Caveat emptor! We've got a couple of hair/beard trimmers around the house that have turned out to be pretty useful during the lockdown for home haircuts. They started to get a little dull, so I bought a whetstone and sharpened them - it's pretty straightforward.

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But here's the gotcha: one of our @WahlGrooming trimmers - the 9899L - sprang apart as soon as the screws were out and there was no obvious way to reassemble it; after looking for a tutorial of a manual, I called the 800 number.

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I spoke to a very helpful and patient customer service rep...but what they told me convinced me that I would never buy another Wahl product.

It turns out that by design, you can't sharpen the blade of this clipper - you're expected to throw it away when it gets dull.

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That means that less than six months after buying a $60 clipper, I have to shell out $40 (including shipping) to replace its blade; alternatively I can mail the entire thing to Wahl for in-house sharpening.

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That's bad enough, but when I pressed the poor CSR on this, saying that I felt ripped off because this non-owner-maintainability nowhere on the product packaging, they told me that ALL Wahl consumer products are designed to be non-owner-maintainable.

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That is, if your blades get dull, they expect you to either mail the clippers to them, or throw them away and buy another product.

Now, I think this is probably rationalization in defense of a new product design that is deliberately hostile to owner-maintenance.

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One of the other clippers I sharpened is an only-slightly-older Wahl model that was simplicity itself to disassemble, sharpen, and reassemble, and Wahl's own tech support department cheerfully supplied links to videos - including one from Wahl - explaining how to do this.

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But the official statement from Wahl saying that I should not expect to be able to sharpen any of my clippers, ever, triggered a memory - @jason_koebler's coverage of Wahl's bizarre 2018 campaign to kill state-level #RightToRepair legislation:

https://www.vice.com/en/article/vbxk3b/appliance-companies-are-lobbying-against-right-to-repair

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Wahl sent letters to state legislatures saying that if people who own Wahl products service them themselves, they could burn their houses down!

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/4446374-Wahl-Opposition-Illinois.html

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There's nothing wrong with Wahl offering to maintain my shaver if I want to mail it from California to Illinois twice a year for maintenance. But that's not what's going on here: they're not offering, they're INSISTING, having altered their design to so there's no choice.

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I think it's a fair statement to say that Wahl doesn't expect to be taken up on this offer by most of its customers - instead, we're expected to either throw away the whole shaver and buy a new one (perhaps enduring a dull shave until the clipper is completely useless).

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Or we're expected to shell out $40 once or twice per year for new disposable blade assemblies to keep our $60 shaver in good working order.

Either way, it's a personal and timely reminder of the importance of the work that @ifixit and @repaircoalition are doing.

eof/