Hello Rod,

 CB>> "Redesigning" or whatever you want to call it is something I
 CB>> avoid whenever possible - but occasionally it can't be helped.

 RG> How often would "occasionally" be?   my guess - less than 0.01% of
 RG> all your repairs?

It varies, but it's a bit higher than that.. at a guess, somewhere
between 2% and 4%.  Sometimes I don't see one for a month, sometimes
I get three in one day...

 BL>>>> all you guys have to do is fix something that an engineer
 BL>>>> designed right,

 RG>>> That's the theory, but surely you are not implying that
 RG>>> everything designed by an engineer is flawless or couldn't be
 RG>>> improved upon?

 CB>> It's not usually the engineer's oversight or fault - the real
 CB>> culprits in "bad design" cases are the accountants and other
 CB>> financial people, looking to cut the costs.  Save $1 in parts on
 CB>> a radio that sells a million, and that bumps the company's profit
 CB>> from that radio up by $1,000,000...

 RG> Frankly, I feel this is wank...   sure, the accountants, etc could ask
 RG> (even demand) that an engineer trim $1.00 off the production costs,
 RG> but I don't believe for a minute that any of them could have the force
 RG> to make the engineer do so, well, not unless the engineer in question
 RG> is so incompetent that he'd fear losing his/her job over it.

My guess is that they hire a very competent and qualified engineer
type person, pay him more than the other engineers (say $200K a year
for a big company) - with his main objective being to shave a few
cents here and a few cents there.  The other techs and engineers
would be on a level below him, and as such they wouldn't have the
final say.

Save 20 cents on a million selling article and the company has
broke even on the head engineer's wages - and I'd expect that
he'd be able to save them a bit more than that.

Of course, this is only my hypothetical idea - I've never been
involved with big time manafacture.  After seeing a lot of faults
that should have never happened in the first place (one last week
was a radio being flogged as "heavy duty" to the 4WD crowd failing
due to a cracked board - 6" x 8" approx - that is only held in by
four screws.. a couple or three more screw points and it wouldn't
have happened, and would have cost the manafacturer 10 cents at
most) I can only assume things are done that way.

Bob L would be the one to ask :)

 CB>> If you've done zillions of repairs and never had to do this, then

 RG> As per my msg to Bob, I was over generalising.

I realise that...

 CB>> the world of VCR's and camcorders is a lot more standardised than
 CB>> the radio game... haven't you ever struck a problem where both
 CB>> "brand X" TV and "brand Y" VCR both work
fine on their own, (and
 CB>> fine with "brand A" or brand Z") but not with each other?

 RG> Only two such cases come to mind....

Only two?  Lucky, lucky you...

 RG> a very common one being VCR's designed for NTSC playback won't
 RG> work on all TV's,

I presume this only happens when playing NTSC material - or does
it happen when playing regular PAL tapes too?

 RG> and the other case was a classic fuckup...  one design of an
 RG> NEC VCR refused to show a stable picture on NEC TV's. (they
 RG> were fine with other manufacturers sets though) .

Now that sounds more like the problems I get here :-)

 RG> The thing about VCR's is that they are so crappy and unstable
 RG> that its a bloody miracle they work at all.

Yair - a lot of delicate looking mechanicals in there.. things
like that I rarely see.  The only "moving parts" on some of the
later stuff I see here are the press switches behind the membrane
layer on the front panel - and the trimmer presets inside.
Even things like pots for volume etc are getting rarer... replaced
by CPU controlled attenuator IC's.

 RG>>> The only service techs that I've known that have
 RG>>> tried to fix a fault be redesigning the circuit have been failed
 RG>>> engineers...

 CB>> OK, what would you do in either of these (real life) senarios?

 RG> I'd try to redesign them so they work...

Only the first time - the second and subsequent times one knows
exactly what to attack to get it working, much the same as normal
repairs.

 RG> I'm a failed engineer though. ;-)

Same here - if I had to take a job designing, as opposed to
repairing things electronic, I'd be on the dole within a week...

Regards,
Chris.

--- GoldED