5mo ago

The secret ingredient is crime

156 comments

You can save so much money with CAD if you neither factor in your time to actually learn it or the cost of the printer itself.
Makes crime even better in comparison.
- The saving on the knob alone would pay a reasonable chunk of a basic but useful printer. Use it for a few more things and you'll be in the black even ignoring the more fun things you might do. The time it takes to learn a CAD system can also be fun if you enjoy that sort of thing.
  
  I'm proof. My first printer is currently worth like $25. Maker Select V2. Still works great. I learned FreeCAD and enjoyed every minute.
- Here in Canada every major library I've been to has a 3D printer you can use, either for free if you bring your own filament, or for a very small fee to use theirs. I live in a small town of 70,000 people and our public library has a 3D printer.
  
  I would just like to say that 70k people isn't a small town. I live in a town with 9k people in it. Now that's a small town.
- There are places which will print out your model for a small fee on their own printer. There are even places which will allow you to use their printer if you come with your own filament (for example makerspaces) and maybe donate a little bit to support them.
  As for CAD itself, there's a nonzero chance that someone already designed that part for themselves and you can download a ready model. If not, then by designing it yourself you're acquiring a skill that can be useful again in the future and you can share that model with others to get that warm fuzzy feeling that you've helped strangers who had the same problem.
- My printer has saved me more than its cost in useful stuff I have printed.
- I have wasted a bunch of time making things, but like woodworking or similar trades, it's fun and rewarding.
  
  Hence, why it's not "wasted" time.
- Learning a new and useful skill is not "wasting" time at all.
  
  You can't put that in quotation marks like I ever said something about wasting time. You just have to include all that time in your cost calculation.
- Someone else I know got a printer and got bored printing with it after a bit and said I can print on it whenever if I toss them a roll of material every now and then.
  I ended up finding all kinds of useful things to print. I made a connection piece for a sink that had a garbage disposal removed when I couldn't find the fitting anywhere and after 3 years it's holding up fine. I made a set of cams for a washer that randomly stopped spinning one day and those have been working nicely. Just a bunch of times it ended up coming in handy.

I learned this from my dad... When I was young, we had a plumbing leak on a Sunday night, p-trap was leaking. All places were closed, so he went to a McDonald's bathroom and stole theirs to replace ours.
20 something years later, my faucet was leaking. It was a discontinued model from a brand owned by home Depot, though they still had the display model up. Remembering what my pa did, I took the display model apart and took what I needed.
- lmaooo that's why bathrooms in those places now have the minimal setup to work properly. Good to know that I can be part of the change.
- From this story alone I have several ideas of what your accent is, also this is the type of shit my kin would pull. I'm more of a "how many parts can I daisy chain while maintaining no leakage, my record is 12 which was the minimum needed. I hope an actual plumber never looks at my bathtub plumbing cause the faucet is certainly doing things much like my computers cable management.
  
  I am interested in what you assume me accent be, though I'll give ya some hints and you tell me where I'm from...
  My wife teases my pronunciation of butter and water as they come out as "budder" and "wooder", house roofs as "woofs", and I call water creeks "cricks". She also laughs at me when I get angry \ passionate as I become louder and sound like "one of those Italian gangsters from the old bugs Bunny cartoons". And she'll repeat back to me, exaggerated, "whaddya talkin about?!" as I seem to ask her that before every debate...

Why are people breaking/losing knobs on their ranges in the first place? I’ve never done that in 4 decades. Seems like an extremely unlikely thing to do.
- I would have said the same thing but the enshitification isn't just for the web anymore - I had a 'quality' name brand refrigerator and snapped the drawer down the front because I pulled on it a little too hard. Those things used to be bulletproof but now they're flimsy crap.
  
