Pin The Donkey Trick

[darkzero]

Stupid latch broke on one of my my tool box drawers, not the first time this has happened to me either. I have a love & hate for them. I like the latch functionality but hate that they are soft plastic that breaks easy, hence the donkey.

Simple fix to add more support. Drill both ends & pin it using epoxy. I use music/piano wire, can find it at any hobby store. Don't forget to rough up the surface of the pin or put some grooves on it so the epoxy has something to hold onto. If it's a stubborn part that doesn't want to hold, on each end of the pieces, drill half the depth of the hole for the pin slightly over size to allow for more room for the epoxy.




I did this to the original key for my truck (which is a spare now after I got the upgraded key from Toyota) and it has been holding up for years. No matter what I tried to glue it with it would always break until I pinned it.

 

[C-Bag]

I'm always caught wondering if it's that they are designing the plastic piece like its metal, or the "applications engineer" gets the wrong, cheaper plastic or its planned obsolescence. Either way it's a fail. Maybe in the future they will 3D print plastic over a wire frame. Plastic has its place but trying to do structural stuff with it always seems cheap to me.

 

[RJSakowski]

I've used a pin plus epoxy in repairing broken fishing rods. It works well.

 

[MontanaLon]

I'm always caught wondering if it's that they are designing the plastic piece like its metal, or the "applications engineer" gets the wrong, cheaper plastic or its planned obsolescence. Either way it's a fail. Maybe in the future they will 3D print plastic over a wire frame. Plastic has its place but trying to do structural stuff with it always seems cheap to me.

A lot of it is the designer comes up with a design using materials of his choice and then the production guys get a hold of it and decide to use a different material for cost factors and ease of production or it is what they have available or what they are told they can use. On an injection molded part like that it would literally be a penny increase in production cost to insert a steel core into the mold and inject the plastic around it. But when you factor it out to million part runs, not putting the steel in means $10,000 more profit on that piece.

That is how we ended up with die cast zinc gears.

 

[C-Bag]

A lot of it is the designer comes up with a design using materials of his choice and then the production guys get a hold of it and decide to use a different material for cost factors and ease of production or it is what they have available or what they are told they can use. On an injection molded part like that it would literally be a penny increase in production cost to insert a steel core into the mold and inject the plastic around it. But when you factor it out to million part runs, not putting the steel in means $10,000 more profit on that piece.

That is how we ended up with die cast zinc gears.

Or better yet plastic gears.

I had always been at the sticky end of the stick so to speak being an auto mech and then packing house mech. When I ended up working for the co' that made some of the equipment I beheld first hand the cluster that was upstream from me my whole career. You had the customer that had some expectation or idea, then salesman, then head of engineering, then the engineer, then the applications engineer then it went to fabrication and finally to us in assembly. It so reminded me of that kids game where you sit in a circle and whisper a secret around the circle and end up with something totally different by the time it gets back around. The bigger the co' the more shredded it can get. It's amazing anything gets done.

 

[WarrenP]

If it cost an extra penney to make it better why not raise the price by a penny? I would be willing to pay a penny more for quality. Then they arent losing any money.

 

[mickri]

But if they made it better we wouldn't have anything to fix.

 

[MontanaLon]

It probably was specced as a different material altogether that would be less expensive by a larger amount than a penny and wouldn't need the steel reinforcement. Instead of going back to design to be reengineered they just use the cheaper material in the original design and run with it.

I am sure sometime in the past someone has tried to substitute 12L14 steel for silchrome in engine valves because it machined so much easier and faster that it saved tons of money in production. I mean, steel is steel right?

 

[C-Bag]

In in our case it was businessmen(who didn't know anything about machinery) telling engineers(who had never even seen the machine work and the environments it worked in) what to do. Details and real life feedback were not necessary only obeying their orders and submitting to their egos. Logic need not apply. I know that seems cynical but it's the only way to explain the way things worked and the results. I get it can take a lot focus or dominance to get something done the way you want it but it also takes vision and flexibility. Too many times the people who had those traits left and the people who lacked those traits stayed. Providing us with a repair rich environment.

 

[WarrenP]

In in our case it was businessmen(who didn't know anything about machinery) telling engineers(who had never even seen the machine work and the environments it worked in) what to do. Details and real life feedback were not necessary only obeying their orders and submitting to their egos. Logic need not apply. I know that seems cynical but it's the only way to explain the way things worked and the results. I get it can take a lot focus or dominance to get something done the way you want it but it also takes vision and flexibility. Too many times the people who had those traits left and the people who lacked those traits stayed. Providing us with a repair rich environment.

I agree... I repair atm's for my job and you can see lots of places that if they used different materials or designed it a little different the machine would be alot better , longer lasting, working better and easier to work on. The engineers just dont have real life experience they only see paper.