Ask Lemmy

Both Costco and Sam's club make these ice cream makers in the wooden buckets. The motors have flimsy PET plastic gears. I get it. Strip out a replaceable gear rather than burn out the wires in a motor, easy easier repair, right? Wrong, I have a nearly identical ice cream maker that's 60 years old, the motor still works great. Metal gears, just gotta oil and maintain it regularly because it gets near salt water and gets splashed occasionally over the decades. The new ones strip out the damn gears after two batches of ice cream.

My solution ended up being to get an ice cream maker with built in refrigerant, but then I needed to get it recharged and that'll cost a much as the machine itself. Thanks a ton, breville. I'm saving up for a professional machine now.

Alexa.

Any device someone ask my help with figuring out. Its rarely the appliance that pisses me off and more the blatant learned helplessness and fundimental inability for fellow adults to rub two braincells together on figuring out a new thing or to troubleshoot a simple problem. A lifetime of being the techie fixer bitch slave constantly delegated the responsibility of figuring out everyones crap for them has left me jaded to the average persons mental capacity and basic logical application abilities.

It used to be printers but I switched to a Brother laser printer about five years ago and its been trouble free while having reasonable print costs. You can even force it to print on empty for a bit longer, although you shouldn't push any laser printer too far on empty as you can wreck them.

Toasters are my big gripe. Its been proven that they have massively reduced costs at the expense of longevity and toasting efficiency from what we had decades ago. I have an expensive toaster (from Sage), and I have still had to replace micro switches on the buttons. While it does a better job of even browning than a cheap toaster its still far from the level I expect.

I would buy one of those expensive Japanese toasters or a commercial toaster oven but I do not want that much counter top taken up by it. I would rather just cook my toast in a cast iron pan now, far better finish.