And this is the kind of aussie ingenuity that is sometimes missed by the world. Because of resource and distance, sometimes the battler needs to think creatively and repurpose what is available.
Sadly as we pivot to a pure consumer society of plenty this ingenuity is no longer a necessity. (China is closer to Australia than US. Cheaper consumer goods, sometimes cheap ($<10) every day mfg goods are cheaper in AU vs US).
As an Austrlaian living in North America, this is something I feel on a daily basis.
When somethings stops working, needs repair, or just some attention, it boggles my mind when my suggestions of repair and improvise are completely ignored in favor of "order a new one with overnight shipping".
I personally derive great satisfaction from fixing the stuff I rely on, and it's working out really well for me now I'm traveling through West Africa.
I was in my late twenties before I started programming professionally. Always had super crappy jobs before that, and grew up without a lot of money, so I ended up with a fix-all-the-things mindset. I'd think something like "well, I don't have hundreds of dollars to get my truck's ignition fixed. Guess it's time to learn how ignition systems work and fix it myself before I need to goto work on monday."
It could be super stressful, but I appreciate knowing those things now that I could afford to ignore them if I wanted to.
I actually ended up getting a side job working for a stage magician because I worked for the moving company that moved his stuff. I overheard them talking about a motorcycle they used in a trick, and how it wasn't working. I told them how they could fix it and they asked if I wanted to make some extra cash fixing other tricks, which by their nature were all cobbled together one-offs.
It probably varies depending upon your social circles. Plenty of North Americans repair and improvise, especially those not in dense urban areas. Americans may love their disposable consumer goods but I wouldn't write of their ability to adapt and improvise just yet!
If you get out into the country (especially the mountain areas which have always bread independence) you'll see similar mentality. That to is going away in favor of a more throw away society but for the time being you still have a lot of tinkerers and rural-renaissance people (farmer/welder/machinist/etc).
> Sadly as we pivot to a pure consumer society of plenty this ingenuity is no longer a necessity
I guess the necessity is still there but often you can't do anything because most products contain way to much electronics.
The only thing you needed to fix an old farm tractor was a hammer, a piece of pipe and a screwdriver. But nowadays you need to study computer science before you can get such a thing running again... Or look at old TVs or audio equipment. Back in the day you could repair them yourself but nowadays it's full of non-servicable SMD parts.
It's just a matter of having the right tools, and in most cases you don't need anything expensive. A cheap Chinese hot-air rework station, some flux, and tweezers will let you service a lot of those "non-servicable" parts. People tend to overestimate the difficulty of surface mount soldering simply because the parts are small. In many cases it's actually easier than through hole because surface tension does so much of the work for you. You don't need perfect alignment. BGAs are admittedly more difficult but even those can be replaced with cheap/improvised tools if you're sufficiently dedicated. In the old days tools were more expensive and we didn't have easily accessible video tutorials for most common repairs. I think a bigger reason for the decline of repair is the lower costs of replacement products.
A soldering station isn't the problem, but you don't want to do SMD with a cheap chinese one you'll ruin your components if the temp control is off.
The problem is that it's nearly impossible to get schematics for most devices, and I'm not even talking about legally since you'll have to do it illegally for virtually any device any how.
Many SMD components are not marked at all, which means that if some tiny SMD component gets fried you can't even know what it was for sure not to mention it's value without having another board to measure.
Not to mention that with 402 and 603 sized packages becoming more and more common goodluck soldering those at home even with professional kits, these are 0.4MM packages, sure 1608 and even 1005 are doable by a steady hand but anything smaller and you likely won't even be able to see the damage on the board.
And without schematics you can't really debug anything, you might be able to reverse some of the boards but anything beyond 2-3 layers is impossible to RE by hand without an x-ray scattering machine.
And then we get into active components and custom chips which are either impossible to get hold off without cannibalization or would cost you more to buy even in bulk on digikey or any other store than the devices you attempt to fix.
Sure a 2000$ Macbook is worth a 400$ fix, but a 50$ controller board doesn't.
Hot air guns don't need particularly precise temperature control. They apply diffuse and gentle heat, so you really just need to watch the state of the solder. I've done good work on difficult boards with a non-calibrated reflow gun. With a bit of kapton tape, you really have to try hard to damage the board.
0603s are easily solderable with an iron and an Optivisor. There's a knack to 0402s, but they're entirely manageable. Hot tweezers make the job far easier, but it's perfectly manageable with a decent iron and a steady hand. Smartphone repairers are now often dealing with 01005 parts, which are barely visible to the naked eye. As mrob suggests, working with SMDs is often easier than PTH if you know the proper techniques.
A lack of schematics is a problem, but that problem has existed for decades. The most common repairs are broken connectors and failed electrolytics, for which no schematics are required. Schematics for popular smartphones, tablets and laptops are readily available; ZXW make a superb interactive schematic package that massively simplifies the fault finding process.
