My dad is restoring a 1969 MG Midget. The right turn signal stopped working. Using nothing more than a voltmeter, I found a disconnected wire and a short to the frame.
I replaced the entire length of wire that was failing with $3 worth of wire, solder, and heat shrink tubing.
The lesson here is repairability and simplicity.
We’re constantly lectured to be “environmentally aware” by companies that no longer ensure their products will last a lifetime. There is 0 reason a modern phone couldn’t be used for the rest of your life. My Brother printer is nearing 12 years and is still on the same damn print cartridge. My Neato robotics vacuum has had countless parts replaced and is about the same age.
If you truly want to be a good steward of the earth, stop demanding/consuming latest and greatest, endless product and UI refreshes, and instead demand 30+ years out of a product (with small repairs).
As if large corporations base their business strategy on ethically/environmentally-minded consumer demands. At most they will propagandize or triangulate their engineering approach slightly - just enough for the media cycle to turn to some other issue. Gotta make those quarterly profits stand out!
Also - if you haven't changed a printer cartridge in 12 years than you are printing very little (which is fine, but it's not a typical use-case by which to evaluate longevity).
Other than that, definitely agree :-)
This is the reason I chose GNU/Linux phone Librem 5.
>There is 0 reason a modern phone couldn’t be used for the rest of your life.
At some point we must reach peak tech. In the Elite: Dangerous universe, there are quite a few ships you can use, but the majority of them are designs that are hundreds of years old. They are modular spaceships, of course, so they have received upgraded technology as time has gone on, but there are some quirky little ships flying around.
Compared to phones though, we'd need to get carriers to guarantee their old networks stay functional so old cellular radios will still function. Maybe when tech advances enough we CAN have a modular phone it will be less of a concern.
Over a 200,000 mile design lifetime, a modern car is way more reliable and way less work to repair than your MG Midget (by virtue of not breaking as often in the first place). Yes, today’s cars aren’t designed to be collector items that will sit and rot in a barn not being driven and get easily restored by amateurs in 50 years, but why should they be?
To do some wiring that'll be bulletproof and last:
1. get wiring rated for under-the-hood heat (the wiring sold at auto parts stores is no good for that)
2. get crimp-on connectors
3. cut the plastic off the crimp-ons
4. put heat shrink tubing on the wire, well away from the end
5. crimp the connector on
6. solder the crimp joint using a thermostat controlled soldering iron
7. move the heat shrink tubing over the joint, and heat it with a bic cigarette lighter to shrink it on
8. voila!
P.S. Crimped connections don't last. After about a year, they'll work loose a bit from vibration, and corrosion will creep in, and you'll get a loose connection that is very frustrating to find. Soldering it prevents that from happening.
But the point being made about repairability (and simplicity) seems good.
I want to see EVs/plug-in hybrids with similar levels of simplicity wherever possible. Virtually all vehicles in the US nowadays are completely overloaded with unnecessary sensors/electronics that are ripe for failure.
You're right about not letting the solder wick up past the connector. But that's not an issue if the wire is properly supported with a clamp.
My experience with crimps is electrical gremlins, with soldered crimps, no trouble at all.
OEM crimps also come with a molded housing designed to keep out moisture (and corrosion) and provide mechanical support for the joint. The crimp-on connectors at the auto parts store are vastly inferior.
Modern cars are often more work to repair. They're not particularly modular, and to the extent that they are, they often bury one module under several layers of others. It requires you to disconnect and move working parts and assemblies to uncover the broken one.
Modern cars also use replaceable assemblies to speed up repairs, but it also means that even for small problems like a damaged wire in a harness, you often have to rip out the entire system it is "inside" of and replace it completely. The manufacturer has tons of ways of requiring you to "over replace" parts like this on a modern vehicle.
> but why should they be?
That's not an excuse to make them as disposable as they've become. You can't use "the climate" to blindly turn this into a black and white issue.
That's called a crimping tool. They grow on trees. They're designed to achieve the correct amount of force to make a gas tight, permanent connection without destroying the contacts. All you need to do is select the correct connectors for the wire size you're dealing with and squeeze it.
I watched a professional cable installer once crimp the coax F connectors on. I got the manufacturer and model number of it. It's from an outfit that only sold to professionals, and cost about $200. Since I was going to pull all the coax myself in my house, it was worth the money and I haven't had trouble with the results. The consumer grade crimping tools from the hardware store are terrible.
It's the same story with wirewrap tools.
Not if you drive it very much/for very long. See this graph [1] (from this article [2]) for instance. Note that they're evenly diving 173,151 miles across the 13 "years" (and don't ask me why they decided to make the x-axis "years").
And that's with a modern fuel efficient car, not some ancient one.
[1] https://graphics.reuters.com/ELECTRIC-VEHICLES/EMISSIONS/rlg...
[2] https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/when-d...
I also wonder about the original humvee, which I think was designed to be "user" serviced in the field.
Take a look at these:
https://www.amazon.com/Qibaok-Connectors-Insulated-Electrica...
Crimp a wire in it. Look at it from the connector side. You'll see the bare conductor inside the connector. That's where the moisture gets in. Heat shrink tubing won't shrink enough to cover that. Wicking solder into it will seal it against moisture and corrosion.
I don't understand how with those three things, you are able to renew the blinker service subscription.
The disposability has to be factored into the environmental impact.
A phone, yes. A 'modern' phone conforming to our 'modern' expectations, no.
