Repair Cafe Update - September
Repair Cafe is now back on Sunday afternoons for the Autumn/Winter and we had a busy time from 2 to 5 pm last Sunday with a good range of things being brought for repair including:
a Krups coffee grinder with a broken switch. As this is the exact same grinder I have … with the exact same fault .. I took an interest. As with many household items you can sometimes get an idea of their reliability if you google them. Googling this grinder brings up a fair amount of comment about this fault - and a few helpful youtube videos (eg this repair is covered here). Unfortunately this repair wasn’t successful this time and Sue was going to try the same workaround I do which is to use a wooden spoon to turn it off and on …
Simon worked super hard with sharpening things including some Garden Sheers and a knife for Ze, secateurs for Rachel
Other things we had included a stunning kartell Bourgie lamp brought in by Sally Anne. She has had it for years has been frustrated with it not working properly - this was one of our successful fixes! Such a stunning lamp!
Another success was a hedge trimmer and this repair is a good example of what sometimes happens, in that Karine had brought it in to an earlier repair cafe. We’d identified it needed a new part, she’d got the part and returned to have it fitted. This was a successful repair 😊
David bought in a carriage clock - he had to wait patiently (as did many folk) for his slot with our volunteer reparirers - but happily they were able to get it working for him!
Other successes included a hoverboard brought in by Annie, a SMEG toaster for David, a kettle for Michelle, a bookcase for Veronnica
Jo brought in a vintage floor lamp - but we don’t know if we were successful as she needed a bayonette bulb to test the repair. Rowan had this problem as we needed the power cable to test the blue tooth speaker she brought in. So that’s a top tip to remember to bring things like bulbs, batteries, power leads etc to enable us to test your repair
And another top tip is to research your repair before hand to see what youtube tells you about whether it might be possible or not.
The cafe was nice and busy, and with so many repairs completed must have made a good impact environmentally (saving waste and landfill) and also for people who saw favourite items mended/didnt’ need to spend money buying replacement items.
Many thanks to our amazing volunteers for this cafe who were: Gordon, Dave, Simon, Diane, Peter and Johnny and me (Sophy).
We’re planning our next dates and I’ll post these soon. Meanwhile if you would like to volunteer please do get in touch as we’d love to hear from you (email me at info@harlandworks.co.uk). We would love some more people who can do sewing repairs. But other skills (including admin) are very welcome :)
And top tip - if you have a BIKE that needs repairing - we didn’t have any bikes this cafe, so you would have had excellent service if you’d have been the one to bring your bike in!
