Becos Beko

Our existing washing machine has stopped working (more on that elsewhere). As a fix it was decided to buy a cheap second-hand spare off Facebook Marketplace to fill the gap. For £50 enter a Beko WTL74051W washing machine. Beko is a Turkish brand (the machine was made in Turkey) of Arçelik A.Ş. which also owns Grundig, Indesit, Hotpoint, Arctic, Ariston, Leisure and Blomberg. They aren't great machines, but have a reasonably good reputation for being cheap and cheerful (just not in terms of energy efficiency).

Beko WTL74051W
Washing Machine

This particular one came from under a tarp in someone's back yard, but it didn't look too bad (and was being bought from a friend of the Major's). Unfortunately the whole process was completed in a bit of a rush and I forgot to look at it properly. I didn't even spin the cylinder to make sure the bearings were OK, 😟. Once it was on the van I did notice that underside looked OK, if a bit cobwebby. But, stupidly, the fact that one of the feet was missing passed me by.

Wonky washer

The vendor couldn't find the original foot. So now there are two broken washing machines in the house 😞.

Beko washing machine underside showing
foot placement inside and out (circled)

On inspection the feet are screw-threaded with a plastic lock nut and fit into a press-moulded tapped socket made from the case of the machine. As you can see there is a bit of rust on the case under the front right foot, actually the one that was missing. Hopefully this won't be a problem…

Original and replacement Beko washing machine feet

Fortunately getting a replacement foot wasn't a problem and was only a fiver. I washed the other feet as they were a bit grotty and gave the insides a light vacuuming. After that it was simply a matter of screwing the feet back on and pushing the machine back under the counter after it had been plugged in and connected to the cold water supply. Levelling the machine was straightforward and an empty test run was uneventful.

JOB DO…

Then the Major then came along, after previously expounding on her expert knowledge of washing machines, and put three times the recommended soap powder into it causing it to leak everywhere. Working on the basis that, A) it will be sold at some point in the nearish future and B) the designers should have planned for this misuse case, I've elected to cross my fingers and assume that it will be OK to keep using it as is. However I still think I'll need to extract it from under the counter and give it a once over, but I'll let it dry out properly before attempting that as I don't want tip it and get water into places the machine isn't designed for.

JOB DONE

Time: 10 mins

Cost: £5.29 (or £55.29 inc. washing machine).

Kitchen Scissors

Following in the footsteps of the tin opener, ;the kitchen scissors also broke. At some point one of the handles had gotten too close to the stove and been melted a little. Then someone else seems to have dropped them and the loop of the handle has snapped. Although this is all supposition, I was presented with them as "found like this." On inspection you can see that it is a clean break.

Damaged kitchen scissors

At this point I'd pared back the bubbled plastic so it isn't really visible on the close-up. Ideally I would like to have solvent welded the break but, as I couldn't identify the manufacturer (initially), I couldn't find out what polymer it was made from. Assuming it might be ABS I tried MEK but it didn't touch it at all, with none of the usual tackiness that usually results from interactions between the two. My next guess was nylon, as the bubbling on the handle looked a lot like the same damage you get on a fish slice that has been overheated, which means superglue. In the end it turned out to be polypropylene so superglue was probably not the best choice, but I didn't know that at the time.

So I retrieved the superglue from storage, applied it and it stuck well. However superglue does not do well in water so I needed to protect the joint somehow. I settled on a liberal application of black electricians' tape. The result, whilst not pretty, was functional.

Repaired kitchen scissors

If I'd had my wits about me I would have used heat shrink sleeving instead but I didn't have my good head on that day.

The Wrong Head

Fast forward six months and the repair is still solid, so no complaints, even though now I'm not sure whether it is the superglue or the electrical tape that is holding it together. However one of the tykes has walked off with them and they are not coming back (just the scissors, I think). So I am back into purchasing mode, as with the tin opener 'repair.'

I'm not sure where the scissors originated from. The view is that they are probably from Oxo but no-one really knew. However, they had been a good pair of scissors and were still providing reliable service. Five out of seven review sites recommended Oxo Good Grips Kitchen & Herb Stainless Steel Scissors. These aren't the same design as the earlier scissors (if they were Oxo, that is), but the most important feature is that they come apart for cleaning. It also makes sharpening them a lot easier as well.