  Yep happen to our fridge. Not mention it quit working after 2 years of use. Now buy mine off FB market place. Why bother buying new.
- Enshittification is probably a large part. However, I can see it.
  Our's are plastic, 25 years old, and look like crap. Wash them all you want, they just look dirty all the time. I'd replace them except for the absurd cost for a piece of molded ABS.
  I take them off to wash them. I can imagine someone having an accident with one, like washing them in dishwasher and having one fall down onto a heating element. Those are big, but our's are small enough to get knocked down onto the garbage disposal - it would't be easy, and would require an unusual sequence is events, but I've fucked up even more unlikely sequences of events in my life.
  I really wish I could get decent aluminum replacements for our's; it wouldn't make the range any newer, but it'd make it look nicer than the black plastic shit that it came with.
  
  Aluminum casting is fun and cheap.
- I was thinking the same thing? Who are these animals that somehow destroy a metal knob on a commercial-style $8000 Bosch oven that is made of stainless steel?!
  
  My only guess is that they have children who steal the knobs and flush them down the toilet or something. But the knobs on those high end models are pretty huge which means they would probably get stuck and refuse to flush down.
  
  Those knobs probably aren’t metal, but plastic with a metal plating.
- People with toddlers often keep the knobs off as a form of baby proofing, when the kiddos are tall enough to reach but not old enough to listen. It's then easy to lose a knob that isn't in the right place.
  
  I completely forgot until now that my daughter used to steal the knob from our dishwasher on a near daily basis. I remember confiscating it one morning and accidentally bringing it to work in my pocket.
  
  Oh, that's brilliant! I guess its better to lose it all together than to give a toddler access to fire/a really hot thing
  
  Yep. They also sell childproof knob covers for them, you have to pop open the lid to reach them.
  I'm embarrassed it took a few times of the toddlers walking off with the knobs inside the covers before we realized we could just... not leave the knobs on. I blame the fact that they never slept more than 90 minutes at a time...
  
  I think if you have young children you shouldn’t have a high end range like this (especially gas). A standard range with the knobs at the back where they’re much harder to reach would be a lot safer.
- Some guy once broke into my brother's backyard and stole the lid to his BBQ. Just the lid.
  
  Sounds like a tweaker preparing to join a Roman Phalanx
- You can accidentally hit a knob and break it while moving the appliance itself. As for losing them, sometimes you knock one loose and it rolls under the fridge, and it's not worth the effort of moving a large appliance out of its nook just to get the knob back. Shit happens.
  Maybe you were just a miracle child who never has accidents. Who knows?
  
  I have never had a range where the knobs are at the front, so that’s probably part of it. They’re much safer at the back.
- Ours is a cheap model, but the knobs are held on with a plastic housing inside the knob similar to that middle plastic tube that holds keycaps center on keyboards. Im constantly worried its going to break when i take them off to clean.
- Kinda depends on your environment, a lot of plastics are susceptible to degrading in certain temperatures, humidity levels, or especially from being left in direct sunlight.

While I don't do it myself, I don't consider stealing from big name stores theft and am, actually, completely morally fine with it. Will not report somebody stealing even if I see them.
- The day big corporations stop stealing from the workers is the day I care about stealing from them. That day will not come.
- Let's not forget the rampant wage theft across the entirety of the US, much less the ongoing grift they're pulling on its citizens re: "shoplifting", etc. being the big scary Evil — when wage theft stats completely destroy the charts in comparison to all other commercial/consumer theft, including misappropriation by employees! 😡
  TL;DR: Stealing from big corps isn't theft. It's a civic duty, at this point.

I'd like to take this opportunity to say sorry to all the people that ended up buying the WD-40s I stole the straw off of.
- Man, i mean while we're fessing up to these things...
  If you bought a PC gamer magazine from Barnes and noble back in like 2004 and the demo disc was missing, I'm so sorry.
- Oh, are we confessing to ~~minor~~ thefts? Let's see, what's beyond 7 years old...
  A Hogwarts robe clip from a Halloween costume
  $12 in expired powerbars
  About $200 in assorted mediocre liquor from some wedding
  4 posters from bus stops for the Scooby-Doo movie
  A 1999 Ford Explorer
  7 Playboys and a bag of old coins
  97 million kisses from my missus
  (Edit: the largest thefts are the kisses)
  
  I'm telling the missus that you think her kisses are only minor theft worthy!
  
