A while back, I shared an idea: when testing prototypes, you can remove material from overbuilt areas and use it where it actually matters. Someone pushed back hard, saying that mindset encourages planned obsolescence.

I don’t see it that way at all.

This isn’t about making things fail. It’s about understanding how they fail so you can design better.

The truth is, most of us are guessing when we design, guessing where stress will show up, guessing what might break. So what do we do? We overbuild. Thicker parts, stronger materials, more “just in case.”

And it feels like quality.

But overbuilding is often just a shortcut. It adds weight, cost, and complexity, and worse, it can give you a false sense of confidence. You might reinforce one area while unknowingly creating a new failure somewhere else.

What’s worked better for me is a different approach:

Build simple. Build cheap. And intentionally underbuild your prototypes.

Not to prove they work, but to find out how they break.

Then iterate:
Build → Test → Break → Improve → Repeat.

Every failure teaches you something real. Something you can’t get from a simulation or a guess.

This really hit me today as I was working on my garden tractor.  Plenty of parts are well built and still going strong. But the engine is failing, due to a basic design error on the cam shaft. I could spend a ton of time rebuilding the engine, or drop $1,000 on a new engine. Or, at the end of the day, I could just buy another used one for $400 and throw this one on the scrap heap. 

That’s the lesson.

If you don’t know where your product will fail, nothing else is going to matter.

 

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