In an ideal world an all steel design would be better as there is no risk of the blades parting company with the handles. The downside of this, though, is that it increases their weight and to minimise this manufacturers make the handles smaller and thinner and this impacts on the comfort of using the scissors. I suppose wrapping a stainless steel core with a better grip would ease this, but that is more pennies for the manufacturer to lay out. Another factor against all-steel designs is that they are pretty exorbitant, think £50-100 a pair compared to £17.50 for the Oxo scissors, ouch! You'd have to get a lot of use out of a pair to support that cost and our last pair has lasted over 10 years.

So, Oxo it is.

Oxo Good Grips Kitchen Scissors

Probably.

Not being able to identify the source of the original scissors was irking me. Guessing that they might be from Lakeland or Debenhams a Google search for images identified something similar from Lakeland. Right-clicking the picture and copy image link and it was off to Google image search (which has steadily become more and more useful over the years).

Using Google Image Search to identify the manufacturer

And they were quickly identified as Arcos Prochef Series 195 mm Kitchen Scissors. As I had no complaints about the first pair I dropped the Oxo scissors and rebought the original ones from the Arcos Store on Amazon. Even better they were only £9.86, about half the price of the Oxo scissors.

Their advert could use a bit of work though. I could have had them for £7.20 if I would have picked them up at the local Post Office, but the delivery time, stated as "Usually dispatched within 6 to 7 months," was a little too long to wait. Also the handle material was described variously as polypropylene, polyoxymethylene and wooden all on the same page.

Arcos shonky Amazon product page

Arcos makes a great play of their Spanish heritage but, like everything else, these are made in China. The blades are fashioned of something called Nitrum stainless steel; it turns out that this is a tradename for Arcos' own brand of stainless steel. Its composition is a secret, apparently. A secret to everyone, that is, apart from any other knife manufacturer with access to an XRF analyser who will know the elemental composition. Arcos haven't patented it, so my guess is that this 'secret sauce' is probably more marketing than technical know-how. Not that this really affects my use of the scissors.

Once the scissors arrived they were washed, dried and put into service. One thing I noted when dealing with the packaging was that they come with a 10 year guarantee that isn't even mentioned on their Amazon product page, which is nice.

So for Arcos, 9/10 for their cost and quality but 2/10 for their Marketing Dept.

JOB DONE

Time: A day of research

Cost: £9.86

Tin Opener

Another day, another thing broken. The tin opener this time. The main problem being that it is not opening tins any more. It pierces the lids OK but just won't move round the tin as the gears keep slipping. On inspection this is because they are, technically speaking, shagged.

Old vs New Tin Opener

I happened to have a new tin opener to hand and you can see that, apart from being almost identical bar the handle (?all made in the same factory), the gears on the old (and yes I know rusty) one are completely rounded over. So, just a matter of replacing the drive gears and it can be put back into service then?

Partially dismantled tin opener

Well the tin opener can be reversibly dismantled with hand tools, which is a good start. There was a stainless steel screw holding the angled drive gear and blade assembly in position and the other flat drive gear was held onto a threaded spindle and could be released by holding the finer toothed gear above it with a pair of pliers and screwing off the handle.

Nadgered drive gear

As you can see the cogs on the drive gears were irretrievably damaged. But their repair ought to be simply a matter of buying a replacement set on the web and fitting them, no?

No, not allowed. Why let you pay a quid for new parts that are standard across multiple brands when we can make you buy a whole new tin opener and, even better, we'll shave a few pennies more off of the manufacturing process making the new one even more difficult to repair.

New opener mechanism

You can see that they have replaced the screw thread on the handle on this model for a permanent rivet and the screw and thread on the angled blade for a one-way press fitting. Just in case you might be able to work around the lack of parts.

This is a great (not really) example of manufacturing enshittification by prevention of repairs planned obsolescence. Watch Louis Rossman cover this by example of LED ceiling fans.

Louis Rossman

Believe me I tried really hard to source these parts on-line and came up with a blank. Either they just aren't available or I am completely failing to use the correct search terms/pictures.

So in order to fix the tin opener I would have to actually make the parts. This has been successfully attempted by at least one person in a real tour-de-force display of engineering bloody-mindedness. But only for the flat drive gear and on an opener where the angled drive gear was in better shape. Also I don’t have a Sherline mill handy… Unfortunately I needed to replace the angled one as well, which comes as an assembly with the cutting blade. Both are notched (double D-holes) and what looks to be press-fitted together onto a spindle.

