Not talking about obvious things like crime.
I mean things that people just accept as part of life.
Things everyone does, but when you really think about it, it actually makes no sense.
Not talking about obvious things like crime.
I mean things that people just accept as part of life.
Things everyone does, but when you really think about it, it actually makes no sense.
Buy a thing, it stops working, throw the thing away, buy a new thing.
Seems like nobody fixes shit anymore. And yes, I know, companies make things as unfixable as possible. But I’m a weirdo who would rather pay a lot to fix a thing than throw it into the ocean and buy a new thing.
My wife’s 4K monitor died a few months ago. They’d been pondering a new one anyway, so that forced the decision.
So I took the broken one to work and asked my electrician buddy if he could run a multimeter over it.
One 8p capacitor later and now I have a 4K monitor as well.
I have one of those digital measurement calipers. I dropped it and the screen went wonky. I took it apart, one of the zebra connectors had moved a bit. Put it back in place, put the thing back together and I’m back to measuring with it. Didn’t cost anything except maybe 30 minutes of time.
I love the feeling of fixing shit.
I got old-school calipers with a vernier scale because I was sick and tired of replacing the coin cell batteries in the digital ones.
If you buy a decent digital one, they actually turn off when you press the off button, and the battery lasts a long time. The cheap ones just turn the display off, and the batterty dies like every week.
These days, even if you pay more you still risk getting something that isn’t “decent” a lot of the time anyway, and I’m not willing to pay a lot more for something like Mitutoyo that actually has brand reputation.
Yeah I have like 8 different ones. I have a fancy Mitutoyo in a nice wooden box that I use on special occasions and a whole bunch of others that are more or less beat up. I use the digital one’s for quick checks on stuff like brake disc thickness, where it doesnt matter if its off by 0.05mm etc
We moved from repairing things to replacing things in one generation.
Probably half a generation even. When I was a kid fixing things was normal. I remember when all the small electronic shops started to disappear. Only to be replaced by mobile phone screen switch shops lol.
Repair used to be a normal skill. Now it’s almost a niche hobby.
Haha yup. Either a hobby or a way to make youtube videos. The amount of channels where people just fix things and they have millions of views is a good sign… I just hope it evolves into people starting to think about this whole fixing of things and not just watch youtube videos.
That’s the strange part.
Millions of people watch repair videos, but far fewer actually repair things themselves.
Yup. But if only 10% of those people decide to go fix a thing, instead of buying a new one, I guess that’s a win.
Thanks also for reminding me: planned obsolescence.
https://repair.eu/ is basically the group fighting that. They’re a huge coalition pushing the EU to force companies to stop soldering everything and actually give us parts and manuals.
It’s less “ranting on YouTube” and more “lobbying for laws” so your next laptop doesn’t end up in a landfill just because of a $2 fuse.
When our clothes washer broke, we paid a local pro to repair it for almost the cost of a new one. It was worth it to us, and I’d rather pay a local worker for their labor than a big box store for a new appliance. This was several years ago, and fortunately it’s still working.
Yeah I do that a lot. Luckily I have tools and some skills so I can do a lot of fixing myself. My current clothes washing machine was given to me, the shock absorbers had let the liquids out. I put some new O-rings in and a bit of hydraulic fluid. Its been working fine for 3 years now lol.
Yeah this. People cuss at the price of repair sometimes being even higher than a new product (which is a valid criticism) but you’re still more likely to be supporting a local worker rather than some faceless megacorp (though probably any spare parts might come from a corp, but at least some of the labor is rewarded as is due)
What I hate is that as much as I try to repair things, I just can’t do it because of companies not giving a fuck.
My monitor has been regularly having major display glitches, and I think it’s due to a cold solder joint, but my monitor is just glued and welded together in such a way where if I tried fixing it, I’d crack the screen and make it even more useless, so now I just have to… get a whole new monitor.
If you don’t mind how it looks, as long as it works, check out James Channel on youtube. Dude cuts circuit boards with a angle grinder etc. Goes to show that you don’t necessarily need to be careful… as long as you know what and how to fix. And if you have a lot of hot glue.