Maker Movement / Mending Things

It's great to see that not everything is just thrown away and that people are making a real effort (and a creative effort) to recycle and reuse.  The BBC have a programme on their mid-afternoon schedules called Money for Nothing where items headed for landfill are given a new lease of life - it would be really good to see some electrical items on there too :)


My own fixes tend to involve gaffer tape as I don't have the skills of an engineer! :)

For those occasions when you just can't repair things yourself, here's an excellent spares website that I'd recommend as its kept quite a few of our household appliances and other items going for several years www.buyspares.co.uk

The Swiss are moving along with this:

http://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/good-as-new_switzerland-holds-first-nationwide--repair-day--/42556010


Best regards


Roger

In reply to Graham's point from some way up, my experience of lean manufacturing is that inability to repair is a byproduct rather than an aim. In practice, any bit of technology you can think of is so cheap now because of, say, clip together casing that it is cheaper to buy five of them and throw them away over a 10 year period as it was (say) 20 years ago to buy one that was kept going for 10 years through repair. And in any case developments in technology tend to mean that consumers press for the new one after two years anyway.


Personally I disagree with this view (partly for environmental reasons), and I am delighted that I have always worked in industries where products are designed to be kept going. Interesting that someone above mentions the rail industry, it would stagger visitors to my previous employer when I proudly showed them the 50 year old products on the shelf in our repair cell, which we would repair if we possibly could. "Surely that's bad for business, don't you want to sell them new ones?" they would say. No, what we wanted to sell was reliability and service. It's horses for courses.


It does wind me up when white goods shops try to sell extended warranties by saying "of course you can't expect these to last as long as they used to". I have been known to ask them why in that case they are selling goods they know to be shoddy!


Anyway, just finishing refurbishing four electric guitars as a favour for my local school, that was fun   When will somebody invent a really good refurbishing coating for connectors? But I suppose I answered that question at the start of this piece!

In the latest E&T Tim Fryer is asking for tales of repairing rather than throwing away. This thread is a good start.

30+ year old Kenwood Chef starts smoking (bad habit); a couple of new capacitors and away we go! Cakes - mmm yum yum.

Another, in this case mechanical, fix. The pivot on my neighbors pruners broke. It looks like it was originally designed as a fabrication but was then changed to a casting on cost grounds. The tensile straight of the alloy chosen was not sufficient so both side plates cracked. Some hacksaw and file work produced two new stainless steel side plates, two new pivot pins took a few minutes on the lathe. The pins were silver soldered in one side and screwed the other with some thread retainer. Better than new.

Hi Roger,

My experience with stainless steel (as a pig of a material to work with) is that you're underselling the skill you put into that - that's a lovely bit of work! I was going to put some photos up of some of my fixes but I'm a bit embarrased to now 

Cheers, Andy

Some of my "Frankenstein's" guitars built from scrap instruments (modelled by my son who is much better at playing them than me):


Biscuit tin electric slide guitar built in a couple of afternoons - one of which was teaching my son to use a router.


Electric and electro-acoustic "u-basses" built from children's guitars - fantastic sounding instruments, no-one can work out where that deep bass sound is coming from.


Five string fretless bass from a beautiful neck aquired from a well known online auction site, a bass body I had lying around, and my own design of electronics. This is a serious instrument.


Ross, who is heavily into all things medieval, said "can I have a bass shaped like a sword?" As a true engineering dad, I said he could if he made it himself. It's taken a while but we finished it this summer - it's actually remarkably good! As ever, made from pretty much all scrap parts but with some serious woodworking this time.


Cheers, Andy