Hacker News Reader

Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

It all depends on what you ask the factory to do.

This project seems to take its heating elements, clockwork timer and knob from a classic Dualit 2 Slice toaster - so those parts are all available off-the-shelf.

Other than that, this design needs some laser cut and bent metal, and some wooden feet. If you're able to bend the metal yourself and find some off-the-shelf feet, you could probably get the flat sheets of stainless steel laser cut and shipped for less than $100.

On the other hand, if one wanted a factory to do more demanding production processes, with more worker time or more machine setup - you're right that it would cost a good deal more.

View on HN

On the subject of Dualit toasters: I've picked several up on the street over the years, cleaned them up and replaced a few parts (heating elements and/ or timers) and for about £10 effectively had a new toaster to give away/ sell. Dualit toasters aren't the best but I wholeheartedly recomend them from the point of view of DIY repair and maintainence. Our current model is 20 years old this year.

Yeah, the knob and the lack of automated pop-out made me think that they at least deeply evaluated dualit models. I have 2 dualits. Both inherited, both well over 20 years old. There really is not much to repair with these things.

I will say the OP’s design looks cool, it’s certainly an interesting exercise and portfolio item.

The last one I picked up off the street had no problems whatsoever, except for the fact that the power cord had been cut off. Presumably someone had cut it off deliberately, which is infuriating - but hey, free toaster.

>Presumably someone had cut it off deliberately

People usually do that to specifically indicate that it has a problem of some sort, so someone else doesn't assume it's working. Although with a toaster, just the act of flipping it around to cut the cord might dislodge whatever toast bits were causing it to smoke and such in the first place.

In my experience, desperate people cut the cords off of perfectly good appliances to sell the copper as scrap. Copper wire fetches something like ~$1/lb as scrap. It's infuriating when they cut it right at the connection to the appliance, making it too time consuming to test.

A label of "Broken" or "Works" or "Missing X" is so much more helpful for appliances left out.

Good point, if it was just sitting by the curb, a metal scraper might have just cut the cord instead of taking the whole thing. I've noticed that different scrapers have different criteria for what they'll take. Some will take the whole thing and break it down or just sell it as unsorted metal and others are more particular and will pick through and just take what they know they can get the most/easiest money for.

I once had to cut the power cord off of an appliance (a dehumidifier, in this case) as part of the process to claim a recall. They company didn't want me to ship back the entire unit (annoying, but understandable given the weight of it), but they wanted to ensure that it wouldn't still be used, since it was recalled for being a fire risk.

I’m like this with Mazzer grinders. It’s a niche kink, but I’m addicted to them.

People claim they break, but I’m yet to find one that wasn’t fixed fairly easily. With the intention of selling, I sand and paint them. But then they are so beautiful I can’t.

Best are the models ‘Major’ and above. The air vents look so good. Who needs to grind 20kgs of beans per day? Not me, but I can do this 5 or 6 times over.

There are also services that can do the sheet metal bending for you if you have the cad designed. Of course shipping can get pricey, but I think it’s not prohibitively expensive.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com