Smart design: When the package is a functional part of the tool it’s carrying | Hacker News Reader

Smart design: When the package is a functional part of the tool it’s carrying

core77.com

95 pointsfortran7752 comments

Do not use an Orange screw.

Some snapped while being screwed into my rocky ground, and after just a few weeks holding down my tent the rest all started to fatigue snap.

Making that sort of thing out if plastic is just poor design. Screw threads are far better made of steel. You can use less steel for the same strength and it's more eco friendly when lost in the ground too.

This company is all marketing and very little engineering.

This. And I think that we really should focus more on recyclable materials: like steel and aluminium instead of trying to use (unescessary) plastic everywhere.

They are made of 100% recycled material, have a lifetime breakage guarantee, and end-of-product-life recycling.

Still, after breaking, the bottom part of the PLASTIC screw will remain buried in the soil of some national park.

In this scenario, how is a polycarbonate screw any more environmentally damaging than one made of e.g. some aluminum alloy? Neither one is decomposing any time soon.

Plastics eventually break up into micro-plastics that enter the food chain or leach other chemicals and they stick around without chemically changing much. Metals don’t do that, they’ll either oxidize and eventually become nutrients for something, or stay as a hunk of metal.

If this kind of decompositional pollution is a significant concern, why aren’t we worried about the millions of miles of PVC pipe we lay in the ground? Wouldn’t that be the same mechanism?

Lots of people are worried about that...

But PVC pipe has so many advantages over copper/cast iron/lead pipe that they are overlooked.

Probably out of general ignorance and active campaigns from the manufacturers. Just like no one was concerned about, then were confused about, and then finally started to have very late well-founded concern about cigarettes, and then oil. Plastics are just at the beginning of that curve.

The phrasing of the "100% recycled material" statements on their website a little suspect.

But that’s not enough. The company might guarantee all those things and that’s great, but when it’s left in a field somewhere because the user forgot about it or if the tube blows away then it still turns into plastic pollution.

it seems plastics recycling is a highly controversial topic on it's own:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24441979

If you're worrying about the "natural" curl of the fence, you're not putting tension on it when you put it up; and the fence will not function well.

"I'm always walking around picking tools up from the last place I left them"... Totally unsurprising. The old guys yell at people for that for a reason too, it wastes time, it wastes tools, and it advertises that attitude on behalf of a whole crew.

Finally, the tent stake needing packaging is one of the sillier things I've ever encountered.

> So it's always, invariably far away at some random spot on the property; it "lives" by the latest location where I've felled a storm-damaged tree to be cut up into firewood, which could be anywhere.

In other words, this person treats their tools worse than my 6 year old, and we're supposed to trust their judgement on tools?

This "article" is just an ad.

and it says so right at the top of the article:

Core77 is supported by its audience. When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.

The ending of that article was a major let-down...

Yeah, and 7 clicks of the back button to return here.

Long live open in new tab.

"Open in new tab" is the original browser sandboxing for brains. No matter what crap a website pulls, as long as it is in its own tab, it won't mess up other stuff I was reading (or planning to), and I can just kill it when I get tired of it.

They can still track you though.

Now I just open in a new temporary container tab with Firefox and Temporary Containers addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/temporary-con...

I swiped left.

is packaging really packaging if its not in any way useful. Why would the screw need a tube?

My only idea of why you need a tube is to keep your bag clean from a dirty used screw?

But the tube is open, no?

> Why would the screw need a tube

It needs some kind of retail packaging (the name of the product, a place to put a UPC sticker, etc) and the end seems pretty pointy, so there's probably a little safety mitigation there, too. Add in the functional piece and you can kill three birds with one plastic tube.

One of the things I like about going to my local agricultural supply store is that they don't seem to have the need for retail packaging. There are large boxes and creates (clearly labeled most the time) that contain each item. No need to individual package each part. Even the big-box hardware stores do this for things like screws. There are many items that can do with much less packaging.

Yeah, there’s a lot that can be done between manufacturers and retailers to reduce packaging waste, but there are also a lot of dependencies, especially for brands that don’t do their own manufacturing.

I can tell you from experience how painful it can be to set up even one alternative line for a hardware product. Most of the time it’s just not worth the effort, unless you’re selling into a giant channel partner.

Yeah, should really just be a smallest cardboard tag if something is really necessary. Can display the barcode and hang it from a peg in the shop. The tube seems like a massive waste.

The tube goes through the hole in the top of the screw and acts as a handle/lever to use when driving it into the ground. It serves a useful and well defined purpose.

