Twelve years ago I bought a new but cheap Cub Cadet riding mower. After using it for a couple months, I heard a loud BANG BANG BANG coming from the mower deck after accidently running over a couple rocks. WTH? I removed the deck and inspected it. The blades were hitting each other! How could this possibly be? Upon further inspection I discovered the blades were synchronized using a toothed belt and sprockets, and were timed to always be 90° out-of-phase. I suspect they did this to make the deck smaller. The idiot engineer who came up with this probably got a promotion for reducing weight and material costs.
Works great in theory. Until you hit something by accident, and the belt skips a few teeth.
I fixed it and continued mowing. And then it started happening more and more frequently, even when I didn’t hit something. I started replacing things in the deck (mandrels, tensioner, belts, etc.). Nothing seemed to work. I gave the POS away for free after a couple years.
When I went shopping for a new mower, the first thing I did was crawl under to to make 100% sure it didn’t have a !@#$% timing belt.
That’d be a great design, if they used a high-quality belt and sprockets that wouldn’t skip.
@John_DiFool , it’s not saving an inch or two of width, it’s saving a foot or so of length. If you don’t have an overlapping design, then you need to move one way back to accommodate the offset, or get an inch or two in the middle that doesn’t get mowed.
A well-designed mower deck should be able to survive an immediate stoppage of the blades, with the only damage to the blades themselves. (The blades are cheap and easy to replace and thus should be considered sacrificial when something goes wrong.) This stupid - and yes, cheap - design didn’t follow that philosophy.
Oh, and on that note, let me give you a tip: when buying new blade(s) for a mower, buy OEM. Do not purchase the “better” heavy duty / extra thick blades sold by after-market manufacturers. Why? Well, if you hit something, you want the energy to be absorbed by the blades, not the (much more expensive and more difficult to replace) mandrels. I learned this lesson the hard way on my new mower. I bought after-market heavy duty / extra thick blades thinking they would be “better.” And then I had some terrible vibration problems after a few months. I discovered the shafts in two out of the three mandrels were bent, most likely due to hitting things. Blades were O.K. If I had installed the thinner OEM blades, I am guessing the blades would have bent instead of the mandrels.
It’s even more fun aboard an airplane at altitude where the inside of the pot is pressurized more than the plane’s atmosphere so the foil lid is straining and bulging upwards. The yogurt from one of those can easily hit the ceiling or somebody across the aisle if you aim badly carefully.
Pro tip: Gently stab the foil top with one fork tine before you start trying to peel the lid. Works well for those tiny pots of half-and-half as well.
ETA: Great username / post combo. Maybe if you kicked fewer cows, the yogurt would not be seeking revenge.
It’s not even saving width, but length – the horizontal overlap in both illos is the same. You don’t want to save width in the first case; it means your cutting swath is narrower.
Our Kubota lawn tractor was very safe. Too safe, even. The seat must be sat in or the engine cuts off. Cool, I guess. But it is too sensitive. My gf is a lightweight, so if she leans to either side it shuts down. Then there’s the “awareness” button. Before backing up you have to push a button to prove you are aware of who/what is behind you.
It became too frustrating to use the thing, so I disabled all the safety features. Then, when Kubota was doing transmission work on it, they reconnected all the safety features. I have since found someone else to work on the tractor who is fine with my modifications.
This must vary between manufacturers, then. My drier has an “automatic dry miser” setting, which allows you to set a unique level of dryness. But it also includes a high-heat and low-heat setting which can be used in conjunction with the dryness level. So you can ask for very dry stuff using low heat, if you’re willing to wait that long for it to finish.
I’d imagine this is a liability issue for Kubota. Guessing they don’t really care what you do, but it must have safety features engaged when it leaves their shop. I don’t blame them. There are plenty of people who disable safety features and then sue if they have any injuries. Not saying you’d do this, but there are plenty who would.
I nominate the IKEA Tillreda induction cookplate. This is a typically elegant-looking, minimalist design. When you plug it in, it comes up locked, with a flashing light next to a lock icon.