It was just not practical to make both pieces; the flat gear is difficult but not impossible; the gear-and-blade combination is, however, too much trouble for a £5-10 piece of kit. I will point out that this doesn't absolve the manufacturer for having no spares available and offering something that can't be fixed. Thus costing the earth yet another dollop of resources it doesn't need to part with; I am throwing out 170 g of tin opener because I can't replace 9 g of duff parts.

Resignedly I had to accept the fact that I would have to dance to the manufacturers' tune and buy a new, even less reparable tin opener.

After a long dive into review sites, reddit, etc. I came to the conclusion that they had all tested brand new openers and no-one had published _any_ data on how well they work over time or how long they last. Suffice to say the older your tin opener the more likely it is to be a bit blunt but still working. The lifespan of a new tin opener appears to be about a couple of years and generally people are dissatisfied with that fact (even product designers).

My decision tree was, manual not electric, then not something dirt cheap like a butterfly opener, but after that I was fairly agnostic about which brand to go with. In no particular order here are the results from an incomplete selection of review sites.

Review Site	Brand
Serious Eats	Oxo
Spruce Eats	Zyliss
Which?	Joseph & Joseph
BBC Good Food	Zyliss
NYT Wirecutter	EZ-duz-IT
CNN Underscored	Oxo

I also asked Copilot for a recommendation and the Oxo opener came up on its list (although I am not sure whether it is really 'reviewing' all the options rather than just providing one). Some amusing points were America's Test Kitchen getting roundly abused in their comments section for not being able to use a safety can opener and coming down against them and the Which? reviewer being obsessed with the size of the opener. Really, who cares what size a tin opener is? There's plenty of stuff that you could throw out of most utensil drawers before you got rid of the tin opener.

In the end I decided to weigh the reviews on Amazon, counting any reviews with three stars or less as dissatisfied customers. In last place was the Joseph & Joseph Can-Do opener with 27% not satisfied out of 4,500 ratings. Next came the Zyliss Lock 'n' Lift opener with 18% dissatisfied out of 27,450 ratings, then the EZ-duz-IT opener with 9% (but not being in the States it was too expensive anyway) on 13,900 ratings. Finally, the best rated was the Oxo Good Grips opener with only 8% dissatisfied on 50,100 ratings

Oxo Good Grips Soft-Handled Can Opener

So Helen of Troy earned the sale and I bought an Oxo Good Grips Soft Handled Can Opener, which is essentially a like-for-like replacement for the defunct KitchenCraft opener. I am extremely dubious that A) it will last as long as the recently deceased one or B) that the Oxo brand name implies any better quality than any other opener. But they are offering a lifetime warranty on the opener so perhaps I will be proved wrong (their customer service dept. claims 10-15 years of use). It is also completely unrepairable.

Kuhn Rikon Safety Can Opener

As I am a sucker for new tools I also bought a Kuhn Rikon Safety Can Opener, even though its' dissatisfaction rating was 16% on 14,100 ratings. Mostly because of the comments in the America's Test Kitchen video and a video by Technology Connections. It comes with a three year guarantee and just looks cool. And again, it is also completely unrepairable.

In conclusion then, most tin openers are now unrepairable by design, despite earlier models having this feature. Once the blade dulls or the gears wear out the whole thing has to go into the waste, which is a shame as 95% of the opener is still functional.

This got me thinking. There is free open-source software for almost every application out there. Where is the open-source hardware movement? Are we limited to electronics (Raspberry Pi, Arduino, etc.) and basic components (like resistors and screws)?

The answer appears to be, mostly yes. In the kitchen area there is a bit of stuff on actual kitchens but searching for open source kitchen utensils doesn't return much of anything, apart from a really nice blender. Further digging found a few prints on Thingiverse for replacement handles for tin openers. Including a nice one that improves standard butterfly openers making them easier to use.

Open Source Hardware Tin Opener

The nearest I got was a student project by Alexander Cielsa which provides .stl files for most of a standard Bunker-type can opener. The author claims to have sourced the gears and cutting blade from "a local hardware store", which is a bit doubtful given my experience. A more likely source was from another, working opener than from the local hardware store. In fact you can see the rust on the gears in the photos of the finished opener.

But I am not knocking the effort, it is a really good start. In fact the only things missing are the gears and cutting wheel, which brings me back to the same dead end. Until I or, more likely, someone else out there works out how to source these components, tin openers are going to stay a disposable item, unhappily.

JOB DONE

Time taken: Too long

Cost: Oxo opener - £8.00; Kun Rikon opener £14.95

P.S. Yes I know it is overkill to buy two, but hey, at least when one breaks I'll have a spare.