FUTURE PROOF
Is perfect the same for one person as the next, asks Horrell. Turns out, it’s very unlikely...
My microwave door doesn’t fit I don’t mean it’s falling off and preventing my rewarming of yesterday’s sausage and mash I just mean it’s three or four millimetres down on the left It doesn’t sit properly in the kitchen cabinet it’s built into The main oven directly below isn’t actually directly below It’s a couple of mil to the right And the fridge door is a little wonky relative to the drawers next to it I can’t help noticing every single morning as I get the milk It’ll be like that in your kitchen too But don’t worry You’re the only one in your household who cares at least unless you share your life with someone else who’s spent too much time as you have and as I have idly examining the fit and finish of cars What other sphere of activity manufactures with anything like the precision and consistency of the car industry? And no don’t hit me with microelectronics The way light leaks around the tiles of my MacBook’s backlit keyboard tells me no one from Apple ever saw how precisely illuminated even a Fiat Panda’s climate controls are
The trouble with ‘handcrafted’ objects is the parts don’t consistently fit Someone makes one part then makes the next part to fit the first one There’s no interchangeability with parts from another supposedly identical object it takes too much time
“LOOK AT THE BUMPER GAPS AND DASH FIT ON AN E30 M3. GAPING. BUT WE STILL WANT ONE”
and as complexity increases tolerances mount up My kitchen made by carpenters rather than a car factory is the perfect example So actually is the entire fabric of pretty well every house Why don’t we get carmakers to advise on homebuilding? That’d surely improve the shortage the cost and the quality
Henry Ford gets the credit for inventing mass production using interchangeable parts But there are earlier examples The Royal Navy needed pulley blocks a year for its sailing ships and they had to be jamproof and repairable So in the th century it set up a block mill at the Portsmouth Dockyard It used accurate lathes standard screw sizes and novel assembly machinery
The car companies have elevated this to such a high art that now we take perverse delight in finding the tiniest imperfection Think how hard it must be to press two large steel panels and produce a plastic moulding rear wing tail panel rear bumper so that at their extremities they mate and form a threedimensional aperture so precise that another complex plastic moulding the rear light cluster can fit into it with a borderline that’s accurate to a few tenths of a millimetre Or consider the feat of making multiple switches probably coming from different suppliers when they operate the climate the windows and the ADAS that all have exactly the same surface gloss illumination and clickspring action
But does it make us happy? Look at the bumper gaps and dash fit on an E M Gaping But we still want one And if something got knocked on an Eighties or Nineties car you might be able to biff it back near enough that it wouldn’t matter These days it’s a fourfigure bill to realign a bumper Plus every time you walk into the kitchen the sight of the oven door sets your teeth on edge