Indeed, so it's a screw handle that comes affixed to the screw. OP presents it as dual-use: handle and packaging. But it appears to only have the former use since the latter use is unnecessary.

amazon could stop this easily if that was the decision that they made. instead, through their basics program, amazon decided to become “the best of” these types of scammers. or at least the largest scale.

This isn't your typical co-mingling issue with Amazon. This is simply stealing images and building a fake site.

The ending of this post (lots of cheap knock-offs exist after someone finds a good idea) shows the challenges of designing a hardware product. Just having a cool idea, ie screw-tent-stake, isn't good enough because even if you were able to get a patent there is no way you could slow the tide of cheap knock-off copy-cats.

I believe hardware is still a great opportunity though, you just need to integrate the hardware into a bigger business plan. Have a family of products, software/firmware component, subscription model, etc.

The thing is that intellectual property can only be enforced for so long (if it's even enforcible). The wheel is a great invention - but nobody got paid for it!

If the cheap chinese knockoff works just as well, then the value proposition of your more expensive production method just isn't justifiable to the end consumer. If the knockoffs don't work well, then you have a business case (to educate your customers).

The problem is that the chinese knockoffs don't work as well, don't even look similar, but are advertised by fraudsters with marketing materials stolen from the original product.

This is not a case of someone making a cheaper version, this is someone defrauding customers.

The way the article ends is very odd. If you click on the link about the scam products, you can see a pic of the imitation screws, and they don't even have the hole/handle on top, nor the pipe, to be used to screw the thing in.

The article could've highlighted this and then (since it's apparently an ad piece) end with "So to make sure you get the functionality you want, buy at the official blahblah online store."...

Exactly, I work on the mechanical hardware side of tech. I've long said that any company making physical products in the consumer space has to have something proprietary that cannot be easily copied, typically a software ecosystem.

It doesn't help that $7 for a piece of molded plastic that size is absolutely insane. Of course someone is going to copy it when they can make a good profit selling it for half the price in a country where you have no chance of defending your patents against copycats.

Great title for a blog about glue programming.

Pretending that's what this is instead - is the increase in the amount of glue programing job (i.e. assembling software where most of the work is really done by libraries and frameworks) really just a sign that we're missing a layer of abstraction with more appropriate tools?

(bonus question: is a comment unrelated to the posted content still off-topic if it brings the conversation away from discussion about a blatant marketing post?)

That screw looks like it'll snap in half the first time it gets used in clay or any other hard ground. Why not make it out of metal?

This is a great advertisement for that screw system.

By the end of the article I was really starting to wonder whether this was just marketing

Core77 is an industrial design blog. I’ve been reading it for over ten years. They cover hammers and screwdrivers the same way people in this site discuss Rust and hot new containers technologies. They are enthusiasts and are sometimes enthusiastic.

"When the package is a functional part of the tool it’s carrying"

Exactly like the iPouch for the new Apple headphones, right?

What even is this article? When did Core77 hire lazy farmers to write product reviews of crappy products?

I don't understand why this article was submitted under the current title ("The Orange Screw has fallen prey to Amazon bait-and-switch product pirates"). Surely the actual company post about exactly this [0] as linked in the article would have been a more appropriate basis for discussing this?

The point of this article is about one instance of product packaging also having a secondary function (after a roundabout way of describing applications). Why choose the parenthetical in the sub-heading as the main title for HN?

[0]: https://www.orangescrew.com/blogs/news/scam-alert-this-is-no...

(Aside from promoting someone’s blog?) I guess the main difference is do we want the story told from a personal/emotional narrative perspective or do we want the story told in a corporate Press release form.

Not sure??

Strangely enough when I first saw the Orange Screw site I didn't think it was real because the only product measurements given are in old style imperial units. Maybe real but not something I'd trust to order from.

It seemed suspicious to me that a site claiming to sell world wide with foreign currencies accepted wouldn't show metric units for their product.

I can't put my finger on why exactly but it just looked weird.

Not defending US Customary Units, but is it unreasonable for a product to use the dominant form of measurement of the country in which it is manufactured and primarily marketed towards?

https://www.orangescrew.com/pages/where-to-buy

Ah maybe that's it.

If they were geared up for a single market with it's own units that would be fine but this site is also selling to global consumers too. You can select language and local currency.

It's like someone lifted the stuff from the US domestic website for a brand and started using it to sell worldwide without the brand knowing.

Seeing something priced in my currency but measured in Smoots. :) It just looks... funny.

> primarily marketed towards

That's the main part. Where it's manufactured does not matter, what matters is that by using US measurement unities, they are making an implicit statement that it's a US-only product.

That right near an explicit statement that it's not US-only is somewhat confusing.

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