I, too, can see how this might not come up during test, Rob. I would just hope that the manufacturer would take the inevitable complaints to heart and never make that same mistake on future products.
Hall of Fame (or shame) for sure on this, Chuck. Once the design mistake is made, I can see how it might be hard to detect. When testing the product, I can understand that removing and replacing the blub would never come up. Then, once the product is out in the market, it could be a couple years (or more) before anyone needs to replace the bulb.
There is an important corollary to Murphy's Law, an immutable Law of Nature that sits with Newton & Einstein's questions to Life, the Universe & Everything.
"If something is made easy to repair, it will never need repairing."
This was pointed out to me by Peter Walker of QUAD who made some of the most reliable gear in my industry, domestic electronics. And he meant repair at the troubleshoot & component level rather than naive swapping of modules.
My own experience has confirmed this, even in other fields.
I have no explanation other than a designer thinking about repair is also thinking about failure modes and will probably address both.
So endeth the first lesson .. on using Murphy to our advantage.
Bulbs were coming loose during shipment.. and the persons (engineer? committee?) responsible for resolving the problem decided to put a locking mechanism.. totally ignoring the customer frustration that would be caused long after the product was purchased and installed... likely because it wasn't going to be "their" problem.
What may have started as an engineering problem (poor design), became a very different kind of problem.
This is a problem of providing the people responsible with appropriate incentives and possibly resources to resolve the original problem completely and correctly. Likely related to same poor management of the original engineering.
Just saying it isn't all related to some engineer's bad choices.
I have often been in meetings (20+ people/ 4 countries) where the engineer's obvious (best) choice for resolving a problem on a product, is often discounted or ignored by management... only to be resolved a year or so later with another poor fix.
There is a reason why so many relate to "Dilbert" cartoons.
From reading this site and others, consumer appliances seem to be rife with repair and maintanence problems. There seems to be very little awareness of this among consumers (I know I don't ask about it when shopping for an appliance, and I should know better). Without market pressure, I doubt the manufacturers will spend any effort on it.
I've replaced light bulbs in general before when the base was tightly glued to its threaded socket. After breaking and removing the bulb, I would grab the top lip of the metal base with needle nose pliers and twist it out. Of course, I'd disconnect the electricity just in case, even though the socket is supposed to be the ground. Also, I didn't trust the glass bulb not to break even if wrapped by a heavy cloth.
Let's go back a step. I want to be able to see what I am cooking, so there needs to be a light somewhere. Since the interior of the oven is liable to sputtering fat, it would make sense for that to be totally sealed. Why should the light bulb not be inserted from outside the oven? OK it would be nice not to have to pull the whole unit forward to get access, so maybe the bulb should not be inserted from the rear, but the present design is a design to fail.
A light-pipe should be easy and cheap to guide the light from an accessible bulb to where the light is needed. That could be glass or plastic, or a metal lined hollow tube, which is the way hallways can be illuminated through the attic. Lots of options, up to the designer to choose one, anything is better than the arrangement described.
I cannot help but wonder whether there was a tab to be pressed before one spins off the vover glass. I also cannot help but wonder whether that's clearly explained in the manual.
I AGREE wholeheartedly with CRITIC's criticism. As has been commented previously, the descriptions of faulty OR poor design are not always very well transferred from the blogger's mind to the written word. Add in the different colloquialisms from our extra-American readers and that spells a recipe for incomprehension.
I read this piece twice, and still wasn't sure of the mechanical problem. Standard kitchen stove/oven appliances here are mostly designed with ( an appliance) bulb in a socket @ the rear of the compartment area. A couple of self-tapping (sheetmetal) screws, and the glass cover comes off for access to the atandard A-19 style bulb.
Maybe the Europeans with their reams & reams of design criteria (IEC, VDE, NEMKO, DEMKO, FEMKO, etal!) are experiencing the fruits of all this regulation in the name of safety!
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