A Repairers View
By Paul Smith, Volunteer Repairer
Since we launched the Share & Repair Cafés in Crich, I’ve been fascinated to see the range of household items people have brought for us to look at.
We’ve had kitchen appliances, including toasters, sandwich makers, kettles and coffee machines, along with carpet sweepers and vacuum cleaners. Then there’s been the power tools, including leaf blowers, drills and heat guns, and general household items, including clothes warmers, hair driers, wonky fans, and lamps of all shapes and sizes.
For me though, the prize has to go to the solar-powered chicken door: the idea being that the morning sun opens it, letting your chickens out for the day, and then at dusk, it closes again – with your chicks hopefully shut up inside, safe from Mr (or Mrs) Fox.
Of course, all these items had one thing in common: they either didn’t work or they didn’t work as they should. Our job as repairers has been to find out why, fix it if we can, or at least point them in the right direction for a replacement or (better and greener) a repair.
There’s a strong team feeling among us, and we each try help each other if anyone gets stuck, hasn’t got the tool they need, or would just like a second opinion.
Often the hardest job is to get inside whatever it is so that we can find what’s wrong. Sadly, that’s not always easy or indeed possible: the truth is that some things are deliberately made so that they cannot be taken apart, and if you try to do so, you’ll just end up breaking it.
But we have got smart to this and between us we now have a brilliant range of tools for removing fastenings of all types and sizes. So, if we can see any sort of screw or bolt – even if’s tiny or got a funny head – we can both remove it and put it back later.
Most of us have some sort of magnetic tray, or just a series of pots, so that we don’t lose those tiny screws.
Once inside, we can often see why something’s not working or otherwise misbehaving. Perhaps something’s become loose, or it’s blocked by dirt or fluff, or as we had with one cleaner head, heat from friction had just melted a plastic part away.
No matter how complicated, all electrical equipment relies on a circuit, so our eagle eyes are always on the lookout for any loose or broken wires, meaning that the circuit is broken.
There’s a real lift when the fault is fixed and the light comes on or the motor bursts into life.
I was initially downhearted at not being able to fix everything people bring, but sometimes they just want to know that it can’t readily be repaired before they go online and order a replacement: at least they, and we, tried to get a few more years of life out of it!
The BBC TV “Repair Shop” show makes a big deal out of milking every drop of emotion out of people’s attachment to their things, but there is no doubt that many people have an amazingly strong bond with their stuff.
Perhaps it was a present from a much-loved friend, or something that’s been handed down from parent to child, or it’s got some other special memory that we won’t know about unless the person shares it with us.
One lady told me at our last Repair Café: “I just like it, and you can’t buy anything like it now.” With her lamp, the problem was a stiff switch that hurt her finger when she pressed it. A quick spray with the WD40, a slight adjustment to the clamp holding the shade to the light fitting and a few strokes of the file to remove a sharp edge that had formed on the switch, and all’s working fine again. It made her day – and ours too.
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