Of course they were!
And finished. There were no rough edges to be found. They weren't just stamped out of sheet metal.
Who said they were?
Yes - precision extruded, with far more accurate profiles and tolerances than today's extruded or moulded plastic gears.
They had to be: erratic gear friction would translate directly to erratic time-keeping.
Who said it was?
Grumpy old men, for instance, are not particularly good.
Did you even read my post? I pointed out that the beautifully made old clocks were less accurate (bad), but the gear-trains were beautiful (good).
The idiom "seeing through rose tinted glasses" means being in denial, being unable to even see the existence of anything negative - exactly the opposite of what I wrote, as I pointed out both good and bad qualities of the newer clocks.
Have a nice (neutral-tinted, I suggest smoke-grey) day!
-Gnobuddy
Not assumptions, Assume. It's a pun.
Assume - ***-U-Me.
Also - surely an *** (donkey) does not need to be asterisked out?
My alarm clock has no moving parts, it's software on my phone. No gears to strip and the clock is set by the network so it's always right.
I will never buy anything made by Chrysler. They make complete junk IMHO. There is a reason why so many people drive one. Chrysler will finance a car to people with terrible credit. Who cares that they rust out and fall apart much faster than their competition, right? I would rather drive a Lada!
I will never buy anything made by Chrysler. They make complete junk IMHO. There is a reason why so many people drive one. Chrysler will finance a car to people with terrible credit. Who cares that they rust out and fall apart much faster than their competition, right?
I would rather drive a Lada!
Nanny filtering at it's finest. "But someone might be offended with adult language on a site for adults!" Câlice en tabarnak!
The mechanical clock in my Olds Delta88 kept perfect time. That just blew me away. That's with wildly fluctuating temperatures. When I sold that car, I should have kept the clock.
Relax everyone, no other mechanical or electronic clock in any other car kept time that well. That one was an oddity.
Bygone build quality. Yes, this is very evident in stereo products too, like receivers. The lack of quality in more modern sets is very disappointing. I'd rather work on those really nice old stereos.
-Chris
Relax everyone, no other mechanical or electronic clock in any other car kept time that well. That one was an oddity.
Bygone build quality. Yes, this is very evident in stereo products too, like receivers. The lack of quality in more modern sets is very disappointing. I'd rather work on those really nice old stereos.
-Chris
That wasn't why I bought one. I don't buy anything on credit.
My reason was much more prosaic: the seats fold down completely into the floor, and the interior is long enough for me to build a bed in. Poor man's camper van on the cheap. I moved to a beautiful part of the world, I want to see a bit of it before I croak.
In addition to the crappy factory CD player, the minivan has, by far, the worst-calibrated automatic transmission I've ever encountered in any car built at any time during the last five decades. It has six speeds to choose from, and at any given moment, is virtually guaranteed to have chosen a hopelessly unsuitable one, usually with a jarring "Clunk!" to liven things up, particularly when driving on icy roads.
On the other hand, lots of people swear by Toyota reliability, but I had three Toyotas in a row that were lemons. At least they didn't kill me with bad firmware, as Toyotas did to these unforunate 89 people: Toyota "Unintended Acceleration" Has Killed 89 - CBS News
-Gnobuddy
That link - Toyota "Unintended Acceleration" Has Killed 89 - CBS News
Nothing was much discussed as to WHY these incidents happened - a sort of cover-up.
My sources seem to point at the infamous "bad capacitor syndrome" that centered around the early/mid 2000s.
Yet, nothing was mentioned about it on the news media, I suppose because it would open up a can of worms in the electronics industry that was already costing Big Corp a lot of money.
Computers, TV sets, anything electronic made in that time (including NASA and Military equipment) was failing because of those bad capacitors - yet no mention of the electronic acceleration modules using these same lousy capacitors.
Nothing was much discussed as to WHY these incidents happened - a sort of cover-up.
My sources seem to point at the infamous "bad capacitor syndrome" that centered around the early/mid 2000s.
Yet, nothing was mentioned about it on the news media, I suppose because it would open up a can of worms in the electronics industry that was already costing Big Corp a lot of money.
Computers, TV sets, anything electronic made in that time (including NASA and Military equipment) was failing because of those bad capacitors - yet no mention of the electronic acceleration modules using these same lousy capacitors.
That used to be all I bought....But those days are gone....long gone.
I used to buy a Dart, Duster, Valiant, even a Coronet, anything with the slant 6 engine. Despite years of trying, I never broke an engine. Never paid more than $200 for one either.
