The saving on the knob alone would pay a reasonable chunk of a basic but useful printer. Use it for a few more things and you'll be in the black even ignoring the more fun things you might do. The time it takes to learn a CAD system can also be fun if you enjoy that sort of thing.

My printer has saved me more than its cost in useful stuff I have printed.

There are places which will print out your model for a small fee on their own printer. There are even places which will allow you to use their printer if you come with your own filament (for example makerspaces) and maybe donate a little bit to support them.

As for CAD itself, there's a nonzero chance that someone already designed that part for themselves and you can download a ready model. If not, then by designing it yourself you're acquiring a skill that can be useful again in the future and you can share that model with others to get that warm fuzzy feeling that you've helped strangers who had the same problem.

I have wasted a bunch of time making things, but like woodworking or similar trades, it's fun and rewarding.

Someone else I know got a printer and got bored printing with it after a bit and said I can print on it whenever if I toss them a roll of material every now and then.

I ended up finding all kinds of useful things to print. I made a connection piece for a sink that had a garbage disposal removed when I couldn't find the fitting anywhere and after 3 years it's holding up fine. I made a set of cams for a washer that randomly stopped spinning one day and those have been working nicely. Just a bunch of times it ended up coming in handy.

Learning a new and useful skill is not "wasting" time at all.

Man, i mean while we're fessing up to these things...

If you bought a PC gamer magazine from Barnes and noble back in like 2004 and the demo disc was missing, I'm so sorry.

Oh, are we confessing to minor thefts? Let's see, what's beyond 7 years old...

A Hogwarts robe clip from a Halloween costume

$12 in expired powerbars

About $200 in assorted mediocre liquor from some wedding

4 posters from bus stops for the Scooby-Doo movie

A 1999 Ford Explorer

7 Playboys and a bag of old coins

97 million kisses from my missus

(Edit: the largest thefts are the kisses)

I once ate the baby carrots from the grocery store, right off the display. I am not sorry about it.

ßake? Must be Japanese.

From a cost-savings perspective it's actually kind of genius, cause now they don't have to localize the text for multiple countries. Just produce one stove, throw a °C/°F setting on the display for the Americans, and profit.

lmaooo that's why bathrooms in those places now have the minimal setup to work properly. Good to know that I can be part of the change.

From this story alone I have several ideas of what your accent is, also this is the type of shit my kin would pull. I'm more of a "how many parts can I daisy chain while maintaining no leakage, my record is 12 which was the minimum needed. I hope an actual plumber never looks at my bathtub plumbing cause the faucet is certainly doing things much like my computers cable management.

I would have said the same thing but the enshitification isn't just for the web anymore - I had a 'quality' name brand refrigerator and snapped the drawer down the front because I pulled on it a little too hard. Those things used to be bulletproof but now they're flimsy crap.

I was thinking the same thing? Who are these animals that somehow destroy a metal knob on a commercial-style $8000 Bosch oven that is made of stainless steel?!

People with toddlers often keep the knobs off as a form of baby proofing, when the kiddos are tall enough to reach but not old enough to listen. It's then easy to lose a knob that isn't in the right place.

Enshittification is probably a large part. However, I can see it.

Our's are plastic, 25 years old, and look like crap. Wash them all you want, they just look dirty all the time. I'd replace them except for the absurd cost for a piece of molded ABS.

I take them off to wash them. I can imagine someone having an accident with one, like washing them in dishwasher and having one fall down onto a heating element. Those are big, but our's are small enough to get knocked down onto the garbage disposal - it would't be easy, and would require an unusual sequence is events, but I've fucked up even more unlikely sequences of events in my life.

I really wish I could get decent aluminum replacements for our's; it wouldn't make the range any newer, but it'd make it look nicer than the black plastic shit that it came with.

Ours is a cheap model, but the knobs are held on with a plastic housing inside the knob similar to that middle plastic tube that holds keycaps center on keyboards. Im constantly worried its going to break when i take them off to clean.

You can accidentally hit a knob and break it while moving the appliance itself. As for losing them, sometimes you knock one loose and it rolls under the fridge, and it's not worth the effort of moving a large appliance out of its nook just to get the knob back. Shit happens.

Maybe you were just a miracle child who never has accidents. Who knows?

Kinda depends on your environment, a lot of plastics are susceptible to degrading in certain temperatures, humidity levels, or especially from being left in direct sunlight.

The day big corporations stop stealing from the workers is the day I care about stealing from them. That day will not come.

Let's not forget the rampant wage theft across the entirety of the US, much less the ongoing grift they're pulling on its citizens re: "shoplifting", etc. being the big scary Evil — when wage theft stats completely destroy the charts in comparison to all other commercial/consumer theft, including misappropriation by employees! 😡

TL;DR: Stealing from big corps isn't theft. It's a civic duty, at this point.

That's actually hilarious, i never thought about that when i see missing parts in stores.

Maybe that's what happened to the original knob. Years ago someone bought a stove and the knob broke so they stole their neighbours as a replacement, thus starting a tit for tat, reciprocal crime wave that swept the nation.

They do build them like they used to.

But if your devices had broken down in the past like all the other devices from that time, you wouldn't be telling this story. Classic survivorship bias.

Kids today just don't know the joys of sticking paperclips into the knob-less posts and then trying to guess what each stop on the knob does.

I know right? They need to teach it in schools!

Once you have the printer and the knowhow, it takes like 5 minutes to draw and 20 minutes to print at a cost of like 0.10 €

It takes longer to go to a location and buy it at a much higher cost. So why should you?

Look dude, fuck those ants.

The same but for my broken Xbox, after a little sticker art.