I currently do. Almost every piece of rolling equipment has error codes showing, multiple out of date repair orders, piles of things that fell off (sort of like a Harley) and most of this is equipment built to spec for government use....

 

I work for a company that doesn't make the space shuttle but we do make things that go up in the air with lots of mechanical stuff primarily for the government and in short "TomCat39" pretty much summed up what I've observed in the field and is backed by some of the more basic classes in my schooling. There are calculated service intervals that are critical for maximum performance and wear and tear items are replaced before they are ever an issue.

 

Sounds like they spend a lot of time doing maintenance...shouldn't need all that if it was built perfectly from the get go lol

where i work the most common problem is electrical due to vibration destroying wiring over time. Too often the fix is a jumper past the relay that burned up due to a short...
I am with you on what TomCat39 says though, all that government stuff is supposed to have regular maintenance that far exceeds what you see in the civilian world. It doesn't mean it always is done on time or right...but they keep it running, even if things like climate control are flaky, wiring is rigged, etc...

 

Actually, I'm pretty sure many things on the space shuttle are replaced after every trip into space.
a space race lol
I'm sure when they design a space ship they rather it not break in space because they cant predict whats gonna happen when they send probes so they make it near perfect so at least it doesn't fail due to design flaws before it completes the mission...

and I didn't mean just spacecraft. I meant whatever we send to space
I'm sure voyager 1 is way past service station since its not even in our solar system anymore

its not so evident now with all digital tech and a **** ton less moving parts in our appliances that some parts are designed to fail either by physical design or by manufacturer chosing certain material grade that will fail after specific amount of use.

kinda like forged wheel vs Alibaba special knockoff of same design.
it was very bad in early 2000s with failing electronics in pretty much everything and cars suffered too with cheaper materials in place of better quality metals and plastics.
just look at early and mid 2000s is probably the worst quality time in automotive history. 90s cars outlast these by far because of better materials used.


and electronics now have much less moving parts but are made with smaller tolerances. so any kind of fluctuation will burn few components and damage others that are not evident right away without testing each and every part...
because at the end of the day. a company is well capable of designing almost perfect product. but its the cost and the fact that it HAS to break in order for consumer to buy new model.

look at car stereo. **** is literally identical to last 3 years models just has different faceplate they have ran out of combinations to move the buttons around long ago so they are changing from piano gloss to carbon fiber to flat black to whatever else they can come up with for all these stereos now.

in case of pioneer its. this year the dolphins are orange and swim in circles chasing their own tail. instead of blue dolphin animation from last year

 

I will just say that, that is an accurate assessment. To be fair though, and without saying too much, there's a need to ensure that much reliability. It's not a flaw in the design, more like the way the product is being used. Anyway the main reason I stepped in was just to confirm what was stated previously, if it moves it wears. Doesn't matter much about the design itself. Two parts rub, it wears.

 

Right on. You should see the wear on wiring on the fire apparatus I ride and operate. Vibration literally has the harness cutting itself apart, and the repairs are stop gap usually. I think the reason they go overboard though is that most military and emergency vehicles are usually related to life and death situations. The last thing you want is a military vehicles that fails when being attacked, or a fire engine that won't start when there is a fire 4 blocks away with trapped victims...

 

Man that's crazy!

 

Electronics being non mechanical are a totally different breed.

First off, there is no such thing as a perfect device, machine etc etc. Everything, even electronics, have tolerances and variances. We can never attain ideal, we can only get close.

On electronics, they are purposely designed to "wear" out. It's called forced obsolescence. They do it so you have to buy a new do hickey in a few years tops. What they do to do this is to make sure at least 75% of the components in the device are rated at the operating wattage of the circuit(s). What this does is every time you flick the power on a voltage spike that surpasses the power rating off all those components passes through them. It's not enough to cause instant death but it does reduce the silica of the component little by little. Eventually one or more of the components wear out and the electronic device dies. Couple those spikes with general spikes on the power lines from storms, utility switching etc etc and the device dies.

They learned from tube technology that if it doesn't wear out, people wouldn't buy more. The old tube testing machines were wired in reverse to sell tubes. If it said the tube was bad, it was good and vice versa. It almost always said tubes were bad as they were almost always good. It was the only way to get people to buy replacement tubes for their TV's and Radios.

From that they learned to have the components only handle the power the circuit requires so the tiny "shocks" reduced lifespan slowly.

If all the components are rated double what ever the power requirements of the circuit are, the device would last indefinitely with proper power line surge protection.

Something we learned in electronics class.

Mechanical devices follow a different set of rules.

 

that's why I said almost perfect.
there are products that don't break that easily or wear out for a long time and there are products that barely make it off the shelf and go right back for exchange or get thrown away

mechanical devices follow similar rules where instead of voltage spikes and silica you have stress on the material and purposely chosen lower grade material that will fail under stress. if not material then the physical design has weak points that will fail under stress. I'm sure you all had fake transformers that fell apart even though they looked almost identical to real ones.
same with engines. some parts are designed to fail either my choice of the material or by designing weak points into them to keep the dealerships busy