I did own two minivans, a 1985 and a 1994. Both went for well over 100K miles but the Mitsubishi motors were junk. The 3.0 V6's were all chain smokers...bad valve train geometry guarantees worn valve guides and leaky valve stem seals.
Now Chrysler = Fiat.....never known for reliability.
Some of their cars were also Fiat derivates or clones.
Their software skills have always sucked.
The turbo Dodges that I used to race had a potentially fatal flaw. It was documented in the owners manual that the ECU would bump up the idle speed when the AC compressor kicked in to compensate for the extra load. The idle speed would be gradually reduced after the compressor disengaged.
What happens when the AC system was slightly low on Freon?
The AC is turned on, it starts, and bumps up the idle. The system then shuts down because the low side pressure goes negative, at which point the idle is GRADUALLY lowered. Before the idle gets back to normal the AC pressure goes back to normal and the system restarts, bumping up the idle again.
This process will repeat indefinitely, and the idle speed will get bumped up much faster than it comes down...….At some point the idle speed will get to the point where the turbo will begin to build boost and the brakes will no longer hold the car still on an automatic transmission car. Not cool when you are stopped at a red light, or in my wife's case at a school crosswalk with kids in front of her. She turned the car off, got out and left it in the middle of a 6 lane road until I arrived.
Our last two cars have been Hondas one of which I just traded for a Ford minivan after 10 years of abuse with ZERO major failures.
In 10 years of my torture I replaced two power window motors, changed the brakes twice and fed it three Walmart batteries. I changed the oil every time the reminder told me to, ALWAYS with Mobil 1. I would have kept it longer, but our crappy roads had worn out the suspension parts.....it WAS time to feed it some expensive parts.
So I decided I would NOT repair it.....trade it instead. Sometimes it is the right option.
I got the 1963 Plymouth Valiant to go 100+MPH on a downhill from Cleveland to Athens OH -- 1967 no seatbelts, no nuttin!
The 1964 Valiant we failed its brakes going out of the parking lot at Rockefeller University where Jeanette was working in a molecular bio lab -- they let the grad students park for free -- rolled right out onto York Ave in NYC w no brakes. Fortunately there was a shop up near 96th St and York which I was able to gently roll it into. At my mother-in-law's funeral at St. Raymond's Cemetery in the Bronx it caught fire!
We traded it for my uncle's 1970 Pontiac Grand Prix -- the one with the 451. It wasn't a good trade!
Actually, there were a long string of newspaper articles about them when the problem first surfaced. No, it was nothing as relatively innocent as bad capacitors. It was much worse than that.
Many credible Toyota runaway crash survivors - and some who were killed by their Toyotas, but managed to make phone calls first - reported that after their vehicle began to accelerate at full throttle, the engine could not be turned off with the ignition key, and the transmission could not be shifted into neutral. Crash investigators repeatedly found burned-away brake pads and heat-warped and discoloured brake rotors in post-crash runaway Toyotas, indicating that the unfortunate driver had been applying the brakes, hard, until he/she was killed by their car. And yet, the cars hadn't stopped.
Toyota, not surprisingly, claimed their vehicles were not flawed, but the drivers were. After much legal badgering, they conceded that the drivers-side floor mat in some vehicles might have trapped the gas pedal in the down position, and offered to replace $5 floor mats in some models.
This was quite obvious nonsense on Toyota's part, as all the crash evidence indicated something much more serious - terrible, fatal, software flaws. However, gullible press and populace bought the B.S. for a while, until many more people died in their runaway Toyotas.
The truth emerged bit by bit, in one tortuous court-case after another, with Toyota fighting tooth and nail every inch of the way to prevent the truth from coming out. In the end, after software and hardware experts - hired and paid by families of victims - reverse-engineered and picked apart Toyota's engine and transmission control software, it was found that Toyota software engineers deliberately wrote code that prevented the driver from turning off the engine if it wasn't at idle (presumably to avoid possible engine damage).
Toyota software engineers also deliberately wrote code to prevent shifting the (electronically controlled) transmission out of Drive if the engine wasn't at idle (presumably to avoid possible damage to engine or transmission.)
Software critical to human life usually goes through extreme qualification procedures to ensure it's bug free (the code written by JPL for their numerous space missions is a great example.) Toyota chose to do no such thing. They just hired everyday programmers and got them to write code in the same way other programmers write generic code to, say, respond to a button-click on a 'Web page or in a software application. Nobody seems to have cared that a software bug could now cause people to die.
At the same time as Toyota's ECU software team was making a deadly mess of their code, Toyota hardware engineers decided to use cheap standard computer memory in their ECU modules (rather than the more expensive ECC memory, Error Correcting Code memory, which is mandatory in critical applications or wherever human life is at stake.)
