Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/08/28/inside-nycs-slowly-vanishing.html
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I would have thought, with 3D printing, making odd sized film spools should be easy peasy (of course that might put an artisan out of business*).
*on the plus side to might lead to an increase in “new” artisans.
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I’ve actually used 3D printing to make repair parts for one of my pairs of headphones - the plastic pieces that held the headband together had cracked after years of use. The shape files were up on Thingiverse, and I just put them on a USB stick and went over to my local library.
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My eye always goes to the workbench in a shop like this, for a master’s class in selecting the tools that really work/live/survive a life of service.
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It’s hard to make a living fixing things these days. The wide variety of old things to be fixed means that you can’t economically stock spare parts, and you can’t have the deep knowledge of what breaks on each model, to be able to repair it quickly.
Also, TV sets are too reliable. They are engineered to last for many years, until the industry invents the next higher resolution format that renders the device obsolete. Would you pay much to fix a 10-year-old DSLR, when there’s a better one available?
I fix stuff all the time for work and for fun and for friends. It’s definitely a labor of love.
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Those are Wiha screwdrivers. I use them also.
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And then there’s this guy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3G7b-DcOO4 (circa 2008 - warning 1hr 45 mins). I enjoyed watching this gentlemen and all his expertise and specialized workbenches and tools for rebuilding CRT television sets. Part of the fascination is wondering if there’s any way this guy could still be in business. He has all of this knowledge for a completely obsolete technology and can perform a service that nobody wants or needs anymore. You can see from watching him work that it’s a labor of love, you have to care a great deal about the final result in order to be able to perform the work properly.
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Talking of repair shops…
The BBC has a delightful series called The Repair Shop. Skilled experts repair a wide range of family heirlooms. If you can get iPlayer, go watch. One episode and you will be hooked. It takes several episodes to see all the different experts deployed, according to need.
Coincidentally, there was an article/review about it in today’s Guardian.
(Timing is everything.)
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I would think that there would be a market for dependable, serviceable, high-quality goods that aren’t made with planned obsolescence in mind, but that seems to not be the case for many, maybe even most, items. I’m guessing it’s because these days most people are too poor to afford them, regardless of the long-term benefit, and most wealthy people don’t place value in them due to bad taste or simply not living a kind of lifestyle where they actually have to care about quality over quantity. But if there’s another reason, I’d be interested to hear it. I find it continually frustrating to be unable to buy something as simple as an ironing board that isn’t a cheap, disposable piece of garbage.
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Or a window fan, for that matter. My house has a ~60-year-old Sears window fan of all-steel construction that just needs a few drops of oil every 2-3 years. The only way you could find an equivalent today would be to go to an industrial supply firm like Grainger, and it would cost hundreds of dollars.
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It’s really not surprising. Given what I assume is the high cost of NYC rent, the fees you’d have to charge to repair something in most cases would exceed the replacement cost of the item. Outside of a collectors items there’s no market for repairs anymore.
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That Sears window fan from way back when did cost hundreds of today’s dollars. when we got a little portable color TV in 1973, it cost $1000 in today’s money.
The reason that modern things aren’t worth repairing is that they are made to cost very little, a result of capitalist evolution.
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There used to be a high-school track called “Small Motor Repair” that was available to vocational students. Haven’t seen anything to replace it.
Although 3D printing makes it cheap-ish to replace broken parts, you still need those repair skills to fix the thing.
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