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Comment by nik282000

6 hours ago

Oh my god, actual dimensions on a drawing, part numbers, AND service instructions!?! I work on industrial equipment with 1/10th the documentation presented here.

Cool find, op!

10 comments

nik282000

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dpe82  5 hours ago

No wonder our grandparents generation were good with mechanical things. If they were looking at materials like that all the time - I feel like you'd build an intuitive sense of how common household devices work pretty easily if it were so clear and accessible.

  • jackyinger  4 hours ago

    Literature on doing things was much more practical. There was a culture of things being repairable. There was a pride in one’s work. Check this out if you don’t believe me: http://vintagemachinery.org/pubs/1617/30720.pdf

    The rise of the publicly traded corporation run by fiduciary duty has, in my opinion, squeezed out repairability, pride, and workmanship for marginal financial gains.

    I fear it won’t have been worth it in the long run. Shame short term incentives run the show.

  • Aurornis  4 hours ago

    Materials like this are infinitely more accessible to us than our grandparents generation. We all have devices in our pockets that can get to service manuals for our products in minutes. I can have common parts at my door overnight from Amazon with the press of a button on my phone. Every local hardware store carries replacement cartridges and gaskets for common faucet types.

    The reason our grandparents generation was good at fixing things is because they had to be. My grandparents lived through the Great Depression and worked difficult manual labor jobs. Contrary to the Reddit memes about how past generations lived like kings on trivial jobs, they worked extremely hard for everything and made it last.

    It’s really easy to get service manuals and do basic maintenance on simple things like faucets these days. I think the only reason it’s becoming common for people to not know how to do basic repairs or even find basic service information is that many people grew up never having to think about it. I still have adult friends who went from living with their parents to dorms to rented apartments who never learned the first thing about maintaining or fixing things around the house because they’ve never had to and they don’t want to - and they can keep going that way without really losing anything. It’s a choice at this point, but it works for them.

    • TeMPOraL  1 hour ago

      > Materials like this are infinitely more accessible to us than our grandparents generation. We all have devices in our pockets that can get to service manuals for our products in minutes.

      You mean minutes to find the right bootleg manual site with PDF for an adjacent product category, then some more minutes to realize you cannot safely (if at all) get at the manual, some more minutes to find a different bootleg PDF site, realize that it's actually not close enough to the model you have, and 1h later, finally find the good enough PDF... only to realize that "service manuals" today are often useless, and decide to repeat this process on YouTube?

      > I can have common parts at my door overnight from Amazon with the press of a button on my phone.

      Overnight is often too long. Also good luck finding the right parts and reconciling conflicting IDs between manuals, manufacturers and vendors.

      > Every local hardware store carries replacement cartridges and gaskets for common faucet types.

      Except when 90% of the faucets are uncommon, and support for them gets effectively discontinued after a few years.

      Now contrast that with our grandparents, who usually had repair manuals included with the product, most parts were universal (and probably on-hand or extractable from something else at home), and you could actually go to a local hardware store where the clerk would be able to figure out what parts you needed on the spot, and with luck had them in stock.

      I'm not claiming our grandparents had it better in general, but let's also not pretend there are no downsides to ongoing specialization and market competition. We may have more stuff, prettier stuff, better stuff[0], but nothing is ever compatible with anything, it's that way on purpose, and people are no longer supposed to repair anything themselves.

      --

      [0] - That's highly debatable in appliance space.

    • wredcoll  3 hours ago

      I mean, a generation or two ago, people frequently learned to do things like replace spark plugs and alternators and mess with oil changes.

      My generation learned how to plug computer components together and install operating systems and drivers.

      The reason people did that is because they (more or less) had to.

      The generation being born today will need neither of those skill sets.

      Cars, by and large, stay working for as long as people care to keep them and the things that do go wrong are, mostly, uneconomical to fix at home.

      It's likewise rare for, dunno, uninstalling a video game to accidentally delete some crucial OS dependency that causes the thing to need to be reformatted.

      It's hard to say what skills the next generation will learn, but I can guarantee there will be something that they need that their children will not. And that they'll complain about their children being useless for not knowing whatever that is.

      3 replies →

mns  43 minutes ago

Is this a US thing? We renovated the apartment in Germany in the last year and every faucet and piece of equipment that we got has a manual including a table with list of parts and technical drawings and how to take it apart. We also got from the original owner all the manuals of the existing things, and this helped a lot in finding the proper part to replace and fix the bathtub drain. None of this is old stuff, the building is 15 years old.