NEW event - 🔧 Repair Cafe 🔨
We’re trying an experiment by hosting a Repair Cafe - the next ones are Sunday 6 November and Sunday 11 December so if you couldn’t make the October one then don’t miss these!
What’s a repair cafe you ask?
It’s a global movement to encourage people to consider repairing things they already own, rather than throwing them away and buying new things. Here’s a description from the Repair Cafe website:
“Repair Cafés are free meeting places and they’re all about repairing things (together). In the place where a Repair Café is located, you’ll find tools and materials to help you make any repairs you need. On clothes, furniture, electrical appliances, bicycles, crockery, appliances, toys, et cetera. You’ll also find expert volunteers, with repair skills in all kinds of fields.
Visitors bring their broken items from home. Together with the specialists they start making their repairs in the Repair Café. It’s an ongoing learning process. If you have nothing to repair, you can enjoy a cup of tea or coffee. Or you can lend a hand with someone else’s repair job. You can also get inspired at the reading table – by leafing through books on repairs and DIY."
There are apparently over 2,200 Repair cafes world wide and I have always wanted to host one at Harland Works. A few months ago I sent out an appeal to see if anyone was willing to come and volunteer if we were to run one … and people responded! Which was so fab.
After some initial discussions we now have a group of volunteer fixers assembling in our cafe on Sunday 9th October, prepared to help you if you need a bit of expertise, information, tools or support to have a go at trying to fix something you have which needs repair!
What sort of things can you bring along?
Well here’s a list of the repairs our volunteers have experience / expertise with….
household electrical items - kettles, lights etc (top tip: check the fuse first!)
laptops - courtesy of Rhiannon Repairs
phones
glasses - courtesy of the lovely Eyeye Opticians folk
bicycles
portable things made of wood - courtesy of Johnny from Fallen Giants Woodwork
clothes needing sewing repairs
We’ve also got some expert help on-hand for the day from Margaret who runs the Repair Cafe in Chesterfield.
She suggests it’s a good idea if you assess how repairable your item is before you go to the trouble of bringing it along - anything made by Apple is apparently, very hard to fix. Whereas your chances with an older hoover or mixer are good! Older things, apparently are more likely to have been made repairable.
If you’re interested in bringing something along and getting our volunteer experts’ input please do join us.
If you’d like to check out how likely it is your item can be repaired you might like to have a look at the handy repair guides that the repair cafe community makes available to people online here:
https://www.repaircafe.org/en/community/repair-guides/
If you do come, our volunteer fixers will do their best to help you, but we can’t guarantee results - it depends how fixable your thing is. We also won’t be able to store your item, so you’ll need to be able to take it away again. Here are some house rules for repair cafes suggested on their website which we think will be very useful guidelines for us too:
Repair Café house rules
The work carried out in the Repair Café is performed free of charge on a voluntary basis by the repair experts at hand.
Visitors carry out the repairs themselves whenever possible, but repair experts on site can help if necessary.
The fact that the repairs are being performed by unpaid volunteers reflects the allocation of risks and limitation of liability. Neither the organisers of the Repair Café nor the repair experts are liable for any loss that may result from advice or instructions concerning repairs, for the loss of items handed over for repair, for indirect or consequential loss or for any other kind of loss resulting from work performed in the Repair Café. The limitations set forth in these house rules shall not apply to claims declared justified on the basis of liability arising by virtue of applicable consumer protection legislation which cannot be lawfully superseded.
A voluntary donation is greatly appreciated.
Any use of new materials such as leads, plugs, fuses, ready-made kneebends or applications will be paid for separately.
Visitors offering broken items for repair do so at their own risk.
Experts making repairs offer no guarantee for the repairs carried out with their help and are not liable if objects that are repaired in the Repair Café turn out not to work properly at home.
Repair experts are entitled to refuse to repair certain objects.
Repair experts are not obliged to reassemble disassembled appliances that cannot be repaired.
Visitors to Repair Café are solely responsible for the tidy removal of broken objects that could not be repaired.
To cut down on unnecessary waiting times during busy periods, a maximum of ONE broken item per person will be examined. The visitor will join the back of the queue if there is a second item for repair.