Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • I have been a "repair mentor" at our "repair studio" for 3+ years. It's very rewarding. We did have to set some ground rules: (clean your fan/vac, bring batteries, etc). Collaborated with our local library.
    by washbasin
  • I fixed a lot of stuff over the past couple of years. Recently I put alot of our shellys back to life. They were taking care of our rolling shutters, but died due to a low quality capacitor. I soldered quality ones in it and they now do their job as expected again.
    by jfsebastian
  • Considering that for the average person things, not food, nor housing, nor transport are the main drivers of our negative impact on this world. Repairing instead of throwing away is very undervalued.

    See: https://myhiddenimpact.com/nl/en to discover your biggest impact driver and https://thinkbigactnow.org to learn more.

    by wilgertvelinga
  • I love this idea. A lot of repair knowledge is buried in non-English forums or unsearchable Discord servers (grr Discord). We need to localize it and rebuild community expertise.
    by kayson
  • Here is a list of Repair Cafes in Switzerland: https://www.repair-cafe.ch

    Supported by the Switzerland Department for the Environment.

    by sschueller
  • Love those places! We have a very vibrant one here in town that is open almost every day of the week (with different focuses per day, like textiles, electronics etc.). Sometime ago I've been there to have an old German radio from the 60s repaired and there was actually a guy there who used to work in a radio manufacturing company in the 80s and really knew all about these kinds of devices. I think he was retired and going to these repair cafés just as a pastime and for fun and was super enthusiastic to repair it. I think these places are not only a great way of community-building, but also great for passing on knowledge. And to prevent electronic waste of course. (The repair café actually got some fundings from the federal state government, who were subsidizing these repairing initiatives for a while. Not sure if that's still going on.)
    by shin-ra
  • My ex-partner and I used to have "drink it and fix it" on Sunday evenings where she would bring stuff out for me to fix and we'd slowly get pissed! Some things remained fixed, some things, erm, needed re-fixing!
    by filterfish
  • Like others, I love this idea. A related idea I had was a library of 3d models of parts. Like thingiverse, but specifically for repair/replace components and not limited to plastic. My thought was if it's plastic you could 3d print whatever little busted plastic part was going to send your household item to landfill. But also models of things like automotive parts that you could have made by somewhere like xometry. I thought of it as an "international component database."
    by jaredhallen

Explore Birbla archives