Go find an 'antique' soft serve machine from the pre-digital age. It will work longer, better, be easier to repair, and probably put out tastier iced cream. Go retro-tech. No digital boolsheet.
Repair Cafes https://www.repaircafe.org/en/ are very popular with the younger crowd and the "oldster" crowd. They find, in common with each other, the desire to fix things that are broken and make them work. I believe Repair Cafes got started in Denmark, but chapters have cropped up all over the US and the world. When I first arrived in Bristol I'd go and volunteer just to meet people, drink tea, repair things that were broken, and learn how to fix things I didn't know how to fix.
I've always been a Luddite - give me analog, knobs, dials, and things I can repair and make work again. Planned obsolescence never confines itself to things, it eventually creeps to people as well. It's also lazy and not proper Capitalism at all. Adam Smith is doing backflips in his grave.
All that said, I've never seen the allure of soft-serve or Dairy Queen. Proper ice cream, churned on your grandmother's back porch with fresh picked June strawberries or ripe summer peaches, and heavy cream from the local farmer's cow, is one close-to-Heaven thing we can have in this world. Soft-serve is arguably, the Lady Esther Face Cream version. But, each to their own mileage.......
Was on a 6 month cruise many moons ago courtesy of the USN and on the air wing mess deck there was, (of course), what we all lovingly referred to as an ‘auto-dog’ machine. It was on all the time, along with the coffee and we all took advantage. One day, in the middle of the I.O. the machine broke hard. None of the mess cranks knew what to do or how to fix it. The machine had never broken; it was all mechanical and was very reliable. Fortunately, one of the squadrons had a mech who had worked at DQ for a summer before the navy, so he jumped in and fixed everything as if it had never broken. We heard he got extra time ashore at our next port call, Perth. Ahhh, those were the days…
I used to be a big fan of the digital revolution and the replacement of awkward knobs, dials, meters, and such analog user interface elements with neat new digital ones. Over the last 20 years, I've been steadily retreating from that over optimistic viewpoint. It seems like the one thing the digital revolution has done is that it has (permanently?) banished repairability of any device. If it was merely a simple plug-and-play replacement of a commonly available part (commonly available, that is, from multiple vendors at competitive prices), it wouldn't be as much of an issue. But everything seems to "require" its own custom circuit board that only fits that one model of that one device and once all the replacement stock has been used it, there will never be any more made. You'll likely have to replace the entire device rather than getting that one blown circuit fixed.
It's clear why manufacturers and retailers love this, as it means more sales of full-price devices rather than a trickle of income from replacement parts and service charges. These days, I advise people to buy the simplest possible devices that will meet the minimum requirements ... your toaster doesn't need a WiFi connection. The more electronic/computerized cruft there is in/on the device, the sooner it will need to be replaced.
Go find an 'antique' soft serve machine from the pre-digital age. It will work longer, better, be easier to repair, and probably put out tastier iced cream. Go retro-tech. No digital boolsheet.
Repair Cafes https://www.repaircafe.org/en/ are very popular with the younger crowd and the "oldster" crowd. They find, in common with each other, the desire to fix things that are broken and make them work. I believe Repair Cafes got started in Denmark, but chapters have cropped up all over the US and the world. When I first arrived in Bristol I'd go and volunteer just to meet people, drink tea, repair things that were broken, and learn how to fix things I didn't know how to fix.
I've always been a Luddite - give me analog, knobs, dials, and things I can repair and make work again. Planned obsolescence never confines itself to things, it eventually creeps to people as well. It's also lazy and not proper Capitalism at all. Adam Smith is doing backflips in his grave.
All that said, I've never seen the allure of soft-serve or Dairy Queen. Proper ice cream, churned on your grandmother's back porch with fresh picked June strawberries or ripe summer peaches, and heavy cream from the local farmer's cow, is one close-to-Heaven thing we can have in this world. Soft-serve is arguably, the Lady Esther Face Cream version. But, each to their own mileage.......
Call the local Dairy Queen. They know how to fix their ice cream machines.
Was on a 6 month cruise many moons ago courtesy of the USN and on the air wing mess deck there was, (of course), what we all lovingly referred to as an ‘auto-dog’ machine. It was on all the time, along with the coffee and we all took advantage. One day, in the middle of the I.O. the machine broke hard. None of the mess cranks knew what to do or how to fix it. The machine had never broken; it was all mechanical and was very reliable. Fortunately, one of the squadrons had a mech who had worked at DQ for a summer before the navy, so he jumped in and fixed everything as if it had never broken. We heard he got extra time ashore at our next port call, Perth. Ahhh, those were the days…
I used to be a big fan of the digital revolution and the replacement of awkward knobs, dials, meters, and such analog user interface elements with neat new digital ones. Over the last 20 years, I've been steadily retreating from that over optimistic viewpoint. It seems like the one thing the digital revolution has done is that it has (permanently?) banished repairability of any device. If it was merely a simple plug-and-play replacement of a commonly available part (commonly available, that is, from multiple vendors at competitive prices), it wouldn't be as much of an issue. But everything seems to "require" its own custom circuit board that only fits that one model of that one device and once all the replacement stock has been used it, there will never be any more made. You'll likely have to replace the entire device rather than getting that one blown circuit fixed.
It's clear why manufacturers and retailers love this, as it means more sales of full-price devices rather than a trickle of income from replacement parts and service charges. These days, I advise people to buy the simplest possible devices that will meet the minimum requirements ... your toaster doesn't need a WiFi connection. The more electronic/computerized cruft there is in/on the device, the sooner it will need to be replaced.
This guy won’t end up unemployed, if you can fix this you can fix other things