devices of unecessary complexity

I deviced to take apart an orignal Nikon F 35mm camera today, to see what's inside.

About 5000 parts is the answer, for a completely mechanical 35mm camera.

There were easily hundreds of screws, mostly of differnt types and clearly no concept of standardized parts.

I took the rest apart with a hammer and pliers. The magnesium? body was pretty brittle so the hammer worked great.

The thing was clearly overly complex for what it does, cleary not designed to be easily serviced, and clearly built to use as many different components and specialized tools as needed.

Does anybody know if these were designed to simply create lots of busy work for people? I think the basic design was from the late 1950s this this particular one being made in the early 1970s.

I've seem some German rifles that were made this way too, with as many parts as possible crammed in, none of which were even truly needed.

What's the deal with this? When did this rediculous fad finally go away?

Old VCRs used to be overly built the same way with too many mechanical parts.

Has anybody come across any other products, new or old that just appear to be some sort of socialist work program, and not about making a machine that works, at a reasonable price and that can be easily serviced?

Reply to
Cydrome Leader
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It had no pentaprism, so it's not actually worth anything. I still have one left that is complete.

while I'm typically no fan of destroying stuff like this, it is the only option when no service manuals are available, and you can't hire and old guy to let you watch a repair.

The question still stands. When do companies design stuff to be overly complex. What's the real end goal?

Reply to
Cydrome Leader

Service manuals for many Nikon cameras, including the F

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Reply to
Steve W.

Gunner Asch on Sun, 21 Sep 2014 19:12:04 -0700 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

Barbarians - they break what they don't understand.

Witness the actions of the Democrat party towards the economy over the last forty years.

-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although more often, Age travels alone."

Reply to
pyotr filipivich

interesting. I looked for weeks and found nothing with the exploded diagram, like this site does actually have.

oh well. Apparently the one I ripped apart had titanium foil instead of cloth for the shutter. weird stuff.

Reply to
Cydrome Leader

Tearing stuff apart is the greatest way to learn about how things work.

I was just thinking about other things that are just overly complex for no reason and remembered server rail kits from Sun and especially the ones from Sun designed by Fujitsu. They're supposed to just be rails that allow a server to slide in and out of a 19" rack. Pretty simple, like glides for a desk drawer. HP has it figured out, Dell took years too, and almost got it right, but not Sun/Oracle/Fujitsu. I've still never figured out what all the extra pieces are for, even with the installation book, and I've not come across anybody else that has either. As to why rails need to be highly asymmetrical from left to right is mind boggling. Even with ball bearings, they're harder to operate than metal on metal sliders, are prone to just falling apart and require special alignment jigs for installation, even into industry standard racks. Plus, with no matter what you do, you're going to get grease all over your hands. Here's a personal message to anybody involved in those products - "you're a complete idiot".

Reply to
Cydrome Leader

It's often not intentional, just a mindset. I used to design motorized disp lays for a toy company. The bases would show the kinetic aspects of the toy s. I would get a proposed design from their engineers, and come in the next day with revisions that would sometimes halve the cost with no loss of per formance or reliability. I had no real motive to save them money, I just li ke simplicity and abhor waste. Most of my suggestions would be shot down ju st because they were perceived as cutting corners.

Reply to
robobass

I wonder how much of that shooting down was covering for the "We couldn't charge as much for it, so it would be less profitable" line of thought.

Absolutely _all_ of us, who either build or repair things, thank those who simplify their products and/or software.

Reply to
Larry Jaques

Have you ever personally participated in the design of new products?

You start by defining the requirements, or rather debating them until you're too tired to argue, then distribute the work among your personnel, come up with a separate solution to each requirement, prototype and test them individually and then together, and finally try to combine the elements that seem to need no further redesign to serve multiple functions and reduce tooling, fabrication and assembly cost while management pesters you to release it to production NOW to beat the competition to market. They are obsessed with the name recognition and sales momentum that comes with being first, and know that the engineers would love to keep playing with it.

All the while realizing that you may be out of a job when it's complete, unless your performance gets you nominated to the next new product design team, if there is one.

At the prototype stage having each part serve a single function is an advantage when it needs to be reworked. Combining and simplifying them later is time-consuming and non-essential.

Any competent draftsman can design complexity, simplicity requires inspired genius.

-jsw

Reply to
Jim Wilkins

I don't know the answer to your question, but there are a few things you could consider. First, the Model F was designed to outperform the competitors in Germany as well as in Japan: Contax and Exa, primarily. Things like the quilted titanium-foil shutter were the best in the world, and Nikon lenses had, at that time, contrast superior to Zeiss and sharpness superior to Leitz.

Second, many of the parts were taken from the Nikon rangefinder models of the late '50s, which were largely Contax copies. They were fairly complex. Then Nikon built the SLR on top of that design.

Another thing is that they conceived the F as a system camera from the start. For my F I have a 250-frame motor back; look-down viewfinder; interchangeable finder screens; and so on. To accomodate all of those options required more complexity.

In the end, it proved to be about the toughest and most reliable SLR going. I worked in NYC for what was then the world's fourth-largest publisher; we all used Fs, and we all had them serviced at the shop in midtown that serviced all of the Life and Time magazine photogs. Service was quick, cheap, and expert. A few blocks away was the Nikon service center in Rockefeller Center. They were not as quick, and possibly not quite as good.

