Wash them hot and dry them hot, I do it every single time and my bags hold up fine. Maybe your sister's bags are just cheap junk to begin with?

Yeah, "those old Trek wheels from the 90s" totally fits into this bigger thing I've noticed with older stuff in general. Like, I was cleaning out my dad's garage last summer and found his old fishing rods from the 80s. The metal guides on them had this same weird crusty corrosion that basically turned the metal into powder if you touched it. It's funny how we assume older stuff was built better, but sometimes it was just built with whatever cheap materials they had lying around. I feel like everything from that era had some weird alloy or plastic that just didn't hold up, like how old car radios get that sticky goo on the buttons. Anyway, glad you caught that about the Trek wheels, it makes me feel less crazy for noticing these patterns in random junk.

Funny how that applies everywhere though. Bad contractor? Blame the materials. Blame the user manual. Blame the weather. Nobody ever starts with "maybe my person just messed up.

Man @coleman.henry I gotta disagree here lol. Every test I've seen where people actually set up the gain and distance right shows it locking on way better than the old stuff.

Funny you mention Hallsands, @robinson.matthew, because I actually read a book about lost coastal villages last year. Dunwich in Suffolk is a famous one - whole town fell into the sea over centuries. There's even a legend you can hear church bells underwater on quiet nights. Pretty sure that's just wind and waves though. What got me was how many of these places were legitimately settled and then just... gone. Not mislabeled farms, just swallowed up by the ocean or buried by sand.