I am an egineer, and I like haing things fastened by screws that are NOT concealed! Why the heck are designers hiding them? Ever take a car dashdoard apart? Just finding the fasteners is a chore! I wish cars were like Captain Nemo’s submarine-exposed rivets and bolts everywhere! 
Have you ever seen engineering models and prototypes? It’s not the engineers who hide fasteners; it is industrial designers who attempt to insist that everything look is if it were squirted out of a tube and molded in place without a screw in evidence. My greatest pain was once dealing with an industrial designer who “designed” (i.e. drew up in pastels) a motorcycle with no place to put an engine. When we started trying to figure out how to locate an engine and transmission in this joke in some feasible fashion, he threw a fit about exposed fasteners, cables, lines, intakes, radiator, et cetera, and nothing could convince him that his beautiful, feature-free line drawings couldn’t be rendered without any physical connections or working hardware showing.
However, and somewhat in defense of designers, how often do you take apart your dashboard? Sure, it is a pain in the ass to do it (and I’ve taken apart the interior of cars enough to know how painful it can be) but it isn’t something you are going to be doing every day, and exposed screw heads and nuts are just additional snag points.
Stranger
Don’t get me started on dashboards! Man oh man, the guy who decided to bury the heater core of my LTD inside the dashboard, by the passenger side of the firewall, well, I’d like to smack him one. When the instructions for accessing the heater core (remember, this thing is up by the firewall, beneath the windshield!), start by having you get into the back seat to remove a pair of screws, somebody’s gone too far in hiding things. A $25 part; $700 in labor to replace, if you don’t feel up to removing the console, removing the front seats, removing the steering column bracket and lowering the column, removing the dashboard and splitting open the a/c evaporator case (what the friggin’ H is it doing inside the friggin’ evaporator case!?! huh? wanna tell me that!?!), to get at the stupid thing. Wait, what…you have to open up the a/c to get at the heater core? Well that means you have to go somewhere that can evacuate the refrigerant and recharge the system after the new heater core’s installed. Arrrgh!!
Now, I need to work on the plumbing around the house and I’m wondering why we seal all the pipes and wires and everything in the walls where you have to tear everything up to repair the smallest problem. So, not just my cars…I want my house to have “Captain Nemo’s submarine-exposed rivets and bolts everywhere!”, as ralph124c so eloquently put it. Heck, right now I want the plumbing and electric and everything running on the surface of the walls, with color coding and labels and maybe cut-off valves and switches like a real submarine would have.
And, Stranger, I’m sure you or *somebody *could design some nice non-snagging machine screw heads and such.
You don’t need to design anything new (besides, the slot holes are still needed for your driver) – just countersink them. You can cover the holes, if you don’t like the way that looks.
Another nifty dodge is to use concealed catches that can be spring by using a screwdriver or a putty knife. The front panels of my washer and dryer are held on this way, and it took me quite a while to figure out the first time I had to disassemble my washer to fix it. But now I know what to look for.
As for Industrial Designers, I’m still annoyed at the one that “slicked up” my device by putting snazzy grooves and raised ridges on it. For a factory device, in which all those sharp-cornered grooves would quickly and surely fill up with hard-to-exttract dirt, grease, and metal shavings. Grrrr.
Heck, just recess them well.
Changing my oil is a PITA on my Mazda3, because there is a plastic shield beneath the engine that has plenty of those plastic snaps and tabs in odd places, plus weird screws. Grrr.
Changing the oil on my Subarus has always been a piece of cake…because they place the oil pan up (where it is protected) but with direct access and plenty of swing room for a 17mm box wrench. Ditto for the oil filter, which is above a large plastic cover on the current car but accessible by a little swing away hatch held in place by three easily removed and replaced plastic quarter-turn fasteners. The current car is a little more difficult that those past, only because the suspension squats so low that I can just barely get the oil pan under there without putting it on stands, but it still takes me less time than it would just to drive to the oil change place (and I don’t have to worry about some Future President of America forgetting to torque down the oil pan plug).
As CalMeacham says, countersinking or counterboring screws and then covering them with a small plug works fine to prevent snagging (although not always possible or convenient). However, industrial designers like things to look as if there was no screw there, ever, and no way to get at it. When I beg an explanation I’m told that it’s all about “power” and “energy” and “flow”, these terms used in a context that makes only a very limited amount of sense to me.
If you look at equipment that was not touched by an ID–construction equipment, say, or jet aircraft cockpits–you’ll find plenty of exposed fasteners. But on something like an automobile, which has been engineered six ways from zero and then attacked by teams of beret-wearing aestheticists, you’ll never find that last screw and will end up just wrenching that bit of plastic away from whatever it is attached too, then reattach it with plenty of epoxy and plastic zip-ties.
Stranger
Reminds me of my old AMC Concord! MY car was great-you didn’t have to get underneath the car to change the oil-you could reach the drain plug from the top of the block. The filter was there too!
