Design for Maintenance

Burning oil is never nice over your hands, but this is the required sacrifice a mechanic must make every time they change the oil on some motorcycles. It’s one of those things where you either cover yourself, your bike, the floor, your helpful cat or all the above in every 5,000 miles.

The oil needs to be warm to flow well when you take the drain plug out. So you run the engine, easy. Running the engine heats up the exhaust pipes which tightly shroud the oil filter and the drain plug. You know what’s coming. So you burn your hands on the pipe undoing the drain plug, it then pours hot oil all over the hot exhaust pipe, which also acts a great sprinkler. Once you’ve treated your wounds, you then need to reach behind the hot header pipes to undo the filter, which again spues oil over the header pipes. An easy job often ends in expletives and wound dressing.

This is a classic example of the design being good for the purchase, but not for the long-term health of the customer. If you’ve ever had to dismantle half the engine to change a spark plug, then you’ll empathise.

The lack of appreciation for maintenance (after all this is the customers enduring experience) can also be seen in aircraft, ships, buildings where the maintainer has to be the size of a 5-year-old child with the reach and strength of an orangutang.

Don’t get me started with refilling the water softener with a 10kg bag of salt – in the loft!