[SGVHAK] Repair Cafe report & next Repair Cafe

[Lan Dang]

Hi all,

The Repair Cafe was fun.   It was held at Throop Hall at Throop Church.  There was a backyard fruit exchange and a seedling exchange.  There were people there with sewing machines and tools.  There was a representative of the Caltech Bike Lab there fixing bikes.  His name is Jonathan and he actually works at JPL.  At the Really, Really Free Market, we scored a Kill-a-Watt and a soldering iron with a rusty  tip.  We all earned one time dollar for our efforts.  We might've earned more if we'd actually been members of the Time Bank.

 James, Adam, and I were sitting at the "tinker" tailor under the auspices of Scoops, who filtered jobs our way and gave us advice on how to fix things and lent us some tools.  One thing I discovered is that the screwdriver set I had is great for unscrewing most electronic parts, but not for reaching screws that are deeply recessed, because the barrel is too thick.  Also, sometimes you want a regular screwdriver when you're trying to pry things open.

I got to use my soldering iron to solder together the wires in a pair of high end headphones.  Someone brought in a projector that was showing funny colors.  Scoops diagnosed it as a problem with one of the lenses, I think.  At least, it was a square piece of glass that looked burnt.  There were also blenders and dehydrators and vacuums.  I got a toaster where the lever wouldn't stay down.  After taking it apart, James checked out the circuits with a multimeter, and said it was an issue with the power supply to the circuit board that controlled the timer. While we couldn't fix the toaster, the process of diagnosing what was wrong was very interesting.  For example, this toaster used a magnetic latch for the lever, and if power wasn't getting to the magnet, then it couldn't act as a latch.  We also realized that the controls on the toaster were not doing anything.   The toaster still works if you manually hold the lever down.  

There are some repairs that span multiple Repair Cafe events, because first you diagnose it, then you advise them about the part they need to replace, then you wait for the part before you can finish the repairs.

I think the next time we do a Repair Cafe, we should wear our SGVHAK shirts and bring along our business cards.

I believe the next Repair Cafe will be on May 3rd at the Pasadena Earth and Arts Festival.  It's supposed to take place off the grid, so Scoops is going to figure out how to make that work, considering our need for electricity to power things like soldering irons and even the devices, to verify that we've fixed things.  

We'll post another Meetup event once we have more details.


Lan
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