Sommar- och höstfixa!

Det är fixardags igen, så plocka fram alla prylar ni har haft sönder i sommar och kom på en Mending Maniacs träff redan i veckan!

Första chansen är nu på Torsdag 5/8 kl 18:00. OBS! Vi kommer att hålla till på ny adress vid Mariatorget, ring för vägbeskrivning.

Nästa två träffar blir 20/9 och 19/10, kl 18:00 båda gångerna.

Ring Anders på 073-9975368 om du är intresserad av att göra oss sällskap och behöver vägbeskrivning. Väl mött!

Nu fixar vi igen!

OBS! ÄNDRAT DATUM FÖR NÄSTA MENDINGSESSION!

På lördag den 19 juni kl. 13 gömmer vi oss för bröllopet och lagar istället våra prylar... Plocka fram era trasiga grejer och bege er till Metargatan på Södermalm!

Ring Anders på 073-9975368 om du är intresserad av att göra oss sällskap och behöver vägbeskrivning. Bienvenue!

Dags att plocka fram fixargrejerna igen

Den 19 april, kl 18:00 är det dags för vår tredje sammankomst. Plocka fram era trasiga prylar och bege er till Metargatan på Södermalm.

Ring Anders på 073-9975368 om du är intresserad av att göra oss sällskap och behöver vägbeskrivning.

Bi-lingual

This blog has so far been written entirely in English. We will continue to post all information that could be of interest to a wider public in English (like results of mending sessions, interesting links, etc..).

But since all of our mending members are Swedish, practical information, like when the next mending sessions are going to be organized, will here after be written in Swedish.

Translations will be provided upon request (leave a comment).

Durable Fashion

The new exhibition at Nordiska museet: "Modemakt - 300 år av kläder" [Fashion power - 300 years of clothing]  presents some interesting comments about past and present attitudes towards our clothes.

Before the industrialization, mending clothes that wore out was an economical necessity. Buying a new dress could cost as much as one years salary; no wonder the wearer wanted to use it for as long as possible.

Once the machines started turning and the industrialization gained momentum at the end of the 19:th century, prices dropped rapidly.

The trend towards cheaper commodities continues to this day, as does the trend to buy more stuff than the previous generation. We are now however slowly becoming aware of that there is another price to pay for consumption. We are using up the available resources in an ever increasing rate, putting people, animals and entire eco-systems in great jeopardy.

I do recommend a visit to the exhibition; it's an excellent historical looking glass for a close inspection of our own time.

Anticipating the Afterlife

Today, Make magazine published a blog post directing my attention to a really interesting article covering the concept Design for Disassembly (DfD).

The article: Afterlife: An Essential Guide to to Design for Disassembly, written by industrial designer Alex Diener, talks about the many advantages of taking the "repairabillity" in to consideration when designing new products. I quote:

Design for easy repair + provide access to parts: If it can be worn out, it will need to be replaced, and the design should support that. Batteries, moving components, contact areas are all examples of parts that will need replacement at some point. The challenge is two-fold: make it easy to replace, and make the parts accessible for purchased through a website or reseller. If these two factors aren't considered, the life of the product is severely limited.

Not only is it, as Diener points out, important for material recycling needs that product are easily disassembled. I would argue that repairing things is the best way to recycle. For instance, if you do a life cycle analysis of carbon dioxide emissions for a product you will find that a large portion of the environmental "cost" is due to transports. The more advanced and processed a product is, the more energy has gone in to the assembly and manufacture of it. Any repair you make close to your home and with a minimum amount of new material to, say, double the life span of a product will cut all those environmental costs in half! The savings could be huge.

The second mending success

Our second mending workshop, two days ago, was a successful event indeed. Miss S had made semlor to the delight and joy of all participants. The image doesn't even begin to do justice to how good they tasted.

Just like the first time, we got a lot of things fixed.There was a new set of broken headphones, and some old ones that got a shrink tube fixup. The electric screw driver that eluded us on our last workshop finally got fixed. Miss S saved a pair of broken candle sconce from the waste bin.

Every where you turned there was making and mending in progress. These stockings for instance, got a bunch of holes mended.

On the other side of the table, a pair of worn shoes had a touch up with some leather paint; have a look at the before and after images below.

In short, it was a marvelous mending evening and I had a great time!

Who needs light bulbs?!

This pair of old sconce are really useless in their current state. As you can see from the image, you can only hang one of them on the wall.

Miss S was determined to fix this though and she had come up with an ingenious way of doing it.

First she cut an oval shape out of a masonite board to match the shape of the sconces backside.

She then cut the oval in half and added a small notch. This is kind of hard to describe so please have a look at the third image. In the image you can see the part she has cut out of the masonite board fitting perfectly inside the sconce oval.

The idea is of course that you slide the notch down over a nail or a screw in the wall.


Next, Miss S stirred some two component epoxy glue together and pushed the plate in place.

After letting the glue harden, it becomes very strong. As you can see from the last image it is definitely strong enough to hold the sconce hanging from a screw.

Another successful and innovative fix for the record (and for the wall).

Headphone replay

Miss A wasn't the only one to bring headphones to the workshop. This time miss K also brought a broken set. The cable to the headphone had gotten snagged on something and now one of the speakers was completely mute.

After taking the speaker apart it was obvious what had happened. The tug to the cable had made it snap close to where it was soldered.