Why don’t engineers think this way?
See the [thread=394836]Do automotive engineers fix their own cars?[/thread] thread. Basically, designing and building a car is a lot more complicated than any one person has control over.
As for placing the drain plug and filter on the top, how would that work? That seems like a convenience for the owner but a major pain in the arse for design and manufacturing.
Stranger
I feel that any designer or engineer should have to change the oil, or the spark plugs or remove / replace the part he has a hand in designing 10 times in a row on a hot engine in a hot garage before he is paid or it is implemented in a production run. Include all forms of transportation, (glares at aircraft designers) building designers etc… Any special tool has to be provided with each machine, especially those that require routine maintenance like transportation conveyances …I’ll gladly pay an extra thousand for them if this is done first…
I agree with the OP. Man, is it ever lovely to work on my old VWs compared to newer cars. My ancient 1984 Toyota which is way newer than the VWs actually has some exposed screw heads on the dash, but still has enough hidden clips that I’ve managed to break. How did people take apart dashboards and headliners before the advent of the internet, anyhow?
I’ve heard stories about people who paid garage mechanics to tell them where the screws and clips for the dahboard are.
This infuriates me. This is PRECISELY the sort of information that ought to be in the damned owner’s manual. In any other piece of complex electronics or machinery the manual gives you such basic maintenance info, and required circuit diagrams. An automobile owner’s manual tells you how to adjust the seats and the cup holders.
From the above linked thread: The other thing you have to recognize is that no one engineer is responsible for the little details on any one system, much less the entire car. The coolant is one system, the fuel system is another, brakes, suspension, restraints, environmental control, transmission, engine, electrical, et cetera, and this is assuming that these systems are even designed in house–frequently, major components (sometimes the entire powertrain) are sourced externally. Hardly anyone builds actual axles, and suspension components are almosst always sourced from outside. So no engineer knows the entire car. On the other hand, while some techs might be more expert than others about particular systems, a mechanic generally has to be able to work on any part of the car, from the headlights to the tailpipe and everything in between.
There isn’t one engineer who oversees the design of a whole vehicle in all of its intricate details. For something like an automobile, there are literally thousands of engineers, analysts, technicians, industrial designers, managers, production schedulers, item buyers, meeting sitters, bullshitters, et cetera, all of whom have some kind of say regarding what goes into the car and how it goes there. “Blame the engineer,” is almost as obtuse and/or contumelious as, “First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers…” Given the opportunity and support, most (competent) engineers would like nothing better than to design a product that is robust, readily assembled, and easy to maintain. But this requires a culture and process which holds these parameters as valued goals, worthy of the extra effort required. Some companies do; indeed, the Japanese (and usually the Germans) are obsessive about this; on other hand, if British Leyland ever built a car that was easy to work on it was obscure, quickly retired from production, and entirely accidental in concept.
Stranger
In my experience, that sort of info is in the factory Maintenance Manual, and I always buy one for any cars I buy. It’s pricey, but worth it.
Yeah, but it doesn’t fig in your glove box, does it?
Stranger
Why no exposed screw head on your dashboard? You can thank Ralph Nader for a portion of this. In his book Unsafe at Any Speed he devoted a chapter to how a passenger got his scalp torn off by a screw head on the rear view mirror of IIRC a Corvair.
would you feel better if we just put a tag on the side of the dash like what my TV has on it No user serviceable parts inside?
On the cars I work on the manuals are on DVD as they would have to pretty much deforest Sweden to print them. The wiring diagrams run close to 300 pages.
Unsafe is a great read; if they adapted it into film it would show like Reefer Madness. It is hard to believe anyone survived a trip down to the store to get milk much less decades driving those deathtrap cars.
Stranger
They don’t need to be complete – they just need to have more information than they have, by far.
And c’mon – to me, like to many on this Board, “No User Serviceable Parts Inside” is a challenge and an invitation.
I was bitching about dashboards and heater cores before most of the people were born on this board. The last time I needed to replace a heater core I went to the junkyard to see where it was located, and then cut a hole in mine to remove it like an 8 track. I then sealed the plug I cut out with silicone in case I had to do it again.
And plumbing……. Why does the main shut off valve never fully shut off. Rrrrrrr. I just replaced a whole section of plastic piping with copper and I couldn’t solder the last section because the water kept dripping through it. I discovered that I can buy ball valves with ferrule fitting ends. I wish I had found these when I was sweating in the other valves. They’re more expensive but damn, they’re SOOOOOO easy to install and seal up without worrying about damaging the ball valve assembly with heat. I’m sweating every time I sweat one in. And Teflon tape is worthless.
…or a story cooked up by Uncle ralph Nader…remember his “expose” of the VW Beetle? The guy used a 30 year old report from Sweden, and his “research”. Ralph Nader was a great expert in producing data to fit his conclusions. I’d belive him about as far as I could throw him.