One of the electronics/computer repair shops in Moncton has been branching out into selling Raspberry Pis, Arduinos, and a whole whack of, ahem!, "accessories" for them. Business is apparently brisk: One wall became two, then three. I alternate between referring to them as "Candyland" and "The Widget-pushers."
So I emailed the Alpha-Widget-Pusher last week to see whether he had a source for the ATMega328P DIP chip I've been having a difficult time tracking down...at least from Canadian suppliers. And since I'm probably going to be spending some time moving these from breadboard to breadboard, it's a good excuse to find a better chip-puller than the twist-prone cheapie that I picked up from Princess Auto. So I tacked a request for recommendation onto the email.
The reply was that their Alpha Chip-Puller is mostly using tools made in the 1930s. For which, mad respect. Plus a small side of jealousy. Take care of the tools and the tools will take care of you -- that's one of my tenets, and not just in electronics.
I griped to Dennis about how, after decades of Kanban, TQM, ISO-9001, and every other flavour-of-the-month underfunded QA push, they still "don't make 'em like they used to." That's something you shouldn't gripe about to a Recovering Manufacturing Engineer(TM). At least not unless you want an earful about how ISO-9001 only guarantees that your processes are executed as documented.
But he's right. A CNC machine capable of of 0.001% tolerances can't stop the cheap steel it just milled from warping or cracking in use. Consistency is not quality...or at least is only a part of it. In fairness, in some cases consistency is a Very Big Deal(TM). (Remember Intel's division-error and the resulting freak-out? Even the one-in-nine-billion odds were too much for everyone.) But consistency is a hard, easily-measurable metric. Thus its overweighted role as a surrogate for quality.
True quality, of course, is squishier, less easily shoe-horned into a database or aggregated into a colour-coded chart/graph. Let's face it; no one picks a tool off the wall at the big-box hardware store or out of a mail-order box and thinks, "My great-grandchild will maybe use this to build __x__ one day." So I very much doubt that, unless they were hand-made, the
manufacturer of those antique tools gave much thought to their
whereabouts in 2018.
That's not to say that no one cared about quality. In the Great Depression, people were more apt to look on non-daily expenditures as "investments," especially tools that would better allow them to mend and "make do" vs. having to buy new. Double that for the craftsperson putting food on the table. Print advertisements and radio jingles, doubtless, headlined "quality"* as a major selling-point.
But tracking down product made decades ago and measuring its longevity? Even scraping and comparing offerings on eBay is nothing any MBA could consider a "metric." No, the value is solely in the eye of the beholder--specifically, the craftsperson who imagines the spirit of previous generations of craftspeople echoing in their work with the tool in question.
I suppose that some savvy marketer could pitch tools as "future heirlooms." 'S'matter'a'fact, I'm kind of surprised they already haven't. (And if they already haven't, for the noodley love of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, shhhhhhhhhhh...) Mind you, any such campaign will be waged by some giga-conglomerate offs-horing its manufacturing while writhing its last in the strangling grip of a Wall Street vampire squid. But maybe--just maybe--its last gasp will blow on whatever embers remain of the crafts(wo)man ethic.
Melodramatic? Eh, probably. But even for someone whose tool-belt can be so very ephemeral--wherever you are, PC-Write, know that I still love you!--it does matter. Particularly post-Christmas as I stare at a brass-rimmed steel thimble perched on my monitor-stand. Mom doesn't expect to have the fine motor control necessary for hand-sewing ever again. So I'm the heiress of a *whack* of embroidery floss and her thimble. Which turns out to be her Mom's thimble. It's clearly been stepped-on, and there's a patina of rust on the inside. Alas, my bone-structure takes after my other, more petite, Grandmother. But that's nothing a little padding and a skinny rare-earth magnet can't deal with. And it will be dealt with, and shortly. Enshrining tools on a shelf is the same as burying them. I'd like a bit of Grandma to live on, even if only in my crazy projects.
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* A sound captured by Mark Knopfler in his dangerously catchy throwback tune "Quality Shoe." (You, Gentle Reader, have been warned.)
