Box-Shifters and Quality Assurance

The Quality Assurance methodology of :

• Ship it untested
• let the Customer do the checks
• Replace it willingly if the Customer complains

seems quite popular in this community ... and apparently elsewhere

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A chap on the microscopy forum, having just purchased a new [low budget] microscope, states:

P.S.
Well. As soon as I started using it, the iris in the condenser fell apart. All the little diaphragm leaves stared coming out of it. AmScope is sending me a new microscope.

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That genius Clive Sinclair probably started us along this path, when he bulk-purchased out of tolerance Transistors and re-sold them to hobbyists with a no-quibble guarantee of satisfaction.

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If you have nothing better to do ... Discuss

MichaelG.

An interesting topic Michael. All too often model engineers seem to be too ready to tinker with their faulty products to fix them rather than holding the supplier to account.

it is just a fact of life these days. Nothing is built to last because there is no profit in it.!

BUT! is that because of the customer or the manufacturer???

lets take an iphone, latest model retailing at £1000, how long will it be in service? probably no more than 5 years.

Aren't manufacturers giving consumers what they want?

As for Clive Sinclair, yes! I remember the transistors, MAT100 and MAT101 but they were not cheap compared to OC71 etc but suposedly better spec.

you can see where my pocket money went! We had a local shop in Sheffield called Bardwells selling Army surplus kit and components. Throat mikes and such were cheap and plentiful.

oh! those were the days - long gone now!

Howi

bardwells recently closed its doors

I can remember saving for an ic12 amplifier with a futureistic heat sink on top

Surely it's purely economics? If you want quality assured 'out of the box' someone has to pay for all the checking, setting up and testing throughout the whole production process. If you are on a tight budget you have to accept that you might need to do a lot of that yourself. We all have the opportunity to take the first option if we can afford it, but for many the choice is between the second option or nothing at all. At least there is usually the third option of returning the faulty item for refund or replacement.

If there were no 'box shifters' many of us would not be able to afford so many toys important pieces of equipment. Without Clive Sinclair, whatever you think of some of his products, we might have waited a lot longer before computers became so widely available. In the absence of cheap imports from the far east, second-hand machine tools would probably be even more expensive due to supply and demand.

In my early teens I developed a huge interest in all things mechanical and steadily built up a tool kit of my own. At that time there were a lot of cheaper hand tools coming from Spain, some of which I bought with my pocket money and still have to this day. Maybe I was lucky, but I would have waited a long time before I could afford the same items from the likes of King Dick.

Mike.

P.S. I do have plenty of better things to do really, but I picked some rhubarb yesterday and I'm waiting for the rhubarb crumble to finish cooking . . . and by the smell coming from the oven I think it is done

Howi

Bardwells took most of my pocket money as well. I remember the throat mikes well, we used them in intercoms on rally cars. Those were the days!!

Peter

I think some one else bought Bardwell entire stock and are doing mail order, unfortunely I can't remember the new owners details. If you have a look on "Vintage Radio" you may find the new owners details.

Michael's comment reminded me that the Sinclair scientific calculator was the first one I bought. Shame the trig functions were inaccurate, so it was of little use to me as a young engineer. I expect it's still lurking in a drawer somewhere, unused. I see that someone has reverse engineered it:

Sinclair Scientific

I also bought several other Sinclair projects, before I learned my lesson, including a stereo amplifier. It never worked. I was never as impressed by Sinclair as the Press seemed to be.

Bill

I suspect that box shifters have been around since time immemorial, although Clive Sinclair certainly let the customer do the quality assurance. I never succumbed to the original audio, radio and calculator kits. I let my school mates do that! The first calculator I bought was a Sinclair Oxford, sold ready made. I had a friend who bought the ZX80, ZX81, Spectrum and worst of all the QL. The computers were definitely let the customer do the QA; the repair 'organisation' was a man in a shed in his back garden in Cambridge.

When I was in the university engineering labs at Cambridge there was a debate as to whether Sinclair was a technical genius or a marketing genius. I'm inclined to the latter view. He spotted gaps in the market, filled them, and made a fortune. He made several fortunes over the years, only to lose them at later dates with disasters such as the universal miniature TV set and the QL computer.

I've met Clive Sinclair a few times as he joined college at the same time as me, to do a Ph.D. in business studies. So he was around at some of the parties and dinners. Sharp guy, but with a scattergun approach. Later, when I was learning to power fly, I also met his chief designer, Jim Westwood. He had a fancy aeroplane with a wobbly prop. He was a great chap and we did a couple of flights together - one to the Shuttleworth collection at Old Warden for tea and cakes. Jim is a clever designer. The Sinclair products were very innovative, especially given the cost constraints. Pity about the QA and marketing though.

