A Maker’s Bill of Rights to accessible, extensible, and repairable hardware.
By Mister Jalopy
Recently, the gas gauge on my 2000 Chevrolet tang had broken off. The metal tangs are fragile,
pickup started acting perquacky and, as I’m a lazy under pressure, and move whenever gas sloshes in
person by nature, I asked the Chevrolet dealership the tank, so failure was only a matter of time. After
what it would cost to repair. At a staggering $800, seeing how fine the tangs were, I was surprised that
I briefly considered living without a gas gauge. Pic- they hadn’t broken earlier. A quick Google search
turing certain roadside disaster, I buckled down proved I was lucky that it had lasted as long as it
and decided to fix the problem myself. had — it’s a very common problem.
Hopeful that I would be able to buy
just the fuel sender, Chevrolet broke
the news that I would have to buy the
combined $500+ Delco fuel pump
and sender assembly. Now, only the
fuel sender unit was faulty. The fuel
pump still worked like a champion but
“When your covered wagon broke a
wood spoke, did you throw away the
whole wheel? The whole wagon?”
I had to buy the whole pump/sender
assembly. Mercifully, my local auto parts I bet Chevrolet specified to their subcontractor
store sold the same exact unit for $259. that the fuel sender unit would be removable. Per-
After draining and dropping the gas tank, haps they were planning to offer it as a separate
I removed the old assembly; it’s clearly designed SKU. Is it a purely financial decision by Chevrolet
to have a removable, replaceable fuel sender unit. to not sell the fuel sender independent of the fuel
It’s held in place by two plastic tabs and a single pump? Or how about just selling the tangs for a
wire connector. And to prove my point, I did remove dollar? When your covered wagon broke a wood
it. It took longer to get the pliers from the toolbox spoke, did you throw away the whole wheel? The
than it did to disassemble. whole wagon?
Sometimes components fail and you have no In MAKE Volume 03 (see page 7), Dale Dougherty
idea why, but in this case, the cause of failure was wrote an essay on what makes a product maker
obvious. There are two little spring-metal tangs friendly. And it was an idea that stuck in my head
that glide over the PCB resistor contacts, and one as I was building the retromodern remote-control
