Shown here is a Dexter Thoroughbred 600 washing machine I pissed off. And how did I piss it off, you may ask? I left a penny in my pocket.
The newer Dexter machines appear to not have this same issue, but these older ones (looks like it’s from the 90s?) do.
A lip behind the door edge is just the right size that a penny can fall into the space between it and the rotating basket, and get wedged in the rubber gasket, causing the machine to urinate.
A quarter just kinda sits there.
The offending lip (tub edge?) and basket edge. The rounded edge is what the door gasket seals against. The rubber ring seen at the bottom is just where the front cover of the machine meets the tub and is there to fill a gap and prevent the whole thing shaking and banging.
And the penny doesn’t exactly come out unscathed from the ordeal.
Stuff like this is a good example of why, when you test a design, you must consider some unusual use cases. This could have been prevented if someone had just noticed that the spacing of this assembly easily allowed small flat objects to get sucked in and jammed there.
And maybe Grass Valley Group could come up with a newsroom video archival and playout system that doesn’t toss its cookies every time the moon is in a certain phase, but that’s clearly asking too much. *Growls in frustrated engineer*