I bought one, and when it arrived, plugged it in and read that I had to unlock it first. But touching or touching and holding the lock icon next to the flashing light did nothing! After several attempts, I called IKEA, who basically said “That’s weird” and that they would send me another unit, no need to return the first one.
The second arrived–same thing. At this point I said “This can’t be right”, Googled, and found a video. It turns out there’s a SECOND lock symbol on the panel, inches from the one by the flashing light. Why they would have two icons like this is beyond me.
Yes, I now have two units. I considered returning one of them but that felt worse than keeping both in terms of abusing IKEA. I knew they would have no way to inject the extra one back into inventory…
I’d upload pictures but every time I try, it uploads and then says “Sorry, an error has occurred”. Might be a Firefox vs. Chrome thing.
In a similar vein I bought a string trimmer that has a button on the side to push in before you can squeeze the trigger to start trimming. It is on the left side only and handy to use a thumb on for right-handed use, not so much for left-handed. The handle is in two halves held together with a pair regular ol’ phillips head screws so a buttonectomy is on my to-do list.
So the printed instructions that you read did not describe (or show) how to do that, just that it needed doing?
Sounds like the product design is fine; it’s teh instruction manual design that sucked.
As for the two buttons / touchpoints, that’s all about making it more kid-proof. And more goof-proof = accidental-touch-proof.
I’d not be surprised to see that kind of feature start appearing on all stoves/ranges. I wouldn’t welcome that; not at all. But I wouldn’t be surprised by it.
“more kid-proof” – it’s induction. It won’t do anything unless they ALSO put an induction-ready pan on it. I suppose next we’ll need 2FA to turn it on. Not saying you’re wrong, just that it seems like overkill. Also, I’d suggest that any kid who is experimenting is as likely to press (and hold!) the real unlock as the apparent one next to the flashing light.
The printed instructions just say to press the lock button. There’s also a diagram that shows SOME of the control panel. The fact that the icons are the same doesn’t help.
Why does every manufacturer of microwave ovens find it necessary to re-invent the controls? One lovely example at a friend’s house requires that you open the door to access the settings, set the time by incrementing in (IIRC) 10-second intervals from zero, then close the door and hit start. When it’s done, it chirps an inane melody.
I don’t mind this, when the controls are an improvement. Like, I’ve seen a few (I can’t remember the brand) where if you close the door and press a number button, it immediately starts going for that number of minutes, and pressing the “start” button when there’s either no time on the timer, or while it’s already running, adds 30 seconds. Aside from the (tiny) learning curve, this is great: It lets you hit any of the most-commonly-used times in only one or two button presses (and honestly, it’s very rare that you need more than 30 second precision in microwaving times). Making it easier to use is a good justification for changing the interface.
But incrementing in 10-second intervals? That’s just plain hostile. What, did they not have room to put a numpad on there?
I agree there’s lots of ways to improve control panels. But improvement isn’t always the measure of merit they’re aiming for.
The Chinese are super-adept at least-cost design. Every bit of physical hardware they can leave off saves big money. My current Whirlpool-branded but totally made in China microwave is about 7 years old and has 30 (!) slightly pressure sensitive touch-control buttons. Yep, 30. Surprised me too but I just counted them.
They’d love to drive that number down to one or two. In fact it’s got a very inconvenient-to-use settings menu with layers of settings accessed about like you’d set a digital wristwatch. Push X repeatedly until [some adjustable setting] is prompted, then push Y repeatedly to scroll through the [various choices], stopping on your desired one, then wait a bit for your selection to “take” as signaled by altered blinking. Lather rinse repeat for each setting. Uggh!.
They would totally reduce the panel to just those two buttons and put everything, absolutely everything, somewhere in that menu if they thought the consumers would stand for it. But to their credit they realize about 90% of the units with that design that they’d sell would be returned as “defective” when what was really defective was the end-user’s ability to learn to use it, and/or their willingness to bother.
How could this possibly be? Upon further inspection I discovered the blades were synchronized using a toothed belt and sprockets, and were timed to always be 90° out-of-phase. I suspect they did this to make the deck smaller. The idiot engineer who came up with this probably got a promotion for reducing weight and material costs.
