the material, $27.80 per 9x12 cm. sheet. Be the first >> on your block.... > > Interesting stuff. If I had the money and time, I wouldn't mind doing > a few CF experiments here. > > --Kyle > > > >
