SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the making-broken-vacuum-cleaners-suck-again dept.
If you've ever despaired of getting your vacuum cleaner fixed or thought that your broken lamp was a lost cause, there's hope. A worldwide movement is trying to reform our throwaway approach to possessions.
The movement's foundation is the Repair Cafe, a local meeting place that brings together people with broken items and repair coaches, or volunteers, with the expertise to fix them.
[...] "One of the things that makes it challenging and interesting is that we don't know what people are going to bring," Ray Pfau, an organizer of a Repair Cafe in Bolton, Mass., said in an email.
Lamps top the list of items brought in to be repaired, followed by vacuum cleaners, Mr. Wackman said. The types of repairs offered vary by location and reflect the particular talent in a community, he said.
New Paltz [in upstate New York] has a repair person with a national reputation as a doll expert. It also has a "Listening Corner" with a psychiatric nurse "because being listened to is a 'reparative act,' " he said.
The cafes invite people to bring their "beloved but broken" possessions to the gatherings, which are hosted in church basements, libraries, town halls and senior centers. The cafes make no guarantees that items will be fixed.
"All we can guarantee is that you will have an interesting time," Mr. Wackman said.
The gatherings tend to draw professionals, retirees and hobbyists who volunteer as repair coaches.
None in my area but I would be tempted to show up and help. I like to fix things and have a decent success rate, just coaxed some more life out of our ~30 year old garage door opener.
Similar article at: http://www.digitaltrends.com/home/repair-cafe/ and the main website is at: https://repaircafe.org/en/about/ (also available for NL, FR, DE & ES)
(Score: 2) by nobu_the_bard on Tuesday January 24 2017, @01:38PM
What about 3D printing? Is that a solution to fabricating some of these things? I have no experience with 3D printing personally so I honestly do not know if it is impossible or simply impractical.
(Score: 2) by ledow on Tuesday January 24 2017, @02:12PM
Not really.
Getting the part shape needs a model, or an existing part to 3D scan.
Doing so commercially is likely a patent violation.
The plastics used in anything affordable aren't going to last long at all, especially as the original parts are likely to have broken because they were under great stress in the first place.
And even if there was a readily-available bunch of 3D models of every part from the manufacturer in question, which worked, and you could print them out, the cost of the machine to do so + the plastic + the time is likely to be greater than just buying a replacement part.
Maybe for things that aren't available ANY other way, but they'll never match the quality of the original component with current tech, without spending orders of magnitude more money than it would ever recoup.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday January 24 2017, @06:04PM
Which is the advantage of having multiple "repair cafes" in a big city.
If, every week, you get tens of replacement parts to make (fitting the 3D-print constraints you explained), you might end up getting the economies of scale you need, eventually.
If it's done on a voluntary basis by people helping those who can't afford to buy new stuff, or just by people fighting our growing garbage piles, and the costs keep plummeting, there's a point where it will make sense.
I don't think you'll get many judges to agree that replacing a piece of a 10-year-old vacuum is a punishable offense, given the rate of design changes, and especially if you're on the West Coast.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Fnord666 on Tuesday January 24 2017, @06:04PM
What about 3D printing? Is that a solution to fabricating some of these things? I have no experience with 3D printing personally so I honestly do not know if it is impossible or simply impractical.
It is indeed. I have done it for several appliances. One part for a toaster and another part for the icemaker in a refrigerator for example. Many of the plastics that you can print with are the same plastics that were used to create the part in the first place. They may have a slightly different finish since they are printed layer by layer rather than injection molded, but it will be functional. As for design, unless the broken part is mangled beyond recognition it doesn't take too much to measure it and model a new one. That could even be a part of a Repair Cafe if it was held in a Maker Space for instance, where 3D printing and software might be available.
(Score: 1) by purple_cobra on Tuesday January 24 2017, @08:41PM