I think it's very much swings and roundabouts. Some things are more difficult than they used to be, but the tools and information are far more accessible. There are thousands of excellent tutorials on YouTube demonstrating practically every aspect of electronics repair. Test equipment has become dirt cheap. Most components are readily available; for those that aren't, eBay's "spares or repair" listings are a treasure trove.
In my opinion, repair is less common simply because consumer electronics have become so cheap relative to the labor needed to repair them. The number of repairs that are economically viable has dwindled as prices have fallen. By the time something has failed, the odds are fairly good that it has been rendered obsolete.
I dont think wanting to have the option to repair something deserves such ridicule, from my experience working in fridges, washing machines etc back in the early 2000s one of the biggest complaints was it was uneconomical to repair these items anymore. Im not sure why as a society we have moved so far into the mentality of replace over repair.
I don't say it's a problem, I'm was actually making an argument that fixing modern equipment isn't easy, and you need considerably more things than just a cheap soldering station with a hot air gun.
You don't even need a hot-air rework station. A normal hot-air gun will work if you give it a nozzle (hose fastener and a thin sheet of metal folded over will work in a jiffy)
This is still a common thing. Over the last 5 years, I've opened up my dryer and my dishwasher to fix up problems with them, and both included schematics. Both are about 10 years old.
This was useful in the case of the dryer -- I was trying to disable the buzzer that unhelpfully wakes me up to tell me that my clothes are dry, and the schematic pointed the way to the right circuit to clip.
It was less useful in the case of the dishwasher, as the root cause was user error. But, the schematics were there, nonetheless.
White appliances tend to include some basic schematics for the high power components e.g. the main switch is connected to the valve and the pump and so and so.
But there are still no schematics for the logic boards which is what tends to die more often than the solenoid that controls the water intake valve for example, and those logic boards are either impossible to get or cost as much as a new dishwasher or a washing machine.
I have several old VCRs, when they break I just throw it on the pile and get another from the thrift store for about $20. I noticed one day that although electronics of the VCRs vary widely, the spinning heads all seem the same. So I had one with a damaged head, replaced it with a head from another one (different brand, different electronics) that was broken in another way, and it worked perfectly.
Misleading headline - according to the article body itself, the tanks were used as bulldozers in the immediate post-war period when they were cheaper than purpose-made bulldozers. What's going on now is that farmers that own tanks from that period are acquiring, restoring, maintaining, and running them in their original military configurations for historical reasons.
On the History (haha) Channel show Ax Men, there was one season were one of the crews was using a yarder rig mounted on an old M4 Sherman chassis. My dad has also told me some stories about converted surplus tanks used as bulldozers and half-tracks skidders back when he was starting out logging in the 70s, before there was a lot of really specialized equipment.
Australia is kind of interesting in that it has a lot of preconditions for success (relatively high IQ & conscientiousness, high levels of social cohesion, stable governing institutions, good education, high social & human capital in general) but just an enormously spread-out geography, both internally and externally, and a relatively tiny population.
It ends up with a really odd economic dynamic where they have to leverage their internal resources because, eg, it's simply too much of a PITA to get a particular rare part shipped from a hemisphere away (from a supplier that isn't really set up to routinely ship to them anyway because it's not a huge market), and yet they actually end up being pretty good at it.
well, that wasn't as alarming as "one down the shed there that'll use 13 litres of petrol every hundred yards." I hope it is moving a lot of dirt in those 100 yards.
Tractors -> Tanks (see Christie selling M1931s to the Soviets after the US military passed on them, shipped as the less suspicious "agricultural farm tractors")
So not inconceivable to turn them back into tractors. In fact, if you shed a lot of the armor, you'd probably have a pretty decently performing vehicle, especially for the price.
The armor isn't a bad thing, generally with tractors the heavier the better. It's really common to have tires filled with fluid and wheel weights for traction and stability reasons.
Also with the posts above mentioning aussie ingenuity I recently found our old farm sale video, over 200 vehicles, many of which were hand built ranging from big tractors to 90+ft seekers. Crazy what they built back then on-site.
Gruesome factoid: Balls and chains were a common cannon load for clearing infantry, ship sails and rigging, and other diffuse targets. So this was arguably a straightforward adaptation.
Not really, I think. There's no good example of scale that I can find, but those balls and chains look far too large to fit in a naval gun or a field piece, and chain shot, as a specialist dismasting load, went out with the Age of Sail in any case. (And certainly you wouldn't want to use it in anything remotely like a modern naval gun! It'd be hell on the rifling, and you can't just rebore a five-inch gun the way you can Pappy's .308.) For dealing with infantry at close range, you'd be better off with chain than with nothing, but given your druthers you'd have no reason not to prefer grape or especially canister shot, both of which are designed for specifically that purpose and would be far more effective at it.
That said, if a citation exists for the idea that this kind of drag was developed from or inspired by naval chain, I'd be most interested to see it.
Sadly as we pivot to a pure consumer society of plenty this ingenuity is no longer a necessity. (China is closer to Australia than US. Cheaper consumer goods, sometimes cheap ($<10) every day mfg goods are cheaper in AU vs US).