My F is still in occassional use, on my copy stand. It is on its third shutter and has had ungodly amounts of film run through it (I wasn't paying for film or processing. ) It still works perfectly.

However, for work now I use a Sony NEX-7. I love it but I don't rely on it, because I have no idea what goes on inside and if it craps out, I'm screwed. I have always carried a backup camera. Sometimes now it's my F or F2.

Reply to
Ed Huntress

Or, as they used to say at GM, "Any damned fool can design a carburettor for a Rolls-Royce. It takes a genius to design one for a Chevrolet."

Or the tongue-in-cheek motto applied to Mercedes-Benz: "Never use two parts to do a job when you can get away with three."

Reply to
Ed Huntress

It's often not intentional, just a mindset. I used to design motorized displays for a toy company. The bases would show the kinetic aspects of the toys. I would get a proposed design from their engineers, and come in the next day with revisions that would sometimes halve the cost with no loss of performance or reliability. I had no real motive to save them money, I just like simplicity and abhor waste. Most of my suggestions would be shot down just because they were perceived as cutting corners.

===================

I was asked to simplify the circuit for a custom IC, and did it so well the engineer was embarrassed and upset he hadn't thought of my solution, which he couldn't understand at first so I had to build it for proof. I reduced the complexity of two of their other persistent problems by half by substituting simple but subtle mechanics for complex electronics and probably earned more resentment than gratitude for it, though they did move me from lab tech to design engineer.

The electronic and mechanical engineers at that and several other places I've worked knew little of each others' discipline and didn't cooperate very well when it meant subordinating themselves to each other instead of being in charge. I'm fairly competent at both so often they dumped the problem on me, and I had to be very diplomatic to stay on everyones' good side, or at least not be the person they hated most.

-jsw

Reply to
Jim Wilkins

The trouble with Chevy is they would order the tooling and test station for that carb well in advance and then keep calling with "Oh, by the way..." changes as they refined it.

We larded the test station for their 1970's analog ABS controller with jumpers so they could change the test parameters themselves. While I enjoyed flying first-class I didn't at all like Flint MI. For some reason there weren't many passengers on those flights.

GM's project engineer was a Ph.D. from India with absolutely no practical hands-on experience. He wanted the ramp-down curve of wheel sensor speed accurate to 8 decimal places because that's what his calculator gave him. No one had taught him that resistors have tolerances.

Prior to emission controls the only electronic device in a car was the radio, which they bought. The new electrical engineers they hired faced a steep leaning curve to adapt to the contamination and fighter-plane-like range of temperatures in an engine compartment.

-jsw

Reply to
Jim Wilkins

Gunner Asch on Mon, 22 Sep 2014 02:15:56 -0700 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

Disassembling is one thing. It is called "reverse engineering." Breaking some thing because you don't understand how it works is not "educational".

-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although more often, Age travels alone."

Reply to
pyotr filipivich

"Jim Wilkins" on Mon, 22 Sep 2014 09:19:28

-0400 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

You know when your design is complete - not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is mottling left to take away.

OTOH, rarely are products "completed" so much as the designers run out of time to make any improvements or changes.

-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although more often, Age travels alone."

Reply to
pyotr filipivich

Ed Huntress on Mon, 22 Sep 2014 09:35:46

-0400 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

OTOH, when you have three parts, you can replace one of them. B-)

Nowadays, we have modules which are plug and play, do multiple functions, and can't really be repaired. Not cost effectively, compared to removing and replacing.

-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although more often, Age travels alone."

Reply to
pyotr filipivich

Larry Jaques on Mon, 22 Sep 2014

05:44:13 -0700 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

Feh. If I can simplify the final production, I don't have to tell the customer who much it actually cost to make.

OTOH, there is the engineering mantra of

"It meets the specs, it is under cost, now take this thing and just get lost!"

-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although more often, Age travels alone."

Reply to
pyotr filipivich

"Jim Wilkins" on Mon, 22 Sep 2014 09:52:19

-0400 typed in rec.crafts.metalworking the following:

Not just the EE & ME. I learned machining. When I was tasked with making some fenders for a friends walker - of course the first thing I though of was "get a block of aluminum, and mill it ...".

Sigh, the whole "if all you know is the hammer, everything is a nail."

-- pyotr filipivich "With Age comes Wisdom. Although more often, Age travels alone."

Reply to
pyotr filipivich

At my first job after the Army I told them I'd like to work my way up to engineer, so they ran me through all the departments to learn the intricacies of custom machine design and fabrication. I'd learned mechanical drawing in jr high and Statics and the properties of metals in college, which were big helps. I didn't actually operate a Bridgeport, TIG welder or press brake but I learned what they can and can't do. I did drill and tap a lot of holes and learn to bend sheet metal accurately on a manual brake.

-jsw

Reply to
Jim Wilkins

I don't know about the cost effectiveness. I've had this conversation with Tier 1 automotive supply-chain engineers -- me being in line with your thoughts, and the frustrations of not being able to fix many things these days -- and they've pretty well convinced me that making things repairable at a flesh-and-bones level is not at all cost effective with today's engineering.

I don't know. Sometimes I miss my old VWs and MG, which I could fix while on the road. OTOH, I now own two 10-year-old cars that have never needed a repair.

My suspicion is that they're doing it right. Nostalgia for fixing and adjusting my S.U. carburetors (carburettors, I guess) on my mother's kitchen table isn't enough to overcome the fact that I had to do

*something* with my old cars almost every week.
Reply to
Ed Huntress

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