[sdiy] The wages of buying cheap ass components...

[Magnus Danielson]

From: James Patchell <patchell at cox.net>
Subject: [sdiy] The wages of buying cheap ass components...
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 21:01:41 -0700
Message-ID: <5.2.1.1.2.20040917205821.00b18b60 at pop.west.cox.net>

Jim,

> Well, guess I made a bad decision when I purchased toggle switches from 
> Jameco.  Digikey or mouser sold them for significantly more...however, the 
> ones I got from Jameco, about 6 of the 128 in my logic module are NFG...I 
> will have to replace them...which ticks me off ....but, you get what you 
> pay for...I guess...I will have to investigate further in trying to locate 
> reasonable priced switches (50 cents each vs $2+ each seemed too good to 
> pass up...).

It's expensive to be a cheap-ass!

When you buy better quality stuff you invest in better quality. If you where to
look on this from a reliability and life-cycle economics point of view it would
give you a totally different view on what is "high price" and "low price".

Personally I tend to go towards making one good investment rather than a number
of poor investments, since they need servicing in the end. Also, considering
that I have virtually no time to service anything that means that it can stay
non-functional for years, and I get the dissatisfaction of having it broken all
that time. Now that is a poor investment. When I do "quick and dirties" I say
that this is a poor solution, but I needed it and it needs to be redone, so 
when it fails I say it was high time anyway and get the oppertunity to do it
right, but I don't want too much of that since I don't have the time and it has
already set me back to buy the cheap one to start with!

But then, some stuff is overpriced, and that's not what I long for. Part of a
quality concept is finding the right components for that application so it will
give the needed performance over the needed life-span.

We talk too little about life-cycle aspects of gear. It has a number of 
interesting aspects people tend to forget.

Cheers,
Magnus