Andrew

I was always tickled by John Stevenson’s fit for purse and fit for purpose. Although we maybe prepared to fettle a machine that falls short of requirements if the price is right, products sold in the UK should be fit for purpose.
Bandsaws at the cheap end of the market seem to be a machine that regularly fall short of our expectations but can be fettled into a satisfactory performance. I doubt that blade life and squareness of cut feature in the claims made for a cheap bandsaw so trading standards may be satisfied by it just cutting metal. It is clear that some people have unreasonable or unrealistic expectations of what they are buying and can be a poor customer but bad traders also exist who take the money and run. A direct import purchase has little protection but some of the sellers seem anxious to please and others will just disappear if there is a problem. I am not rich but I prefer to buy from a supplier in the uk with a face that my needs can be discussed with. I have made many purchases on eBay that have mostly been very satisfactory from mostly genuine people, these days it seems to be a more risky place for fakes and rubbish and a bad place for sellers who encounter bad customers.

Mike

Ah but what Clive did was re-test the devices and then design circuits for their particular characteristics. Now that is genius at work.

No quite as bizzarre as as this though. Mr H Gee of Mill Road Cambridge Electronics emporium fame had a son who set up another small shop selling low noise audio cassette tapes. Aparantly he used buy in bulk and then listen to the blank tapes selecting the quiet one which he then sold on for inflated prices. BUt then you can get Hi Fi nuts to part with cash like taking sweets from a baby.

regards Martin

regards Martin

In the old days of tube TVs, valves, and TV repairmen the TV manufacturers issued lists of necessary mods to the TVs that were also compiled into books so the repair man would do the repair and if conscientious all the improvements. This allowed them to start off with a ropey product and gradually improve it. as the consumers road tested it. The manufacturer cared about their reputation to get the next sale and the repair man wanted to give a guarantee and not be called back even though the new failure would not have been due to his previous repair. Peiple expected to have the repair round every couple of years.

Although electronic products are far more reliable now you may be surprised to learn that an initial failure rate of 0.5% is normal and way better than the 2% of 20 years ago. There is a big industry that quietly repairs all this brand new equipment. Overall life hasn't changed much at around 7 years average.

My first computer was a Sinclair ZX 80 and, because the budget didn't run to a ready assembled one, I bought the kit version. The instructions were excellent and the build went like a dream and it actually worked when I finished it!

I sold it last year, still working, to a collector for a lot more than I paid for it, probably due to inflation.

Brian

Quality assurance is a big subject, and depending on the desired goal, there are several ways to do it. There is no universal right or wrong way.

Make / inspect / accept quality processes as practised in the past are unpopular today. Although initially cheap and simple to implement stuff gets through the net and the process becomes hideously expensive - too many people checking rather than producing. Characteristic of firms producing 'quality' goods that cost too much.

Instead, much better to build quality directly into the 'Make' phase, expensive at first but fully applied it can eliminate the need for inspectors entirely. The method involves looking closely at every aspect of the manufacturing process and carefully eliminating all sources of error. Skilled men are a major source of error; if they can be replaced by machines, it's done. Most of the time this system works well, and the cheapest way to fix occasional errors is to replace faulty items without fuss.

Quality depends on the market, not on the desires of elderly gentlefolk. The market for hobby lathes is tiny and it consists mainly of chaps who absolutely refuse to spend grown-up money on tools! (What many think of as serious money is actually chicken-feed.) Although quality is wanted, no-one is prepared to pay for it! So there's a market for stuff made down to a price and for second-hand tools where someone else paid big money in the past. It's our own fault. Machines would be much better made if we all started the hobby off by spending £10,000 to £20,000 on a new lathe.

Other markets are different. That for electronics is much larger, highly competitive, fashion conscious, and the technology is moving forward quickly. Last year's model is out of date, but it must work well because reputation matters when competition is red-hot and huge sums are involved. When products like mobile phones sell by the billion and then collect usage revenue, it's well worth driving prices down and quality up. Cars are also highly competitive, with large numbers of customers tending to push quality and features up and prices down. Good news for the consumer, but it does generate an unrealistic expectation that everything we buy can be both good and cheap.

Then there's White Goods. These are designed to last at least 5 years, but then become unreliable. While the customer might want a fridge to last a lifetime, how can the manufacturer stay in business? And there are good reasons why old fridges should be replaced, energy efficiency, CFCs, faults etc.

When modern industry finds it worthwhile, it easily outperforms anything done in the past. Even the recent past! Aerospace, computers, pharmaceuticals, maintenance, medical, etc all better. Unfortunately, the ordinary Joe doesn't get the best at low prices all the time unless the economics are favourable. It's an imperfect world...

Dave

PS I spent most of my life being unable to afford computers, new cars, lathes, and microscopes. SWMBO put top priority on house, food, holidays, children and cushions!

Gee's in Cambridge burnt down in July last year.

Good to see this thread developing

For my part, having ‘chucked the pebble into the water’ I planned to simply observe the ripples

... but I’ve just found this page about Sinclair, which deserves a mention: **LINK**

http://diy.torrens.org/Sinclair/inside/Duncan.php

MichaelG.