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A recent story on the BBC posed a question to its readers. If it ain't broke: You share your oldest working gadgets. Folks wrote in with their favorite, longest-lasting devices.
Besides being curious about the latest tech devices and advancements, I've noticed our community also seems to have a number of thrifty folk who thrive on getting the most out of their gadgets.
I'll count myself among those in that category. I'll start with a Sharp EL-510S solar-powered, scientific calculator from the early 1980s. I also have a JVC stereo receiver from the mid 1980s that is still going strong. The computer I am currently using is a Dell Latitude Core 2 Duo from about 2009.
So how well has your stuff held up? What was been your best acquisition for long-term durability?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday June 09 2020, @11:28PM (4 children)
I think my old Apple II still works, though I haven't turned it on in perhaps a decade.
And there's a 1959 car in my garage. First year of the new model, in which Ford upgraded the engine from the old flathead to ... overhead valves, woohoo! Increased the horsepower from 33 to 39, which increased the top speed from 70 mph to 80 mph. Scary, huh?
Oh yeah, I have a few old calculators, and digital wristwatches.
One thing about such old equipment is the myriad ways it breaks. Several keys have broken off the Apple II keyboard. Seems the plastic used on the stalks of the keys turns brittle. inside, the chips that fit into sockets, that connection has not stayed connected. Got to where I didn't dare run anything that used the Applesoft BASIC in the ROM.
The face of the calculator was glued on, and the glue gave out after a quarter century. Just fell apart one day. Well, that's one thing I've learned through years. If you want something to stay attached, screw it, don't just glue it.
The old car has similar issues. Seems 50+ years, with seasonal temperature changes, makes spade terminal connections loosen up. When those connections are loose, they can act like a resistor. They will still carry electricity, so everything can seem okay when it's not. Resistance turns electricity into heat. The resistance in those loose connections can generate so much heat that the wire insulation will burn off. Spade terminals aren't the only kind of wire connection that can get loose. There are also rivets that were used to affix components, such as switches, to circuit boards. Right now, if I use the headlights, they work, but the dash around the headlight switch gets hot.
Antique cars need all kinds of maintenance to deal with all the deterioration. Gas tank rusted through and started leaking, the rubber bushings in the suspension grew rock hard, and shattered, the rubber in the engine mounts also hardened and made the car even noisier, the carburetor developed a huge air leak from sideways thrust from a rotating rod gradually widening the hole that held it in place, a flexible tube in the brake line gradually absorbed brake fluid in the walls until it swelled shut like a blocked artery, plastic knobs on the window cranks and controls have turned brittle, and so on. For the brake line, I learned that the kind of fitting the hose used is no longer made. Had to improvise, by lopping the tip off a modern fitting to make it like the original. Another issue was the pistons in the brake calipers. They were coated with what's known as "hard" chrome, to prevent corrosion, and the chrome had worn through, the pistons had started to rust, and made the brakes stick. An easy check to see which brakes are sticking is, after driving for a mile, stop and touch the lug nuts. Whichever ones are warm or hot to the touch, that brake is sticking. I thought to try to get the pistons re-chromed, but it seems there are no facilities left that can apply hard chrome. Took me a while to learn of a much better solution: just use stainless steel pistons, which are available in exactly the correct size. Oh. Yet another problem with the brake system was that the cylinders had also corroded. It's no mere tuneup job to keep an old car running. After 50 years, basically half the metal and every rubber and plastic part is suspect.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 10 2020, @03:04AM (3 children)
Can recommend ethanol free - hindsight, I know.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Wednesday June 10 2020, @06:46PM (2 children)
Actually, the ethanol is good for absorbing any water that gets in the tank. Though it does make sealing a leaky fuel system harder. Gasoline is a powerful solvent, great for cleaning up greasy messes, but that property also makes it astonishingly difficult to contain. Ethanol makes it even worse. Polyester? Forget it. Gasoline will degrade that in about 3 months. Epoxy? Nope, can't take it either. A typical plastic food container won't even last a week.
To tests things, I used a plastic jar of the sort that's used for peanuts. Coated the inside with polyester. After 3 days, the polyester was still good. But the plastic lid, which I hadn't coated because I didn't think it needed a coating since it wasn't in contact, had sagged in the middle. Just the fumes were enough to do that. The plastic or coating has to be designed to handle the stuff. Materials that can withstand gasoline and gasohol, such as MEK, are all kinds of dangerous and toxic themselves. Anyway, I learned the hard way that I didn't run the test long enough to find out that the polyester can't take it either.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday June 10 2020, @08:35PM (1 child)
I bought a '99 Craigslist special for cheap, and one of the things it came with was a bad seal on the gas filler flex hose - bad because there's corrosion under the clamp - this leads the fuel to occasionally make small puddles below that junction, and that whole area has become rusty... not the kind of thing I would expect from pure dead dino fuel, but add some ethanol...
What's remarkable is the number of years and 10s of thousands of miles that such a condition can persist without becoming serious.
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Thursday June 11 2020, @06:36PM
Lucky you didn't end up with an engine fire! If that gas had reached the exhaust manifold, that's what you would have had.
I've experienced an engine fire. Was driving along, headed to class, and I heard this funny crackling pop, then a sizzling noise. Smelled gasoline. 2 seconds later, there's black smoke pouring out from under my hood. I threw the car into neutral, shut the engine off, braked to a stop, leaped out and ran around to the hood release (it was at the front of the hood), and it was already too late. Flames were shooting out through the grill.
I ran back to the driver's seat, and put the car in 1st gear so it wouldn't roll away. That turned out to be a mistake. Should have used the emergency brake. When the fire reached the wiring around the starter, it burned in such a way that the starter engaged and cranked the engine. And since it was in gear, the car started moving. I jumped back in long enough to disengage the transmission.
The one bit of good fortune is that this happened only 3 blocks from the fire department. They got there quick, and put the fire out before it got out of the engine bay and and burned the rest of the car. The heart of the engine suffered no damage, but pretty much everything else under the hood was lost. The carburetor (yeah, this happened a while ago), distributor, and battery had melted into slag, and the belt and all the hoses and wiring had burnt up.
After a car fire, a normal person would probably give up on the car and send it to the junkyard. Not my father. I knew he would insist on salvaging it. And so, mistake number two was letting them call a wrecker. If the police could be persuaded to let the car sit for a day (not likely, but you can at least ask), it would have been much better to simply push the car onto the shoulder. We came back for it the next day and towed it away ourselves. First, though, we had to pay those tow truck bandits $40 to get the car out of their holding pen. Of course the way they carelessly towed did a little additional minor damage. But then, in many cities parking enforcement with expensive tows is an all too common racket, and a mean one at that, kicking people when they're already down. Real hard to avoid that screw job with the situation we were in.