As a result of the bad software review process, it was found that an accidental single-bit error at one crucial memory location would cause the engine to accelerate at full throttle. As a result of the use of cheap memory, such a single-bit error would go undetected, and uncorrected. The death-trap was now ready to kill unsuspecting Toyota owners.
Once the engine began its unintended acceleration due to an accidental one-bit error at one memory location, all that deliberately written Toyota code became a perfect death-trap for driver and passengers, turning the vehicle into a savagely efficient killing machine. The engine could not be turned off with the ignition key, and the transmission would ignore all attempts to shift it out of Drive. All the driver could do was hang on, stamp on the brakes until they burned out and failed, and if possible, attempt to rub the car to a halt along some suitable obstacle (a long thick hedge, say.) Most often, the driver and all passengers ended up smashed into a hard object at high speed, and many died or were terribly injured as a result.
To me, perhaps the most amazing thing about the whole tragedy is that the public very quickly forgot about all the drivers and passengers who had been murdered by their Toyotas, and Im not aware that there was any long-term discernible dip in Toyota sales. Nor do I recall Toyota management ever coming up with a public apology, and promises to write better code using better code-review practices in the future, nor any government safety agency promising to conduct tests and code reviews to prevent similar tragedies in the future.
Instead, everyone went off to write self-driving code for their cars, code which has killed several more people.
Since the Toyota-caused slaughter, I have often thought that it would be a really, really good idea to have a hardware kill switch where the driver can reach it. Something that cuts electrical power to the ignition coils, say, or the ECU, guaranteeing that the engine can be shut down if the worst happens due to yet another software bug.
-Gnobuddy
Gnobuddy, all that you mentioned is interesting, and sad.
However, I've gotten reports from mechanics, one who is a good friend of mine, and that is where I got the info on the "bad capacitor" issue in these vehicles.
He showed me one of the computer-controlled accelerator modules, took the cover off, and low and behold, there were several obviously leaking capacitors - in critical places, oozing their corrosive fluid over IC chips and resistors - a death trap waiting to happen.
And the vendor of those capacitors was the same one as named in the "bad cap syndrome" which, among other vendors, were listed on that website. (badcaps.net)
However, I've gotten reports from mechanics, one who is a good friend of mine, and that is where I got the info on the "bad capacitor" issue in these vehicles.
He showed me one of the computer-controlled accelerator modules, took the cover off, and low and behold, there were several obviously leaking capacitors - in critical places, oozing their corrosive fluid over IC chips and resistors - a death trap waiting to happen.
And the vendor of those capacitors was the same one as named in the "bad cap syndrome" which, among other vendors, were listed on that website. (badcaps.net)
I repaired an SP10 that I got from a radio station. The station tech had cut traces on multiple PCB's, soldered in additional capacitors and the period adjustment was WAY out, it was a mess, oh and quite a few dry joints. After replacing a transistor in the saw tooth generator, removing the additional capacitors, which by the way had the TT run at appox the correct speed, repairing the cut traces and adjusting the period it worked. I cannot for life of me understand why he didn't repair it properly in the first place.
Hi warrjon,
He didn't repair it properly for one of two reasons:
1.) He panicked. That's when people do all kinds of things that don't make any sense.
2.) He figured he was smarter than the engineers who designed it in the first place. That's when people do all kinds of things that don't make any sense.
Basically, that person should not have had that job. Just imagine all the other equipment he worked on.
-Chris
He didn't repair it properly for one of two reasons:
1.) He panicked. That's when people do all kinds of things that don't make any sense.
2.) He figured he was smarter than the engineers who designed it in the first place. That's when people do all kinds of things that don't make any sense.
Basically, that person should not have had that job. Just imagine all the other equipment he worked on.
-Chris
The most likely outcome of this would be a failed ECU, which would neither start nor run the engine. This would be a costly failure, and Toyota would surely gouge the unfortunate consumer (as they do if you need a replacement ignition key), but at least he/she wouldn't be smashed to pulp or burned to death in the process.
You know your way around computers, right? There is no possible scenario in which failed filter caps on a computer motherboard can cause a microcontroller to run code that hasn't already been written and programmed into them.
The runaway Toyota acceleration deaths were caused by bad ECU software - very bad software - and cheap memory that could not detect and prevent the fatal bit error, the deadly bug in the software that triggered all the other deadly consequences.