Holding the wires in place while also holding the soldering iron and the solder is a challenge to any one but Shiva. Applying first a small amount of solder to the speaker contact terminal is one way of getting around this. Then all you have to do is to re-heat the solder while holding the cable.

After the soldering was done miss K put the headphones back together and tested them with some music. It worked! Now they're back to their normal stereo selves again.

A new stylish rubber outfit

During the last mending session miss A fixed a headphone cable that her rabbit had been chewing on. But the tape wrapped around the soldered wires was a bit bulky. So this time she removed the tape and used heat shrink tubing instead. In the picture you can see what it looks like (it's a bit blurred, but you get the idea).

Two thinks to remember when using shrink tubing.

1. It's a lot easier to get it on to the cable before you solder the ends together; that way you don't have to pull it over the cable connector. 
2. If you don't have a hot air gun, a lighter or candle will work fine; just don't hold the tube to close to the flame! or the plastic might melt or start to burn.
   

Return of the screw driver

Here is an in depth report of one fix from yesterdays mending workshop. More posts, about the other things fixed, are coming soon. 

At the last mending session mr A didn't manage to fix the broken electronic screw driver, but this time he wasn't going to give up. The problem with it was that the switch that controls the turning direction (clock wise / counter clock wise) had a glitch; some times it would work and some times not.

The first image shows the gutted screwdriver after it had been  taken apart.

The battery was soldered to two wires that connected it to the circuit board, so the first thing to do was to unsolder one of the wires (to avoid electrical shorts while handling the circuit board).

Next, the faulty switch was unsoldered. Mr P managed to take the small switch apart (the second image) and we could conclude that the glitch was due to mechanical wear. After putting the switch back together it worked better, but not perfect; another solution was required.

On closer inspection of the switch and the circuit board we figured out how the circuit operated. This is going to be a bit technical, leave a comment if you have any questions. The switch is a double pole double throw (DPDT) type and it was used to control the direction of current flow through the motor. This type of circuit is commonly used for electrical motors and is called a H-bridge. It's really not as complicated as it sounds. Have a look at the third image if you are curious about how the h-bridge was connected.

Unfortunately we didn't have any spare DPDT switches to replace the faulty one with. We did however have a bunch of single pole dual throw switches (SPDT). And using two of those you can get the same functionality as with the DPDT switch. So we soldered wires to where the switch once was and added the two switches. In the fourth image you can see the switches sticking out.

And guess what, it works!

But you can't really have switches hanging like that, so in one final step we glued the switches to the side of the screw driver. Notice how, in the last image, we used a rubber band to hold the switches in place.

Our first mends

Here are some images from our first mending session.

These are great headphones. Too bad Miss A's pet rabbit had been chewing on the cord. Well, tape can't really fix electrical problems so Miss A cut the wires before and after the break and then soldered them back together. Now it works like a charm.


I decided to try to fix a huge hole in an old sweater (you can see my fingers sticking out through it). I found a great illustration on how to mend this here.


You can't tell from the black an white photos, but the sweater is gray and I'm using a red yarn for fixing it. This makes the patch stand out. Show the world that you care about your stuff!








While I was busy with my sweater, Miss S got some broken jewelry out and did an amazing job of combining it into a new piece. This just shows that you don't have to fix it to be what it once was, you can use it for parts when creating something new.

The only thing we didn't manage to fix was the electric screwdriver with a glitch in a switch. We haven't given up on this though and we'll give it another try the next time.

Round 2

Last time was a great success! We managed to fix a bunch of things and we had a great time doing it. Pictures and descriptions are coming soon.

Now it's time to get back at it. The next mending workshop will be held on the 17 of February, 18:00 at Metargatan.

If you would like to attend, please give Anders a call on 0739975368.

Let's get this party started!

We are ready for our first mending workshop! Bring your broken stuff to Metargatan on the 20th of January at 18:00.

This is how it's going to work. Everyone can bring something broken. We put all the stuff on a table and collectively discuss how to fix it. Then we help each other out with the actual mending. Aside from being a great opportunity to learn about how to care for your stuff and to reduce the ecological strain of consumption I think it's going to be a fun social event.

Successful repairs will be documented and posted to the blog to help spread knowledge about how to fix things. Incidentally, this is also the reason why the blog is written in English even though we are based in Sweden. We want to make it possible for fixers all over the (English speaking) world to be able to contribute to and benefact from the future knowledge base on how to fix things here on the blog.

If you feel like attending, please let us know and we will provide further details.

An idea is as simple as it is brilliant...

During a recent trip to New York, that included a visit at the amazing Proteus Gowanus gallery, me and my girlfriend stumbled on to something fantastic: the Fixers Collective! Have a look at their flyer (image) for a bit more info about what they do.

The idea is as simple as it is brilliant. We (the people of late capitalist societies) produce and consume stuff at a rate that is threatening to impoverish the earth of it's natural resources. So let's stop doing that! Let's try to suppress our knee-jerk reaction to buy new stuff as soon as the old stuff breaks (at least until we have tried to fix it).

On our way home from NY, we discussed the Fixers Collective and decided to start a similar collaborative mending workshop in Stockholm. The seed to the Mending Maniacs was thus firmly planted in our minds.

Stay tuned for info about our first mending session.