More Craftsmanship Failures

Our next contestant in the game of America's Race to the Bottom is the X-acto 179x Powerhouse electric pencil sharpener. 

My spouse brought me this from a garage sale, thinking it would be useful since I still like classic writing instruments of all types, including these ancient things called pencils made from wood and lead.

Well, the thing doesn't work. When you put a pencil in the aperture, it does trigger a motor but the sharpening blades don't spin. You can still hear the motor spinning, but the machine won't sharpen. Not a problem for a simple electronic device, right? All I need is a screwdriver and I can fix this thing.

Not only that, but there are dozens of video on the Internet of people fixing electric pencil sharpeners. Many have a gear on a shaft that spins and turns another connecting gear that ultimately spins the sharpening blades. Other do-it-yourselfers have found that the gear on the shift slips toward the back of the sharpener and loses contact with the connecting gear. They fix it by simply adding a couple washers on the shaft between the gear and the back of the sharpener, and thus buy a few more years of life out of the device.

 The problem is that when I get my sharpener opened up, I find that issue with the 179x is not a gear that slips, but a gear that cracks. The mechanism on the 179x uses similar concepts as the one on the do-it-yourselfer's video, but the design is different. On the 179x, the motor shaft has a vertical gear directly affixed to it.

This vertical gear is made of plastic and has cracked so it loses its tight hold on the motor shaft and no longer spins. As a result the connecting gear doesn't spin either. 

Unlike the do-it-yourselfer's scenario in the video, I can't fix this with common items from my spare parts box. I will need to repair or replace the gear directly. I consider using epoxy to save the existing gear, but the gear is covered in lubricating grease and it's a messy job and I just don't feel like dealing with the hassle because there's no guarantee it'll hold. I search online, but don't find any way to buy the part. I also find out that this exact same model can be found second hand for $10, so it's not like I'm saving a bunch of value here.

What a disappointment. A part that someone knew would get regular use is cheaply made. And on the bottom of the unit are the famous words, "Made in China." Who's to blame for this poor showing in quality? X-acto? China? How about both?

Now I've got piece of plastic and metal shit that I can't do anything with and will probably end up in a landfill because of a tiny part. What a disappointment. 

Censorship is Alive and Well

I don't respond well to censorship. I've dealt with it a few times and even when it felt innocuous it was unpleasant and, strangely enough, hurtful. Here are my censorship stories.

I'd posted a note in a message board on the old America On Line forums. I think it was a stupid forum about a TV show or something meaningless, but a couple days later I got a note from a moderator saying that I'd used the phrase "BS" and that this was not acceptable. Personally, I don't find that phrase offensive, but I'm not the one that owned and ran that forum. I'd put effort into making that post and effectively it'd been wiped out. I would have had to repost the entire thing from scratch as I didn't have a copy of it. This kind of censorship is certainly less heady than the sort of censorship a journalist in Soviet Russia might have experienced, and really there's no harm done to the world because none of the subject matter was important. But on a personal level, it felt like rejection. 

My response to that was to simply not post there anymore. 

A similar thing just happened at Amazon. I'd written a review of a product that had been up for a month or two and had even gotten some positive votes from readers that found it useful. But suddenly that review was taken down and when I went to check on it there's a note that says something about "Amazon is no longer accepting reviews of this item from this account." Well that's weird since it was already previously approved and published. Did the product developer not like something I said in the review and ask Amazon to silence it? Did Amazon apply a machine AI scanner to look for key words that triggered it to shut down my review? Who knows?  And again, this is a review of one of billions of cheap Chinese products at Amazon, so it's ultimately not that important in the scheme of things. 

That's not what's scary, but the way it happened is concerning. When AOL removed my post, at least a moderator explained the reason. With Amazon, you get shut down with no explanation or opportunity for appeal. That's the scary part. When I went online to search for others that might have had this same thing happen to them, there are many testimonials from people that also had reviews taken down who tried to contact Amazon and have heard nothing back. 

I really liked Amazon reviews and did my part to write in hopes that I'd be helping people get a better idea of whether or not a product was right for them. But my response to this is the same as the one I had for AOL. I'm done if you're just going to arbitrarily censor without proper explanation or chance for appeal. Too bad, because product reviewers at Amazon are providing gobs of FREE content that can often help buyers.