  I used to shoplift handheld electronic games, stuff like Electronic Quarterback by Coleco. I was a paper boy and I would walk into stores with my bag around my shoulder and just grab games off the counter and slip them in the bag. What blows my mind now is that this was even possible - this was the late 1970s and apparently I was something of an innovator because the stores never suspected anything or searched kids, and the electronic games were just sitting out on counters. It wasn't long after this that stores started only allowing two kids into the store at a time and shit like that, and searching them when they left.
  You're welcome, subsequent generations of would-be shoplifters! You'll never know just how fucking easy we had it.
  
  A Hogwarts robe clip from a Halloween costume
  Shame on you
- I once ate the baby carrots from the grocery store, right off the display. I am not sorry about it.
  
  I don't think there's anything in that story to be sorry about.

Had to read like 50 comments and nobody pointed out you can just buy a generic knob for like $1. Hell your used building center would be 50 cents. WTF world do we live in where the solution is CAD and 3D printing for something so trivial. It's like using a nuclear bomb to kill an ant nest.
- Once you have the printer and the knowhow, it takes like 5 minutes to draw and 20 minutes to print at a cost of like 0.10 €
  It takes longer to go to a location and buy it at a much higher cost. So why should you?
  
  Its also something you built with your hands and brain. There are few things which feel as good.
- Look dude, fuck those ants.

I did a similar thing, not because my knob broke though, I just didn't like the heiroglyphics bosch designed 😅
- ßake? Must be Japanese.
  
  huh?
- From a cost-savings perspective it's actually kind of genius, cause now they don't have to localize the text for multiple countries. Just produce one stove, throw a °C/°F setting on the display for the Americans, and profit.

Both are appropriate responses to the bullshit that is oven knobs.

this.
bought a ratchet belt from a large box store. comfortable. but it needs 2 tiny screws what will eventually fall off making it garbage.
so whenever that happens, I go to that store with a precision screwdriver in my pocket, and take a screw from a new belt. given that it's too late to get it exchanged.
did that a couple of times until I realised a drop of cyanoacrylate will stop them from falling off.
ain't going to buy the whole product because they didn't test their products and left it to me to fix them
- It’s like that with sooooo much stuff these days! Quality assurance became a thing of the past as of the late first decade in 2000. They just don’t care. Make shit to die in a week or a month but again. Rinse repeat. If you have the skills to make parts with a 3D printer that’s an awesome solution.
- There is a brand of glue called Loctite that sells popular thread locking glues for this exact purpose and works very well. They make different strength adhesives for different applications, all their thread-locking glues start with code '2'. The common ones for general use around the home for use with small screws / nuts & bolts and removal with hand tools is 222 / 242 / 243 (higher number, larger screw/bolt gauge width).
  Just adding this info for anyone else looking for a similar solution.
  
  yhea, that's the exact glue i mentioned.
  just didn't want to use any brand name.

theres was a weird scratch on the shower box when i bought it from obi. turns out somebody stole the drain cover cause their box had none...so i went back and stole a new cover from a new box. this is probably a domino effect.

I'm so glad I learned THEFT
- I know right? They need to teach it in schools!
  
  Own experience: If you hang out with the right group of kids in highschool you can learn how to walk out of a Kaufland with entire liquor bottles without paying. So they kinda teach it in schools.

