Comment by ssl-3
17 hours ago
Parts wear out. Things break. That's normal.
The rose-tinted era of things being made to last never really happened. For each of the old survivor washing mashines, refrigerators, vacuum cleaners, and Casiotron wrist watches that are still out there doing good work, countless thousands of others were recycled or landfilled because it was better to buy something different than to fix the old one.
It was never cheap to pay someone to work on stuff. The costs of hiring professional labor and the overhead associated with that labor (for service techs, that means things like vehicles, buildings, inventory, tools, training, insurance, book keeping, and covering next week's paycheck even if this week was slow) have always been expensive.
Parts have always been relatively expensive, too. Availability of parts has always been somewhat hit-or-miss.
It seems like an unpopular opinion, but I don't think it came to this. Instead, I think that it started off this way, and that it simply remains this way today.
So, sure: $150 for a new widget? Not so bad. Maybe a pro could get it done in a few hours (maybe they can even get two of them done in one workday!), while perhaps it will take you a day or two to work through R&Ring this thing on your own for the first time.
Whether the total investment (including time) is worth it to you is a personal decision, but that kind of decision-making is also not new. :)
Slightly off-topic but this is why 3D printing becoming popular is a boon to the repair industry. Yeah, the part might be bad, but instead of paying a ridiculous sum for a piece of plastic, you can take the old one, model it, and make yourself a compatible one within a day. Of course, this requires modelling skills and the ability to be able to disassemble the machine but so does any other kind of repair work and at least you are no longer reliant on the manufacturer.
Plastic gears in a washing machine just seems stupid, though. That's probably on me for buying a cheap one, but the repair guy said it's extremely common now, even in nicer models
Metal gears also break and wear out. All materials have finite strength and endurance.
It's up to the folks doing the engineering to make sure that the gears last long enough.
After all, it doesn't do anyone any good at all if the gearbox (whatever it consists of) still works after while the rest of the machine has failed.
And plenty of plastic gearboxes exist in the world. We just don't usually hear much about the ones that end up working Just Fine.
I have a 20+ year old cordless drill that I've beaten the snot out of. As cordless drills go, it offers a mountain of torque. I used it to roll new threads into long, extruded holes that were stamped into radiator supports of new Chevy Impala cop cars. Where my co-workers' drills would just flatly give up and they'd use ratchets instead, this drill would finish the job without a complaint. It did take two hands to hang onto the thing when doing this job and it was not kind to the operator even then, but it accomplished the work.
The plastic gears inside are still fine. The plastic drill body is also holding up very well. Again, we don't usually hear much about the plastic parts that outlive the rest of the machine, but those parts have been great.
In this particular case the nicad batteries for it became NLA, and the ones that came with it (and their replacements) are dead AF, so it has no value to me at this point. I really should take it apart, keep whatever bits are interesting to me and recycle the rest of it.
Due to the lack of new batteries, my world of power tools has moved on. This drill is not doing anyone any good how it is -- despite the astoundingly-good plastic gearset still being (as far as I can tell; ran when parked) just fine.
If it had metal gears instead and those also lasted longer than the machine's lifecycle, then that added expense wouldn't have been an advantage at all.
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Anyway, I aim to be helpful instead of deconstructive here.
If gearboxes are a weak link in washing machines, then it is possible to eliminate them. There are washing machines that don't have gearboxes at all; these are usually front-loaders that only spin-a-ma-thing and that don't really do much in the way of reciprocating motion, but they exist.
Some of them are very stout indeed, though they may appear to be fairly featureless.
Dexter may be at the high end, here, with a belt-driven drum and a VFD-supplied motor; they're made in Iowa. Many places like laundromats and fire stations love these machines for their durability and repairability. Dexter is certainly proud of them; they are not cheap. I once read about their in-house factory testing: IIRC, they take a machine off the line, weld a weight onto the side of the drum that is 40% of the mass that the machine is supposed to handle, and let it run at its highest speed for for 1000 continuous hours. If it fails, they consider it to be a problem that needs to be corrected upstream. It's a pretty good test, I think.
Whirlpool has similarly-shaped mechanisms at a fraction of the cost; many of those are made in Ohio. That's not necessarily an unsafe bet. (I did have a long chat with one of their process guys about things like air-conditioned final assembly areas and conformal coatings once. I've also cleaned up some corrosion on the VFD board's contacts and installed some dielectric grease on a machine that was built in that same plant, but it was built years before this conversation happened.)
Speed Queen is a common consumer favorite. They're still independent, AFAIK. (I've never been inside of a Speed Queen machine or hung out in their factories, so my commentary here is limited. The one I once had in my laundry room was completely trouble-free.)