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comment by mk
mk  ·  2797 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Bolt took apart a Juicero. Now I want one, goddamn it.

Step back from that ledge my friend.

It's an unimaginative solution, and I bet that they iterated themselves into that very complex and durable vice. I am also willing to bet that at the same time, they found they needed to chop up the fruit and veggies more and more so that they had an even squeeze.

Here's what I might have done:

http://www.northerntool.com/shop/tools/product_200329714_200329714

There's a reason why powerful machinery uses hydraulics.





b_b  ·  2797 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Seems like the whole P = F/A thing is kind of lost on them in the chase for clean design. A simple roller press would do the trick, and could be built for very little money; don't even need hydraulics.

Anyway fuck every company ever who raises $120M for a useless product. I hate them all equally.

mk  ·  2797 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Seems like the whole P = F/A thing is kind of lost on them in the chase for clean design.

https://www.juicero.com/blog/juicero/the-journey-to-juicero/

    The Press itself creates three to four tons of pressure—enough to lift two Teslas—and enough to squeeze out every drop of organic fresh kale, spinach, apples, and other fruits and vegetables into your glass.

Hey, that's two Teslas, buddy. Count em. One Tesla, two Teslas. P=2Teslas

    A simple roller press would do the trick, and could be built for very little money; don't even need hydraulics.

That much is true. I was just thinking that if you didn't want the constraint of needing to start with juicy pulp, you might be able to get somewhere with hydraulics. Also, that stupid pack is going to burst at the seams with Tesla-lifting power unless you are applying pressure everywhere except for the port. The pack should be a cylinder, and the piston should push down.

$120M. Christ.

kleinbl00  ·  2797 days ago  ·  link  ·  

You see? Even as you attempt to sway my resolve, you are drawn into the Schwartzchild Radius of its stupidity. It is a poem in metal, a zen koan of wastefulness.

They want you to buy like 6 packs a week at $35 each. This gets you about 40oz of "juice" that expires quickly. Alternatively, you could go Amazon Fresh and get about 150oz for about the same amount of money.

But then you don't get to eat the pulp.

Or you could buy, you know, a juicer. Or, at the prices they're charging, a half-dozen juicers because you have to get kinda aggro to meet their price point. But then you will have to source your own fruits and vegetables and will have to find someone else to recycle your non-existent juice packs:

    The Pack itself (the outer layer) is recyclable at any recycling drop-off that accepts plastic bags (i.e. local grocery stores), or send them to us and we’ll recycle them for you. The Packs must be clean and dry, with the pulp removed from inside. Check here for more details. Also, the pulp inside the Packs is fully compostable or reusable.

Really, the art of turning something you chew into something you drink has a storied history going back before the dawn of recorded history but no one that I know of has ever invoked QR codes and a UPS supply chain before.

The thing is truly the Concorde of stupid VC ideas and we live in a world where Segways are on like Rev 8.

b_b  ·  2797 days ago  ·  link  ·  

There's no such thing as four tons of pressure :/

Edit: Although they really proved my point about not understand literally the most basic physics on the planet :)

Devac  ·  2797 days ago  ·  link  ·  
This comment has been deleted.
mk  ·  2797 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I'm pretty sure there is, and it's about two Teslas.

ButterflyEffect  ·  2797 days ago  ·  link  ·  

This is one of the funniest conversations I've ever read on this site.

kleinbl00  ·  2797 days ago  ·  link  ·  

If you were the guy charged with writing ad copy, you would have gone

"125 PSI? Shit, I run my bike tires at that. Can we make that sound more impressive to, you know, people willing to spend $700 on bagfruit dispensers?"

b_b  ·  2797 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Impressive or not, incorrect is incorrect. I can forgive Han Solo doing the Kessel run in twelve parsecs, because well, light sabres. Someone making a point about how awesome their engineering is without knowing the correct unit? Doesn't pass muster. You have Google. Use it.

am_Unition  ·  2797 days ago  ·  link  ·  

"Here in America, we measure pressure in pounds, goddamnit. Fuck the metric system."

The odds overwhelmingly favor someone having said that over not.

I'm a dynes guy, myself.

