Chapter 4: The Coffee Machine

Posted: July 08, 2011 - 03:43:00 pm

Dexter placed the paper filter into the brewing chamber of the coffeemaker. He carefully measured out the scoops of ground coffee into the paper filter. It always took a little effort to get the brewing chamber placed correctly into the coffeemaker. He then filled the water reservoir to the six-cup level. After rinsing out the glass carafe one more time, he put the lid on it and then slid it onto the burner, checking to make sure it was in the correct place.

He pushed the button, and watched the light come on. It would take a few minutes for the coffeemaker to complete the magic task of brewing a reasonably good pot of coffee. Knowing that, Dexter headed off to the bathroom for his morning ritual.

After his shower, Dexter took a moment to study his reflection in the mirror. He decided that Samantha had been right. He was looking pretty fit. Of course, working out wouldn’t put any hair back on his head. He wondered about one of those medicines intended to promote hair growth, but figured that the only hair he would grow, would be in his nose and ears.

Feeling good about himself, Dexter went into the kitchen. He grabbed a coffee cup and, without looking, picked up the glass coffee carafe from the coffeemaker. It took a fraction of a second for him to realize that it felt a little light. He looked at the carafe. It was empty.

“What the f•©k? It can’t be broken, it’s not even a year old, and there are no moving parts,” Dexter said.

A moment of inspection let him know that the coffeemaker was plugged in, there was water in the holding tank, and coffee in the brewing chamber. The ‘power’ light was off. He flipped the switch, and nothing happened. The power light remained off. There was no other explanation for the absence of brewed coffee, other than the coffeemaker being defective.

“This damned thing is broken,” Dexter said.

For the first time in ages, the little kernel of engineer in Dexter began to emerge. Rather than toss the coffeemaker into the garbage, Dexter took it apart to find out why it wasn’t working (It should be noted that this was the simplest coffeemaker on the market. There just wasn’t that much to it.).

It didn’t take Dexter much time to locate the heating element. He put an ohmmeter on it, only to discover that there was infinite resistance. He examined the heating element, knowing that it had burned out.

“This is a piece of shit,” Dexter declared as he headed out the door on his way to the shopping mall.

Five hours later, Dexter was surrounded by a variety of drip coffee makers, each of which was completely disassembled. Few devices are as simple as a coffeemaker. There were minor variations. Some had timers to turn on or off the heating element. Others had valves that allowed the user to remove the pot to pour some coffee, in the middle of the brewing cycle. Basically, though, they were the same.

Gravity forced water through a one-way valve into a small chamber containing a heating element. The one-way valve prevented the water from flowing back into the water holding tank. The heating element boiled the water, forcing it up through a simple tube. The tube released the water over the brewing basket. Gravity, again, pulled the water through the coffee grounds, out a hole at the base of the brewing basket, and into the coffee carafe.

There just isn’t much that can go wrong with a drip coffeemaker except for the heating element failing, the tube getting clogged with calcium deposits, or the one-way valve sticking. The weak points are the heating element and the one-way valve. Of the two, the weakest point was the heating element.

Dexter looked around at the mess he had made in the little dinette area. The sad thing was, that most of the mess was packaging. He figured that more money had been spent on packaging the coffee machines in plastic, cardboard, and Styrofoam; than had been used to make the machines themselves.

The fact was, he’d had fun taking them apart, figuring out how they worked, and finding the design flaw in each coffeemaker ... and each of them did have a serious design flaw. Usually, there was more than one. The most common was the poor quality of the heating element. The diameter of the heating coil inside the heating element was too small. It would burn out after a few hundred uses.

This was a flaw that could easily be fixed. A ten percent increase in the diameter of the element wire, would have made it a product that lasted forever. He believed that it was a flaw that could easily be fixed by using existing products. All he had to do, now, was prove that to himself.

Feeling good for a change, he said, “That was fun. Now comes the real work.”

Taking a seat in front of his computer, Dexter cracked his fingers before bringing up his browser. He was now on a mission. Two hours of searching for information on heating elements, had produced a greater understanding of what was involved in getting a quality heating element. He found several heating elements intended for commercial grade coffee makers that would work, and work well.

Although this particular project was a little outside Dexter’s area of expertise, he had come to the conclusion that it was possible to build a simple drip coffeemaker, that could be used for at least twenty years. He knew there were engineers out there who did this for a living. They would know of design heuristics that could avoid the thousand other design problems that could emerge.

Dexter spent the next three hours writing an article entitled, “To Engineer Or Not To Engineer.” It started with a simple description of his problem with finding a quality coffeemaker. He wrote about how he had taken apart a number of machines of various manufacture to discover common underlying design flaws.

He described how good engineers could create a quality product if allowed to actually do their jobs. He called upon engineers who created coffee makers, toasters, and other common appliances to consider leaving the monolithic companies that forced them into producing poorly designed and poorly manufactured products. He suggested that they open their own companies to produce well-designed products, following well established engineering principles.

Rather than trying to start a company that produced a hundred different products, they should focus on a single quality product line for home markets. In terms of coffeemakers, he suggested single cup, a six cup, and a twelve cup machine. These three simple products could take over an entire market sector, if designed and manufactured to high standards.

Improvements in quality and style should be done at an engineering pace, rather than in a marketeer’s frenzy. There was no real reason to create a new style of coffeemaker every year, to keep up with some fad in fashion. Dexter didn’t know of anyone who redecorated their kitchen every year by going out and buying all new appliances. He did know people, including himself, who complained that their coffeemaker broke after a year and they’d had to replace it.

Dexter argued that a good engineer could design products that would last twenty years with a price tag of only a few dollars more than the price of the garbage currently on the market. There was no real reason that these products couldn’t last a lifetime. He suggested they be called ‘Heirloom Products,’ after the idea that the children could inherit their parent’s coffeemaker, toaster, or whatever.

Dexter recognized that the most immediate question would be the profitability of such a strategy. He pointed out a certain tool company, with a lifetime warranty on its products. It had been selling tools for decades. He noted that not only was it still in business, it was still at the top of its trade.

He suggested that having a coffeemaker with that same kind of warranty would revolutionize the world of household appliances. The idea of a ‘no questions asked, in store replacement’ strategy on products with a twenty-year warranty was suggested. All it would require, would be inscribing the date of manufacture on the base of the product.