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.