My secret trick?
I've been using the same stove for a quarter of a century. Was here when I moved in.
The trick is: the knobs don't come off. (In the extremely unlikely chance they might come off, I, like, just put 'em back in. I guess. Not that it happens!)
Looks like they don't build them like they used to!
- Kids today just don't know the joys of sticking paperclips into the knob-less posts and then trying to guess what each stop on the knob does.
- They do build them like they used to.
  But if your devices had broken down in the past like all the other devices from that time, you wouldn't be telling this story. Classic survivorship bias.

Knob from your crush? Priceless.

I like this because then the display is broken in the same way it will actually break when someone buys it. It's like warning others of the issue. It's really a public service when you think about it lol
- That's actually hilarious, i never thought about that when i see missing parts in stores.
- Maybe that's what happened to the original knob. Years ago someone bought a stove and the knob broke so they stole their neighbours as a replacement, thus starting a tit for tat, reciprocal crime wave that swept the nation.

Or do the lazy thing, and just keep borrowing other knobs.

Why not both. 3D print one and swap them at Home Depot. Or heck 3D print all of them, replace them all, keep the one you need and sell the rest on eBay. If they all match, I doubt Home Depot would even notice.
- Some poor sucker is going to eventually buy the display model tho
  
  They'll get an even better deal then given the missing knobs! Or the store will just foot the bill for the replacement knob that they can probably get for less than the consumer price
  
  Well they're available on eBay...

LG wants me to pay $45 for a single official replacement.
Amazon has a whole set for $14.

I recently re-did my kitchen floor with 1' square peel-and-stick vinyl tiles. After buying four boxes (30 tiles each at $45 a pop), I ended up exactly one tile short. I was sorely tempted to go back to Home Despot and slip one tile out of a box - obviously people do this a lot there since there are always open boxes in the tile section. In the end I just pieced the last tile out of scrap bits, in a spot where it really wasn't obvious. I don't need a fucking shoplifting charge at this stage of my life.

Could someone point me in the right direction to get started on projects like this? Specifically I have an old Emerson CRT that the volume/power knob is missing on and it's impossible to find an OEM replacement. I've been dreaming about getting into 3D printing to print my own, but I don't know where to even begin considering I would need the exact dimensions of the D shaft and then to model something. Appreciate any help, thank you in advance <3
- Back in the day, that was solved with a vice grips. This is because vice grips are the wrong tool for everything, but the right tool for not having to go find the right tool.
  
  I use needle nose multiple times a week in this TV! Haha
- The first time I took on modelling a replacement part, I took as many measurements with a caliper as I could, fired up Fusion 360 and just went for it with no prior experience. It is actually really intuitive and all you need to do is visualize how simple shapes like circles and squares can be used to construct the object. Basically, don't be scared of starting out and try to break down the object into simple and approachable parts.
  My first object was a kind of transmission cog, so a very cylindrical object, much like yours. All you really should need is the diameters of different "circles" comprising the model and the cylinder heights.
  
  This sounds like a great path for me, I love driving in head first. I appreciate you!
  
  There are lots of things I would like to fabricate I just suck at 3D software. Fusion 360 easy?
- Once you have a printer, there are repositories online with models for just about anything. I've used Printables, and Thingiverse is another option. Someone may have already solved your problem by posting a usable model, just need to print your own part. Otherwise you can design one. Been using Solid Edge from Siemens, they have a free version for makers. Also used FreeCAD in the past, which worked, but wasn't happy with it. It now has a 1.0 release though, so probably worth trying out. They're going to require spending some hours learning to do designs properly, but once you figure it out you can sketch up all kinds of great things. I love being able to send my parts through the slicer software, then over to the printer, and out comes what I want. Learning CAD, or modeling software like Blender, gives you a lot more options with your printer.
  
