Electrical Devices: Simple is Best

I cannot believe how two months rolled by since my last post, but the muggy summer, a weekly blog for my employer, and lots of projects simply got in the way of blogging here. That said, the tempo may pick up at Tractorpunk with better weather and the transition to Fall work.

We had lightning strike very close to the house, destroying an over-engineered, gadget-laden Samsung French Door refrigerator that no service tech would work on. That also goes for LG appliances around here. The reason? Complexity and expensive parts.  So after an insurance claim out went the fancy machine and in went a Maytag top-freezer with nothing fancier than an ice-maker. For cool water? Keep the pitcher filled we used when we were filtering water for a month. The Maytag is highly rated and US built, from their plant in Iowa. I'm not the "buy American" sort but when a US-made item is superior and at a good price, that's my preference.  The new "icebox" (a term I love) has so far provided sterling service and if (when) the ice maker breaks, replacements for a DIY fix can be had for $50.

I'm not quite ready to go back to my parents' defrost-twice-a-year Frigidaire, a unit they got in the heady days right after WWII ended, and dad came back from the Navy to a Postwar boom and his and mom's first home. They kept that icebox for nearly 30  years. For those who don't recall Postwar fridges, check Denis Byrne's The Antique Refrigerator site. The claim there is that these old units are getting trendy again. One reloader in my acquaintance uses one to store gunpowder (it's not plugged in).

We will see if defrosting a fridge gets trendy again. I rather doubt that.

Speaking of reloading, recently another over-engineered device, my electronic scale, began to show "drift": the powder-charges shown were varying to unsafe levels, even after the scale had warmed up. I found myself checking every load with a balance-beam scale of the sort used for decades.  Now that the manufacturer is going to fix or replace my electronic scale under warranty, I plan to sell it and keep doing things the old-fashioned way. It is just as fast, though I ordered a set of "check weights" to be sure my mechanical scale always gets properly zeroed and calibrated when I load ammo.

I used the balance-beam scale recently to reload a batch of .38 special. It was just as fast as the electric. 

These two very different, and differently priced, devices taught me an important lesson about unneeded complexity in the equipment we use. This blog began with a post about the virtues of simple farm tractors. I have been rightly accused by being a throwback, not wanting power locks or windows on my cars; I "got off easy" for $240 having the door-lock actuator in the driver's side door of my Honda C-RV replaced. That sounds fair, until you consider that I can replace the door lock on my '74 Buick project car for a quarter that price and do the work myself.

Then consider that the Honda has three other lock actuators.

Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.