Devac  ·  2796 days ago  ·  link  ·  
This comment has been deleted.
kleinbl00  ·  2796 days ago  ·  link  ·  

And when you study engineering in America, you get to do problems in dynes and slugs and lbf so that your professors can say "and this is why the entire scientific community is behind the metric system."

Inches/feet/yards/miles is one thing. it's all fun'n'games until you have to invoke dimensional analysis and suddenly the entire system of measure explodes in a pyrotechnic nightmare of single-use coefficients.

raisin  ·  2795 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Studying engineering in Canada means that you will use both the imperial and the metric system pretty much arbitrarily. If during first year they at least pretended like the metric system was the one they were sticking with, as time went by I realized that we have been tricked with no hopes of escape.

b_b  ·  2796 days ago  ·  link  ·  

One of the confusions between English and metric is the whole force/mass thing. Pounds are a force measure by default, not as a special edge case. One can talk about pounds of mass, but only if it is specifically mentioned. The slug, though rarely used, is the default mass measurement in English units.

am_Unition  ·  2796 days ago  ·  link  ·  

In the part of space over America, you still weigh many pounds.

'cuz yer fat

am_Unition  ·  2796 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Edit: I blew it (see b_b's response). Been up all night writing. Huge paper. Forgot you aren't even remotely American. Stop being better at English than 90% of my country, Devac.

Edit2, proper response edition: Yeah, that's exactly the pound we're talkin' about. Pound it dawg. And I wouldn't be a very good am_Unition if I didn't feel compelled to tell you that slugs are large diameter shotgun bullets, where I come from.

    As you can see here, in the top rated post for a 5 year period on /r/dataisbeautiful, a Tootsie Pop is coated in 47 licks of candy, on average

^ Nah, I made that up, but you can't tell. My favorite real thing, still. It had a few thousand upvotes before it disappeared from the subreddit, I can't find it there anymore. Gonna be hard to beat a visualization already on the cutting edge so far ahead of its time.

Aaaand I'll bury the only meaningful b1ts in the middle: I will be doing outreach soon. Significantly more outreach than talking mad shit, at least. It's on the calendar now. I've also kinda been practicing on accident.

thread is A++ 100.1% yessers thx bwah

Now get back to work, everyone.

kleinbl00  ·  2797 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Proof that you will never be an ad guy.

am_Unition  ·  2797 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    P=2Teslas

=meNstitches

Anyone not owning 2 Teslas didn't read that far anyway

kleinbl00  ·  2774 days ago  ·  link  ·  
kleinbl00  ·  2797 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Here's the really dumb thing. It's pretty clear the basic concept was this:

Which, hey, arbor presses are no big deal so they could have worked from this:

But then they met the guy who came up with this:

And all of a sudden they needed a fucking FOUR TON RAM in order to generate 125 psi. You are well out of the world of easy hand leverage and all of a sudden you've got an industrial product sitting on the counter.

There had to have been a moment where the engineers were sitting around, staring at this fucking catastrophe of a concept, and one of 'em said

"We could do it with a bottle jack"

and one of the other ones said

"We can't put a fucking bottle jack on a kitchen counter"

and another one said

"Dude we're fucked, aren't we"

And then another one said

"Well, we haven't had to value engineer a goddamn thing yet, so let's get freaky"

And here we are.

That Sodastream Play? My wife bought us one. It broke inside 3 months. The thing that replaced it (for free) has far fewer moving parts.

kleinbl00  ·  2797 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Oh I certainly wouldn't use it for its intended purpose! I prefer to chew my food and besides, if I want an Odwalla there's a grocery store a quarter mile away. But the level of precision machined aluminum -

Okay. Someone more clever than myself once pointed out that there's a terrible urgency to guns - their mechanical nature and high-durability precision demands that their triggers be pulled. It's technological fetishism to be sure but that doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Buddy of mine has a lot of Bosch rail at work. They go through so much of it that they often sell it as scrap. per pound. And there's something about Bosch rail that almost forces you to figure out how to make a coffee table out of it. It will be pure womanbane and you won't care because you have a bosch rail coffee table.

My father owns a Norden bombsight. It's currently in my old bedroom at home. And someday, it will be mine. that does not mean I wish to drop bombs.

I price-shop Curtas regularly.