Listen to a great Tom A interview !

I did play with the idea of making a Mooly spring wound winder for the M4-P/M4-2 and M6. Only problems is that it would get very heavy - and complex. The Mooly today would cost several $1000 to make - more gears and springs than you could shake a big spring at! It would also be of limited use - mainly due to the weight. You would not really get more "speed" out of it than with a Rapidwinder - which can do close to 2.5 - 3 frames/s once you get the hang of it. Unless the spring was extremely strong - you would have to wind it up after 6-7 frames anyway.
 
Modern cars very reliable and, yes more economical - but the engineering and "serviceability" is badly designed. There is nothing that says that if you can make it economical - or more efficient - you can't make it simple to fix. Today you are at the mercy of a guy in a white coat that explains that the light bulb illuminating the speedometer to some other instrument is $0.70 - but the "module" that controls it is a mere $400 + labor to replace! Bad design - particularly as said module is a $20 item.
Digital cameras are profitable simply because they are not worth fixing. Something goes wrong - throw it away and buy another one - and yet another piece of junk in a landfill - together with the millions of cell phones that are chucked out. Yes, recycling is good - but I would like to see the statistics of how many of these items are actually recycled and how many gets thrown in the garbage .
I am not advocating going back to Model T's (though that would be more interesting) or Speed Graphic's - but it the manufacturers can spend the money on designing all the bells and whistles into the latest gizmo - they can also design the same object to be serviceable by someone reasonably handy with tools!
I got a computer set up 7 years ago - using it for scanning, Flickr, RFf - it works fine and I fervently resists any so called "improvements" that are offered. I have it set up to do what I want it to do - and most of the improvements are at best incremental - and forces me to change how I do things. I am not particularly interested in how it works - just that it does work and continue to do so for the foreseeable future.
 
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