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Comment by hinkley | Hacker News Reader

There’s a UX school that says that if the user needs the manual you fucked up. I mostly subscribe to that school. Mostly.

It drives my family nuts that I will assemble a piece of furniture without reading the instructions. But the thing is with a little mechanical sympathy, and a well designed product, there’s only one sensible way for the parts to go together, and if you organize them right while you disassemble it (granted, harder to do when shipping overseas) then you’re good.

Imagine you had a device where four hardened steel bolts held the critical parts together. It would be stupid if the handles used the same bolt sizes in mild steel, right? Someone will fuck that up and use the wrong spare parts or do deep maintenance wrong. You’d use a different size bolt so they can’t get mixed up.

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Your viewpoint is rather naive in the mechanical world. OK it's enough to assemble a coffee table, now try an engine with 2,000 parts. Without a manual how can you set bearing clearances? How do you know how much thrust clearance there should be? How do you know which way up a piston ring goes, or how much torque to apply to a head bolt?

Machines are extremely complex, and that's before you even touch electronics and hydraulics, both of which are highly complex systems. Simply moving large machine parts safely requires documented procedures, let alone order of assembly.

there's a lot of shade-tree mechanics who have successfully rebuilt engines with thousands of parts. essentially figuring out how to rebuild an engine is similar to figuring out how to build one from scratch, which is within human capacity, particularly with background knowledge. but the guy rebuilding the engine has a lot of hints

granted, he'll probably fuck up his first two or three pretty good without haynes or chilton

There is a lot of stuff you can do when it’s pass fail. As a pro you have a time limit and you’re bad if you can’t rebuild in X hours.

My dad will tell you I helped him rebuild a bike coaster brake at 14. But the truth is the only decision he made was to buy the repair kit. I got rags and laid all the parts out like an exploded diagram, we cleaned them or swapped them and they went back in the way they came out.

I worked as a bike mechanic for two summers in college. Cars have manuals and maybe the mechanic you work for has them. Bicycles do not. You’re all shade-tree until you’ve seen everything a couple times.

yeah. thank god for sheldon brown

I was more of a Brandt boy myself.

> granted, he'll probably fuck up his first two or three pretty good without haynes or chilton

Given the assumptions, inaccuracies, and mistakes I've seen in some Haynes and Chilton manuals they'll probably fuck up with them. Factory manuals are usually worth the price (Honda's are, KTM's not so much).

i certainly did. haynes is no substitute for clue

I've rebuilt several motors, transmissions, various other mechanical contrivances. Sometimes with decent documentation, sometimes not so much. Also done a bit of amateur machining, and worked as an engineer on physical products.

Under no circumstances would I claim that rebuilding a motor was essentially figuring out how to build one from scratch. In software, maybe that's like claiming that figuring out how to configure a new Linux box is essentially the same thing as figuring out how to write an OS.

yes, i agree. what i was trying to express is that rebuilding a motor is generally strictly easier than building one from scratch, because it's building a motor from something more than scratch. i don't think i expressed it very well

(i mean, if all the parts of your engine are trashed, you are going to have to machine replacements for them, and that might actually take you longer. but it's clearly achievable given that people have built internal combustion engines without a working example to take measurements from)

Ah, that helps, thanks.

It's a bit academic, but set theory doesn't really apply to such fuzzy human things as knowledge and experience. Repairing and designing are different pursuits which might have a lot of similarities, but I wouldn't presume that a design engineer could competently do the work of a technician.

Just consider that any particular field of engineering as might be described by a lay person, can be far too broad and deep for an individual to be competent in all facets of it. I'm reminded of my neighbour asking for some help configuring email for her new iPhone, because she knows I do computer work. Mainly firmware.

there's something to that, for sure; there are plenty of design engineers who don't know nearly as much as they think they do, and who depend heavily on the expertise of their technicians to get anything done in the real world. they could never build an engine on their own! but there are also others who are eminently capable at the technical level, and i think their designs benefit from that

repair and design have in common that they require a lot of hard thought about the causal relationships involved in making the artifact work, tracing the causal chains through until they break, then patching them up. but they both also certainly involve other skills that the other does not; design also requires figuring out how to make new things happen, which involves imagining things that have never happened, while repair also requires knowing how not to bust your knuckles or spill the gasoline

Does every car mechanic have the entire Chilton’s catalog or do the mechanics just have to memorize things or look them up on the Internet? My understanding is it used to be a little A and a lot of B, and now it’s a mix of B and C

I was using the engine example as an analogy in an apparently failed attempt to help you appreciate the complexity involved. Mechanics in general will feel their way around an issue, but almost universally have access to paid repair databases when non-intuitive and complex issues come about.

You might recall that we're all talking about manufacturing equipment that was exfiltrated as war reparations.

I'm much less convinced than you are about the availability of accurate and detailed manuals. Which is why I keep steering the conversation to more murky engineering projects.

But I do want to circle back to say that I did at some point higher up gloss over the importance of things like torque and clearances. I'm not trying to say that those are things you can just intuit. Even if we could both probably dig up an old mechanic who tightens things by feel.

I don't understand the problem. You take the equipment, the manual, the guy who used to read the manual and maintain the equipment and the guy who wrote the manual and designed the equipment.

Did we mention that the manual was burned, and the guy and the guy who wrote the manual died in the explosion that burned the manual?

It was at the end of a massively destructive war of annihilation.

I think everyone has access to full shop manuals in soft copy these days. I imagine it's a lot like writing code. You remember how to write a for loop (oil change? a brakes?) but have to look up API docs for more esoteric functions (a clutch job?).

FWIW here are Nissan factory manuals in all their glory: https://www.nicoclub.com/nissan-service-manuals

Yeah I laughed my ass off reading that. Something as basic as assembling a modern carbon bike can have you make a hundreds dollars mistake but there will always be smartass like those who always know better than the people who actually engineered the stuff.

But I guess IKEA furniture is a pretty low bar to clear so there is that..

Better hope they done have one set of 50mm bolts which are mild steel, and another set that are hardened high tensive steel that aren't clearly marked and the same length!

Or you're going to have quite an adventure when you go to do your thing and a random selection of bolt heads come pinging off at you at mach 5.

Sure, but now you have another bolt and nut configuration that requires a different drill, maybe a new supplier, etc. RTFM!

Bolts and nuts in two different materials/grades are still two separate pieces of inventory to manage.

Sometimes the intuitive way is wrong and you end up damaging the piece.. ask me how I know.

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