In reply to Graham's point from some way up, my experience of lean manufacturing is that inability to repair is a byproduct rather than an aim. In practice, any bit of technology you can think of is so cheap now because of, say, clip together casing that it is cheaper to buy five of them and throw them away over a 10 year period as it was (say) 20 years ago to buy one that was kept going for 10 years through repair. And in any case developments in technology tend to mean that consumers press for the new one after two years anyway.


Personally I disagree with this view (partly for environmental reasons), and I am delighted that I have always worked in industries where products are designed to be kept going. Interesting that someone above mentions the rail industry, it would stagger visitors to my previous employer when I proudly showed them the 50 year old products on the shelf in our repair cell, which we would repair if we possibly could. "Surely that's bad for business, don't you want to sell them new ones?" they would say. No, what we wanted to sell was reliability and service. It's horses for courses.


It does wind me up when white goods shops try to sell extended warranties by saying "of course you can't expect these to last as long as they used to". I have been known to ask them why in that case they are selling goods they know to be shoddy!


Anyway, just finishing refurbishing four electric guitars as a favour for my local school, that was fun   When will somebody invent a really good refurbishing coating for connectors? But I suppose I answered that question at the start of this piece!

In reply to Graham's point from some way up, my experience of lean manufacturing is that inability to repair is a byproduct rather than an aim. In practice, any bit of technology you can think of is so cheap now because of, say, clip together casing that it is cheaper to buy five of them and throw them away over a 10 year period as it was (say) 20 years ago to buy one that was kept going for 10 years through repair. And in any case developments in technology tend to mean that consumers press for the new one after two years anyway.


Personally I disagree with this view (partly for environmental reasons), and I am delighted that I have always worked in industries where products are designed to be kept going. Interesting that someone above mentions the rail industry, it would stagger visitors to my previous employer when I proudly showed them the 50 year old products on the shelf in our repair cell, which we would repair if we possibly could. "Surely that's bad for business, don't you want to sell them new ones?" they would say. No, what we wanted to sell was reliability and service. It's horses for courses.


It does wind me up when white goods shops try to sell extended warranties by saying "of course you can't expect these to last as long as they used to". I have been known to ask them why in that case they are selling goods they know to be shoddy!


Anyway, just finishing refurbishing four electric guitars as a favour for my local school, that was fun   When will somebody invent a really good refurbishing coating for connectors? But I suppose I answered that question at the start of this piece!