The door latch on my small, inexpensive (inexpensive is really no excuse) GE model JES738WJ 01 microwave oven sticks when it gets hot from long usage or when the temperature in the kitchen reaches the high 80s. This is the common pushbutton door release mechanism. When it sticks, you have to pull on the door while pushing the release button in to get the door open.
A little eyeball investigation revealed that the door latch consists of a couple of spring-loaded hooks on the door which engage a couple of latch pawls on/in the body of the oven. The latch pawls are fixed. The release button opens the door by lifting the hooks so they clear the latch pawls. The problem is, it only lifts the bottom hook. The top hook is supposed to follow the bottom hook and allow the door to open.
Apparently, (I haven't yet bothered to tear the door apart) the two hooks are molded in one piece out of plastic. The hooks and their connecting part are relatively thin. When the bottom hook is lifted by the button mechanism, the entire hook assembly flexes slightly. The spring is apparently at the top of the upper hook.
At normal room temperature, the plastic is rigid enough so that the upper hook follows the lower and the door is unlatched. But when the temperature rises -- due to room ambient temperature above 80F or heavy oven usage -- the hook assembly loses its rigidity and bends. The lower hook is released by the positive lifting action of the release button, but the upper hook, due to the flexing of the now-warm plastic, does not follow sufficiently to allow the door to open.
The simple fix (for the user) would be to file 30 thou to 50 thou off the top hook, which will probably work. But that shouldn't be necessary. Maybe monkeys didn't make my microwave oven, but they sure did design it!
This entry was submitted by Brooks Lyman and edited by Rob Spiegel.
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I still use my old Amana. It was a LOT more expensive than $50, back in 1981 - but it has never failed, and I've only replaced the light bulb once to boot. I've never noticed the current draw, but maybe it's always been on a lightly used circuit. I like to think that the defense company that once owned it put the high-rel design and mfg effort into it that made it so expensive, and maybe that's why it turned out to be an incredible money loser for them. Four children have abused this item (and the youngest will turn 20 this year). I'm probably risking the curse by saying this, but it will probably outlast me.....unless the government outlaws it for some reason.
I agree that quality is affected by business decisions, but citing the desire to maximize profits means your set includes all companies, so that doesn't explain why some of those companies make bad decisions and others don't. The point about offshoring is that once that started, it became a lot tougher to manage all the details, including quality assurance, for multiple reasons, many of which are obvious. That's still the case, at least for many areas of Asia, to the point that it spurred the reverse trend, onshoring. And I drive Asian cars, too: specifically, Japanese cars. The Japanese are known for very high quality standards, in fact, better than in the US. They listened to Deming going on about TQM and Six Sigma long before we did.
I drive an Asian made car without issues for 12 years now while my neighbor is on his third US made Ford. We drive about the same amount. Maybe he just got a lemon twice in a row, but quality is a matter of business decisions, not production location. Offshoring is mainly done to make use of lower labor costs, not for the sake of producing junk.
I disagree. The desire to maximize profits is a constant, not a variable. But most consumer products sold in the US are now made in Asia. Offshoring has a lot to do with the quality problem because of the difficulty of managing quality control and other details at a distance. This has been a well-known, ongoing problem in both products and services ever since this trend began in the 80s.
Offshoring or outsourcing has less to do with it than maximizing profits does. A cheaper plastic, a thinner pin, even if it only saves a 10th of a cent on each item. It doesn't matter who or where the product is assembled. I've came across a lot of garbage 'Made in USA', so that doesn't mean much.
Tool_maker, thanks for the idea on where to find older, used appliances. Thankfully, I don't need them yet, but had started wondering where I could find them when I do. And that's a really good point about the dangers of reworking the latch: you could fry a lot more than your food if doing so caused leakage.
Ann, I agree with your analogy inexpensive etc. I have read so many laments in this Made By Monkeys about applliances that it scares me about buying new. As a result I am ever vigilantly on the look out for appliances at estate sales. We have 6 micowaves (home, office, lake house and all three kids' homes) all purchased at estate sales. None cost more than $25 and all perform well.
As for the faulty latch, I would hesitate to rework the closing mechanism. One of our customers makes commercial grade microwaves and I was shocked at the amount of engineering and testing that goes into the design to assure there is no leakage before it is allowed onto the market.
What bugs me is that the cheapest appliances used to work just fine and last a long time; they just didn't have the bells and whistles of the more expensive models. That was before both offshoring/outsourcing and before the throwaway consumer product concept really took hold. Now you have to buy high end on many appliances just to get them to work right and for a decent period of time. Offshored/.outsourced doesn't have to mean poor quality: but it often means poor oversight, resulting in the same thing.
Inexpensive does sometimes mean poor quality, and it is sound reasoning that a product costs less should be inferior and have a shorter life span than a more expensive model, but sometimes this is not the case. As a kid, I wanted to new pair of fishing pliers. My choices were either $3 for a needlenose set in the hardware aisle or $7 for needle nose pliers in the fishing aisle that were marketed to be made exclusively for fishing use. They were hyped to be especially water resistant and designed to easily cut nylon line. I paid the $7 and got the better pliers. The first fishing trip went great, but before going out on the second trip, the pliers had already rusted so bad that they could not close properly, and the cutting section had serious dings from cutting line. I had to go back to the store and buy the hardware pliers that I still have 30 years later. Sometimes the higher cost only pays for the name.
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