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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.
This is intentional.
Companies don’t want you fixing things, so they both make them hard to fix and then refuse to supply spare parts, unless they are forced to. In which case they make it as difficult as possible.
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.
Search Amazon for a knife sharpening stone, all the pictures that look the same are the exact same product at vastly differing prices.
I just sharpen my knives in the underside of a shitty ceramic mug or plate. Have been thinking of using a slate roof tile as they are bigger.
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
A good pair of shoes costs more, but your feet are worth it. And cobblers are still a thing.
Buy good shoes and have them repaired. This costs much less than buying cheap shoes every few years.
Same with tailoring. Buy a nice coat and have it fixed rather than buying a new coat. Slightly higher outlay up front, but it lasts far longer and is far cheaper than having to buy a new one when your shitty coat wears out in a few years.
Most people have never experienced the difference with quality goods. They seem more expensive, but are actually less expensive in the long run.
Buy nice things then use cobblers and tailors to prevent rebuying later.
High quality clothes can actually look good when they wear a little. Shitty stuff looks immediately shittier the minute it wears just a little. (This actually applies to a lot of other things too, like brick vs concrete.)
100% all of that.
I have these winter boots, got them from my dad. My dad bought them in early 1980s. They have a thing that lets you attach them to traditional skis. I use them during the winter for hiking and forest skiing. When the snows melt I take them to a cobbler and tell him to do a service when he has the time. I pick them up during the spring. They are getting on a bit, but I bet I can still get 3-5 years out of them.
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 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)
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.
We moved from repairing things to replacing things in one generation.
Seeing things break makes me want to not own that type of product again if I can avoid it. Teflon pans break how quickly? Fuck that, cast iron for life now!
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.
I own few things that need repairing. The main one is my bike and I do maintain that myself. Though I probably need to replace the bags on it, repaired them a few times and it isn't really holding together anymore. Those are a case of probably time to buy better quality.
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.
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.
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.