Comment by potato3732842

4 hours ago

What you're describing is the stereotype for "rich west europe" engineering culture.

Every now and then you see it leak out into some other environment, like Toyota and their pull-apart ball joints that "aren't an issue" because "the user will just service it on schedule" where it reliably causes problems in all sorts of dumb ways (because like anything else, designing stuff to within an inch of it's life takes practice).

Now, don't get me wrong, this European approach creates a lot of cool highly performant products, but it's stuff that tends to fall on it's face real good if you violate any of the assumptions made when designing it and the approach is naturally suited to some products more than others.

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potato3732842

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giamma  2 hours ago

Here is an American example, Fox suspensions. Fox is one of the main producers of bicycle suspensions. Great products, but check their service intervals for a fork [0], 125 hours.

Now if you practice mountainbike you may ride your bike 1 to 5 times a week. Let's say you only ride once a week for 4 hours: 125 / 4 = 31, you would need to service your fork every 31 weeks. Add some few more rides and you have to service the fork twice a year.

Each service easily costs $150 if done by a bike shop. If you do it yourself (plenty of tutorials on youtube), you need expensive special tools, oil, special grease and spare o-rings and seals easily costs 30-40$ for every service. And you have to properly dispose the old oil.

[0] https://tech.ridefox.com/bike/owners-manuals/2979/fork--2025...