This one is fairly recent, but I thought it deserved its own post.
After working on my son’s car, I went off on a rant about how the American car industry seems to go out of its way to use a bunch of mix-matched fasteners — see my “rant on fasteners” here.
For example, removing ONE part on a 2001 Ford Explorer required an 8mm socket, a 1/2″ wrench, a 7/16″ wrench, and a screwdriver.
WHY??
After spewing a string of expletives about the lack of quality in Ford’s engineering staff, my final statement on the topic was this:
“When presented with two, similar fastener options, pick the larger of the two, and shut the f___ up!”
Meaning, don’t take it upon yourself to pick the “super-optimized” option — pick the MOST COMMON option instead. There is no reason why all of the fasteners in question could not have been 12mm, which is approximately 0.47″. This would have allowed the part in question to be removed using ONE TOOL.
Moral of the story: Standardization is more important than optimization.
Something super-optimized becomes inefficient. Stick to standards.
My son thought the thesis statement, “pick the larger of the two, and shut the f___ up” was hilarious, so this post is dedicated to him.