  Appreciate the info, I'm stoked to start learning!
- Get yourself some cheap calipers, radius measure, etc from Amazon. You don't need to spend a million dollars for some basic instruments. This will help you measure things you find in the real world.
  For CAD, if you want a really easy on-ramp, try using "Tinkercad". They have a free option for users and there are lots of people who have made really usable replacement parts for things. If you end up really liking it, there are more powerful and complex CAD programs out there, but this will get you a friendly start without spending a lot of money.
  If you have problems on the printer end, you can export your Tinkercad projects and send them to "Shapeways" (or other vendors) who will take your CAD file and return a 3D print in the mail. You can also buy your own 3D printer if you wish.
  That should get you started, and if you pull all 3 of these threads, you will be able to start reproducing things around your house. Have fun!
- There's https://lemmy.world/c/3dprinting where you could get more answers. The yt channel TeachingTech has some good series on getting into various parts of it (basics of printing, part design, machine maintenance, etc.). There are many other resources.
  
  I appreciate the links! I'll do some learning 😁
- Honestly, if you only have that one specific application in mind, might be more cost/time-effective for you to pay someone else to 3D print/ship the part for you, instead of getting into all that yourself just for the one use case.
  
  I've had that thought too, but I'm a tinkerer and I dream of printing parts for my random protects. I appreciate the suggestion though!

With free returns and having a size difference in my feet I may (or may not) order 2 different sizes of the same shoe and end up returning one.
- The same but for my broken Xbox, after a little sticker art.

I though you needed consent to put sometimes knob in you pocket ...

There was this one time when I needed to replace a specific part of a dog bike trailer. I contacted the company: the creator of the trailer, who happened to live in my neighbourhood came to my place to give me a piece from the prototype he still had in his workshop. Shop local!

if everyone is confessing: Back in my first year in Uni, I and buddy stole a cpu and monitor from storage, not from computer lab, just from storage which was scheduled to get replaced. It was a HP business desktop set from 2009. Fairly spec'd
Buddy wanted a second monitor and I wanted to host some fun sfw websites on lan. Some years later, it now works as my home server with some cheap upgrades.
Oh I also nicked stuff from e-waste dumps: psu's, routers, switchs, electronic trinkets from the labs(I asked lab attendants and they said they don't care)
My uni didn't allow us to use the labs in our free time, and I learned a lot!
- Taking from e-waste dump isn’t a crime it’s quite the opposite. If you can make use of it instead of it poisoning the ground, kudos!
  
  crimes don't care about "ethics"

Or you just do the most practical thing and order a $2 replacement from Amazon/Aliexpress
- How much time it takes for a regular cad user to draw such a knob?
  
  Lol "regular CAD user"
  
  Like 5 minutes.
  It is basically 2 rings and a plate with some text on.
  
  I spent less than an hour to design these guards for our stove, and most of the time was on how it looked. I wanted it to be functional, but not look too out of place.
  https://www.printables.com/model/278668-stove-knob-guard

Always fun drawing them up in Tinkercad.

You can dip it in shiny paint too. Its not stainless steel but its good enough
- No worries, the OEM ones aren't stainless steel, either. They're "stainless appearance," i.e. plastic with a thin veneer of cheesy chrome plating that's about one molecule thick.
  You can electroplate 3D prints by using a basecoat of conductive spraypaint, and then the limit of the thickness of your plating is only really limited by your patience. Nickel is quite easy to do at home.
  
  I quite like electroplating with titanium. Can vary the voltage for some great colors too.

My 0$ knob

Ahhh priceless

I need to figure out how to do cad/3d printing, cuz I'm begining to lose control! Well, I've already lost CTRL on both sides of my keyboard because the keycap sleeve broke and it constantly falls off the switch (cherry mx red).

Deluge of personal stories:

Yeah, I did that for a decorative rim for the overflow hole for a sink. I mean the stealing part.

I feel like this parallels the story about spending of $10 million to research and develop a Space Pen vs just using pencils.
- The problem with pencils is that in space broken graphite floats around easily and is conductive. A conductive powder floating into something electronic in a pressurized oxygen rich environment is no bueno.
  
  Graphite powder is also quite flammable isn't it?
- Not that BS story again...
  https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/the-write-stuff/

156 comments