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Comment by Aloha | Hacker News Reader

I'd call this a servicing more than a restoration. The thing looks incredibly well built with an eye towards serviceability over ease of assembly - pretty much exactly what I would expect for a Soviet built appliance.

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There was plenty of awful Soviet tech, too - this thing has survived because it had some value, was well built and taken care of but you don't hear about the thousands of pieces of tech that were shoddily made cheap crap (though expensive for a Soviet citizen) and wouldn't last a year without repairs.

Soviet tech had to be built for serviceability - people couldn't often afford new things and even if they had the money, there was no guarantee it was even available. And many things just broke down constantly. It even went so far that "a set of golden hands," meaning one could fix a lot of stuff was a valued characteristic in males, and women sometimes may have overlooked other personality flaws in a relationship because of it, like drinking.

My grandma had a Soviet TV well into the 90s and even early 2000s, maybe out of sentimental attachment more than anything else. The thing broke down constantly, every 3-4 months at least, and she'd always call a repairman. In the end I think more money was sunk into it than a brand new 4K TV would cost now. It was finally laid to rest when her usual TV repairman died, and the new one found it increasingly difficult to find replacement parts, and finally gave up, and we could at last get her a new TV.

>Soviet tech had to be built for serviceability

also there were significant sharing of tech between military industry and consumer (one can say that in many areas the consumer one was just a minor branch off the main military industry, kind of a USSR version of COTS). TVs and control boards of cruise missiles used the same electronic parts and were built using the same skills/processes - the consumer parts (like transistors, etc) were just the ones that didn't make the higher quality military bin (the military binned parts were marked "VPK" - "Voennaya Priemnaya Komissiya"/"military quality check", and these ones you'd prefer to use in your own electronic projects when/if you could get them).

Just a datapoint: lots of czech(oslovak) devices contained large amounts of MH54xx military grade TTL logic, because it was more readily available than lower-spec MH74xx (and I believe that both soviet-made KL555xx-series and east german D1xx-series of SN74xx TTL logic clones didn't have different reliability grades)

To make a counterexample, my grandmother had a Zil refrigerator she bought in the 1950's (http://i.imgur.com/POw7U6R.jpg) that worked for over 50 years until the late 2000's. It would have probably worked another 50, if we hadn't changed it for a modern larger and more energy efficient one.

Well, yeah - I think most of the stuff was overbuilt by modern standards so it should work for a long time, just that often the build quality would be shoddy, or had improvized components. I didn't mean that one TV example to be the definite example, that was just an anecdote to illustrate the general point.

It's not only Soviet built things would last longer. US washing machines, refrigerators made in 50-60s also last forever. The ones you buy now, the way the are made and painted will rust in couple of years and will be thrown to garbage in 5 years. And no, it's not because it's cheap to buy a new one, they are just simply bad.

You can actually buy decently made appliances nowadays, it's just that the majority of people don't want to spend that much money. A $300 washing machine in the 50s was much better than a current washing machine at the same price but that amount of money in the fifties is $3000 now. A $3000 modern washing machine would probably blow the 50s one out of the water.

Unless you buy insane super-appliances, long-lasting appliances typically cost 2-3 times the consumer average.

I bought a Miele washing machine in 1996, and it's still being used today. It was about twice the price of machines that I'd had to before that never seemed to last more than a few years.

It's cheap to buy a new one for the features. It'd definitely be cheaper to buy a washer with 2010s construction and 1950s feature set, but that's not what consumers (or environmental regulators) want. Likewise, a modern washer with 1950s construction would be outrageously expensive, not to mention material and energy inefficient. (Keep in mind that the operating cost of an appliance is a significant fraction of its total cost)

I'd also like to see a good data set of real prices of appliances over time.

Edit: Here's some examples of 1950s appliances: http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/50selectrical.html

Washer + Dryer in 1953: $494.90

Average monthly wage in 1953: $ 3,139.44 [0]

Average monthly wage in 2013: $44,888.16

So a 1953 washer+dryer cost the same amount of labor as a $7076 washer+dryer today.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average_Indexed_Monthly_Earnin...

I'm pretty sure those "average monthly wage"s are not exactly per-person. The average person in US certainly did not make >$500k/year in 2013.

I think he meant average yearly wage.

Yep, that's correct. Doesn't change the math though.

Still running strong. Mine is from 1940s.

It a faithful copy of a decent General Electric fridge, so no wonder.

I think that building for serviceability would be better than the planned obsolescence with the latest fad included (washing machines with touchscreens). That doesn't necessarily mean poor quality, even if it sometimes did in the Soviet Union.

Being well built says nothing to how durable the parts are that were used to build it - the parts might have been awful - but it was clearly designed to be easy to repair.

Reminds me I have a PSR-420 to "service"

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