It would have to be significantly larger, less performant, and have a worse screen for it to last even ten years.
To make it repairable you'd have to make sure individual chips and capacitors are swappable, which costs ~2x power draw compared to a SOC.
I installed them on an old Marantz amp, which is also connected to my (new) TV. As he visited me, he couldn't believe the incredible sound coming from his own speakers. My friends are shocked by it too, thinking I'm some audio buff that invested 20K.
My dad regretted the gift, went to buy the same amp yet with new speakers. Various sets of it, and failed to come close to the ancient set.
I'm not sure what exactly was innovated in 35 years of audio, but my guess would be costs, not quality.
We built a set of these: https://projectgallery.parts-express.com/speaker-projects/zd... which are a throwback to the old HiFi sets of the 70s-80s. I _really_ like the reference sound of this set. The only thing they don't really do is the sub-sonic punch that action movies require, but that's probably ok for apartment living with neighbors.
Never had trouble with the completed soldered/crimped connections for decades. I use them in my car. With crimp-only, it's only a matter of time till I get erratic connects. It's particularly irritating with the stereo, as the speakers go in and out or suffer the crackling with a loose connection.
Interestingly, the speaker cable connections in the house are a nuisance with bad connections. Spring loaded connectors, even banana plugs, are just plain unreliable. Solder finally fixed them for good. (I'll solder on connectors, and then use a terminal strip.)
For the car, I also use rather expensive high grade stranded wire. I've been very happy with the results - the extra money pays off in time saved not having to repair them.
Solder will fill any voids in your contact, causing the bond to break as your entire assembly heats and cools.
Solder will also wick up the strands, making the resultant wire brittle.
Moisture ingress can be solved with the correct wrapping. After all, the extruded PVC insulation on the wire in the first place shrunk to fit it, right?
And I'm quite sensitive to acoustics. In a lot of modern "minimalist" homes I'm upset by the sound bouncing around endlessly, sometimes it's so bad I can barely hear conversations.
https://www.amazon.com/JRready-Connector-Waterproof-Electric...
The cheaper knock offs can work well, too.
Most MGs have been in the landfill for decades. It wouldn't be a surprise if this car had been sitting on blocks in a garage for decades. It's disingenuous to imply this car is still running for any reason other than because it has an owner that both wants to restore it and has the ability to do so.
I suspect once its restored there's a fair chance that it'll park in a proper garage and be driven a couple of times a month on nice days during summer until the days start cooling off and it gets stored for winter.
My current car, which cannot be jumpstarted since it has a 48v battery for ignition and driving, and has dash-breaking OTA updates requiring a visit to the dealer or a proprietary 1200 usd software, and can be easy stolen by unplugging a headlight and feeding data into the common bus, would disagree.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
Driving emissions numbers I remember off the top of my head are Swedish averages, around 2.5 tonnes CO2e per year (15000 km/year). This is averages for the Swedish car fleet, which tend to be smaller models and more modern than many countries.
So: sure, production emissions are a big factor, but driving the car can easily win the efficiency savings back in a fraction of the car’s lifetime.
I have electronic equipment in nearly continuous use for 40 years. Daily heat/cool cycling. No solder breaks in it.
It seems that this debate is an old one:
https://www.linkedin.com/advice/0/what-pros-cons-soldering-v...
https://blog.peigenesis.com/soldering-vs-crimping-advantages...
https://www.sig4cai.com/soldering-or-crimping-which-is-bette...
P.S. I'm pretty good with soldering, since I've done it professionally, so the disadvantages of a poorly soldered joint don't apply.
My crimped and soldered ones work fine, though, and cost basically nothing.
Even with replaceable batteries, there's still https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law
It would be nice if we had mobile and desktop OSes that didn't get increasingly bloated with time, slowed down, were abandoned by the vendors and were messy in plethora of other ways.
My Android phone doesn't get security updates by the manufacturer, just a few years after the release, which is horrible in the case of RCEs (like the WebP one). I can't install a newer version or a custom ROM because of a locked down bootloader (without exploits) and even then drivers are a big issue. Some of my older hardware wouldn't even be compatible with desktop OSes like Windows 11 because of the whole TPM debacle.
Other than that, digging up my old Android phone with Android 2.1 on it, or maybe my old E8400 CPU from 2008 would yield really bad experience in both cases. Could devices from over a decade ago be viable choices, if the software didn't get exponentially more wasteful? Perhaps, but that's not the reality that we live in, neither for desktop PCs, nor phones.
They aren't cheap, but they are also some of the best headphones I've ever personally used. I don't make any claims of being an "audiophile" or whatever, but they're like the headphone equivalent of using my Kali LP-6 monitors.
I've studied this a little since it effects my work, but I don't claim to be an EE. Sadly, I'm not finding any definitive authorities on the subject with a quick googling, though all the top hits tend to agree with the sentiment of not soldering crimped connections.
This was a short article that I ran across, dealing with the topic. As usual, the comments on hackaday are all over the place, but I still find them useful.
https://hackaday.com/2017/02/09/good-in-a-pinch-the-physics-...
Interestingly, I thought nasa banned soldering crimped connections, but as far as I can tell, rereading this doc now with a quick skim for the string crimp, they only ban crimping tinned connections.
https://s3vi.ndc.nasa.gov/ssri-kb/static/resources/nasa-std-...
On the other hand I also know people who drive a multiple of that.