As mentioned, there were a number of expert witnesses (computer hardware and software researchers) who were called in by families of those killed by faulty Toyotas, and who performed forensic analysis of both ECU hardware and software. They found the two problems I mentioned - non-ECC memory, and buggy software. They did not report any problems with capacitors.
Incidentally, I myself was bitten at least twice by the bad-capacitors problem, which, I agree, was widespread, and very real for a certain time period. One of my PC motherboards died (with black goo around several caps), and later a 24" Phillips LCD monitor we owned also died, also with black goo around every SMD electrolytic cap on the board.
-Gnobuddy
As I'm not much into the automobile technology, I'll admit that honestly.
I'm not a "code savvy" person, but I can put together my own desktop computers, although I despise them.
The term "ECM" is what I wanted to say before, which I called an acceleration module.
I'm not up on all that acronym stuff like I said.
I'll post this photo of a Toyota ECM with the sour caps and corrosion, and surely it must result compromised operation, and/or safety.
I'm not a "code savvy" person, but I can put together my own desktop computers, although I despise them.
The term "ECM" is what I wanted to say before, which I called an acceleration module.
I'm not up on all that acronym stuff like I said.
I'll post this photo of a Toyota ECM with the sour caps and corrosion, and surely it must result compromised operation, and/or safety.
Attachments
Years ago a friend comes to me with a box full of Mitsubishi ECM's. He says that they were all bad and he had been paying a tech $100 each to change some parts, after which most of the ECM's would work. He showed me which parts, and asked how much I would charge to change them.
The parts he pointed to were electrolytic caps, and the board looked a bit like the unit in your picture. I found some evidence that the caps were actually leaking their goo, but similar corrosion was evident where the caps had not leaked. In some cases the wires on the caps and other parts were completely eaten away as were some of the PCB traces.
It seemed to be mostly because of Florida humidity and exposed 12 volt power.
In each case I removed every part with evidence of corrosion, cleaned up the board with alcohol and WD40, repaired the damaged traces, and replaced the bad parts. There were some resistors and a transistor or two with corroded leads. All were replaced.
My repairs had a slightly higher success rate than the other guy, but I only charged $50.
The parts he pointed to were electrolytic caps, and the board looked a bit like the unit in your picture. I found some evidence that the caps were actually leaking their goo, but similar corrosion was evident where the caps had not leaked. In some cases the wires on the caps and other parts were completely eaten away as were some of the PCB traces.
It seemed to be mostly because of Florida humidity and exposed 12 volt power.
In each case I removed every part with evidence of corrosion, cleaned up the board with alcohol and WD40, repaired the damaged traces, and replaced the bad parts. There were some resistors and a transistor or two with corroded leads. All were replaced.
My repairs had a slightly higher success rate than the other guy, but I only charged $50.
Of course they were!
And finished. There were no rough edges to be found. They weren't just stamped out of sheet metal.
Who said they were?
Yes - precision extruded, with far more accurate profiles and tolerances than today's extruded or moulded plastic gears.
They had to be: erratic gear friction would translate directly to erratic time-keeping.
Who said it was?
Grumpy old men, for instance, are not particularly good.
Did you even read my post? I pointed out that the beautifully made old clocks were less accurate (bad), but the gear-trains were beautiful (good).
The idiom "seeing through rose tinted glasses" means being in denial, being unable to even see the existence of anything negative - exactly the opposite of what I wrote, as I pointed out both good and bad qualities of the newer clocks.
Have a nice (neutral-tinted, I suggest smoke-grey) day!
-Gnobuddy
Where does the idea of plastic being a bad material come from? Modern digital slr's are mainly plastic and shutter actuation's can go into the 10s of thousands.
Modern engineered plastic are often reinforced with other elements for strength etc. Mouldings reinforced with glass comes to mind.
There is no difference between an accurately made plastic mould and a punch and die.
Burrs on punched blanks are an indication that there is need for a regrind or the clearance was too much
Looking at the finish on mass produced clock wheels I would say that they had been tumbled with an abrasive to remove sharp edges. Burrs and sharp edges are not the same.
I spent my working life making precision plastic moulds including a number of years in the connector industry producing edge connectors for the communications industry. The high speed punch and forming presses ran so fast they were just a blur and there was never any burrs. The moulding were glass impregnated and wore out the dies and required frequent insert changes.
Unfortunately I do not have your engineering experience and love of past technologies.
By the way, in a clock train there are wheels and pinions not gears, they both have completely different profiles yet all produce minimum friction.
Until you do what I did.
I had my camera in my pocket and it somehow accidentally powered up.
The lens came out and the tight pocket stopped it and stripped the gears.
Shame, it was a great little camera.