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Manuals are fairly easy to find, but in my experience they are dumbed-down. They mostly contain simple Ikea-like instructions and a lot of legalese CMA warnings. That is not a dig at Ikea. Their instructions are great for assembling flatpack furniture. But servicing a faucet, a garage door or a lawn mower is on another level.

This state of affairs is partly due a change in the nature of products. They are in general more complex and no longer meant to be repairable. They are meant to have shorter life spans, and if serviceable are meant to be serviced by professionals. How much that is an improvement for the consumer, is questionable IMO.

> Manuals are fairly easy to find, but in my experience they are dumbed-down.

I just linked to the full CAD library for the modern version of these parts, though. It’s not dumbed down.

Use the search phrase “service manual” and you can find documentation for every appliance in your house. I frequently fix appliances for friends and even neighbors and have yet to be unable to find the service manual.

Same for cars.

I’m so confused by this comment section. Why is everyone convinced that the situation is so much worse today?

> Materials like this are infinitely more accessible to us than our grandparents generation. We all have devices in our pockets that can get to service manuals for our products in minutes.

You mean minutes to find the right bootleg manual site with PDF for an adjacent product category, then some more minutes to realize you cannot safely (if at all) get at the manual, some more minutes to find a different bootleg PDF site, realize that it's actually not close enough to the model you have, and 1h later, finally find the good enough PDF... only to realize that "service manuals" today are often useless, and decide to repeat this process on YouTube?

> I can have common parts at my door overnight from Amazon with the press of a button on my phone.

Overnight is often too long. Also good luck finding the right parts and reconciling conflicting IDs between manuals, manufacturers and vendors.

> Every local hardware store carries replacement cartridges and gaskets for common faucet types.

Except when 90% of the faucets are uncommon, and support for them gets effectively discontinued after a few years.

Now contrast that with our grandparents, who usually had repair manuals included with the product, most parts were universal (and probably on-hand or extractable from something else at home), and you could actually go to a local hardware store where the clerk would be able to figure out what parts you needed on the spot, and with luck had them in stock.

I'm not claiming our grandparents had it better in general, but let's also not pretend there are no downsides to ongoing specialization and market competition. We may have more stuff, prettier stuff, better stuff[0], but nothing is ever compatible with anything, it's that way on purpose, and people are no longer supposed to repair anything themselves.

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[0] - That's highly debatable in appliance space.

I mean, a generation or two ago, people frequently learned to do things like replace spark plugs and alternators and mess with oil changes.

My generation learned how to plug computer components together and install operating systems and drivers.

The reason people did that is because they (more or less) had to.

The generation being born today will need neither of those skill sets.

Cars, by and large, stay working for as long as people care to keep them and the things that do go wrong are, mostly, uneconomical to fix at home.

It's likewise rare for, dunno, uninstalling a video game to accidentally delete some crucial OS dependency that causes the thing to need to be reformatted.

It's hard to say what skills the next generation will learn, but I can guarantee there will be something that they need that their children will not. And that they'll complain about their children being useless for not knowing whatever that is.

No, we just outsourced car maintenance to professional shop services. Both because mechanical aspects have become reliable enough to last a year without maintenance and because electronic/computer aspects are mind-bogglingly complicated.

> because electronic/computer aspects are mind-bogglingly complicated

And because it's software, it happens to be a perfect way for the manufacturer to extract rent (er, "recurring revenue") from car repair business. It's not complexity that's shaping how end-user repair experience looks like, but the fact that you often need proprietary connector, proprietary software, and a valid license key to interface with the car's computer.

And because plenty of engineering goes into designing subsystems with the explicit but unstated purpose of making them close to impossible to repair without ultimately resorting to help from the manufacturer.

Software is just the latest layer on the cake. Non-repairable designs, special tools, unavailable parts, unavailable instructions, fragile and error prone procedures, encryption, and more. They're all occasionally used to with the main purpose of blocking any attempt to easily repair without generating revenue for the manufacturer and their network.

Source: I have family working for two large car manufacturers both in engineering and management, who have personally experienced explicit demands to make things hard to repair by the owner but make them in a way where a reasonable explanation can be used for plausible deniability.

> I mean, a generation or two ago, people frequently learned to do things like replace spark plugs and alternators and mess with oil changes.

These are all things I learned to do myself and have done recently (even the alternator).

Like I said, it’s easier than ever.

I’m kind of baffled that I’m getting downvoted for saying it on HN. Anyone with a little resourcefulness and a willingness to get their hands dirty can do these trivial operations too.