<h2>summary:</h2><p>Because I loved his book “How Buildings Learn”, I expected a more philosophical look at maintenance, but it’s mostly a deep dive into a few specific examples of boats, guns, and cars.</p><h2>recommend: 3/10</h2><img src="https://m.sive.rs/images/book/Maintenance1.webp"><h2>my notes:</h2><p>“Maintenance” means the whole grand process of keeping a thing going.</p><p>Maintenance is what keeps everything going. Every living thing spends time maintaining its own life and the life of the systems it depends on: bodies, vehicles, homes, cities. Everything is nested in something larger, even more worth maintaining.</p><p>The necessity of maintenance accumulates invisibly and gradually.</p><p>When you take responsibility for something, you enter into a contract to take care of it.</p><p>My boat is (like) new every day.</p><p>A large part of maintenance is routine inspection. Fix something when you first see it beginning to fail.</p><p>Prepare for the worst.</p><p>Read “Shop Class as Soulcraft” and “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”.</p><p>Work back from the visible part of the problem to the issues hidden behind it.</p><p>Ensure the problem goes away and stays away.</p><p>A noteworthy fix is a detective story.</p><p>Maintenance is frustrating. That’s what makes it interesting. Inspect the aggravation itself. When you’re baffled, your current theories aren’t working, so empty your mind of them.</p><p>Conquer the gumption trap of value rigidity. (“an inability to revalue what one sees because of the commitment to previous values”)</p><p>If you can't think that way, just fake it. Pretending to be open-minded can work well enough to reward you into gradually developing the real thing.</p><p>Allow what seems like an excess of time for your tasks, because things almost always take longer than expected.</p><p>Tidiness, like cleanliness, is a social signal - as much to yourself as to others. It's visible evidence that something is respected.</p><p>Write down every step of the disassmbly process with reassembly in mind.</p><p>Understand how it works, and how it's made.</p><p>Anything he looked at, he’d mentally dismantle then reassemble before trusting it.</p><p>To take proper ownership of something, study its manual. There are usually two manuals: the one from the manufacturer, and the 3rd party one that goes deeper and wider.</p><p>Swiss Environmental Action Foundation has a great book “Dry Stone Walls” that teaches the principles of the craft. It applies metaphorically to anything that has to hold itself together: a poem, a theory, a software program. Gravity plus friction.</p><p>Never paint rust.</p><p>The most active frontiers of maintenance are manufacturing, aerospace, software, and the military.</p><p>Design process:
- Question every requirement.
- Delete any part or process you can. If you don't have to add back 10% of them later, you didn't delete enough.
- Simplify and optimize, only after step 2.
- Accelerate cycle time, only after step 2 and 3.
- Automate only after all other steps.</p>