Philly Fixers Guild Provides You the Tools to Repair Your Broken Wares

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Philly Fixers Guild puts the tools to repair your broken wares in your hands

Nov. 21, 2016

Ever been to the dump in South Philly? If so, you might have noticed something: It's not a junkyard; it's a junk graveyard.

Piles of Telly'southward and audio equipment sit waiting to be repurposed, frequently but jettisoned because they needed a bit of tender love and care. Not surprising, considering that the U.Due south. produced 3.14 million tons of electronic waste in 2013. Similarly, small mountains of furniture make an appearance, and most of information technology seems imminently-usable—possibly but missing a part or a fleck wobbly.

I cartel you: Become to the dump and tell me yous're not simply a tad tempted to rescue a wheel that's missing a concatenation, an old turntable or a ready of outdoor chairs.

Simply what practice you do in one case you rescue that junk from oblivion? And what do you lot practice with your ain worn-out wares?

That'southward where  the two-year-old Philly Fixers Society can help. To put information technology simply: they help you lot set up your stuff, free of charge, a few times a year at events that they telephone call "repair fairs." And they can handle  a whole lot of stuff: Fixers Order co-founder Ben Davis, an airline pilot by day, says they prepare  everything from musical instruments to audio equipment to grandfather clocks. They do have limits, though. "Sometimes, people bring an iPhone with a cracked screen, and equally much equally we'd love to aid we simply don't have the material," says Davis.

"The inherent goal is more than environmental consciousness," says Logan. "Nosotros're also trying to equip people with a meliorate agreement of how their items work."

The Club, according to Davis, isn't the first urban volunteer repair outfit; there are like groups in New York, Seattle, Boston and San Francisco. And the Fixers Club isn't Davis' first volunteer rodeo. Davis and co-founder Holly Logan are both members of Sustainable 19125 & 19134, a Fishtown-based organization that organizes events focusing on environmental consciousness and helping  neighbors with "green actions" to help eliminate needless waste.

Always on the lookout for new sustainable programs, Davis says he saw reports of "repair cafes" in other cities starting dorsum as far as 2007.

"We were sure that in that location was an organisation like that in Philly already, because information technology was such a great idea and Philly'south a pretty progressive city nowadays," Davis says.

Davis, who has been in Philly for about 12 years, says he and Logan, who works at Temple, hunted effectually the city for a similar group, but to no avail. So they started their own, holding a first event in 2014; events have been held at a diversity of venues, from the Sculpture Gym in Fishtown to Memphis Street Academy.

Davis himself is no slouch of a repairman. "I had a father who was mechanically-inclined, and we had a minor gunkhole that we fabricated repairs to when I was a child, and my grandfather owned a small hardware shop in southern California for 40 or 50 years, and I would piece of work there in the summers," he says. He learned by doing while working for his granddad, fixing everything from dishwashers to vacuum cleaners to kitchen pipes.

Still, at the fairs, he doesn't practise much of the bodily fixing. "Holly and I are usually busy signing people in and getting people epoxy and thermal fuses, and making certain everything is running smoothly," he says.

Roughly 85 people have called Davis asking to exist volunteer fixers, and Davis says early on repair fairs drew up to 110 people. Davis says roughly 50 per centum of those who attend the repair fairs go home with fixes.

The kind of kind of hands-on ethos Davis learned working for his gramps is reflected in the Fixers Gild'due south work. Meet, they don't merely take their volunteer repair people reassemble your cleaved junk. No, that'd exist far likewise like shooting fish in a barrel. Instead they supervise you while you take apart your disrepair mandolin or old Super Nintendo, and coach you forth.

"When a invitee shows up to a repair fair consequence, nosotros endeavor to become them to brand the repair themselves," says Davis. "We hand them the screwdriver, tell them to accept the screws out of the dorsum of that clock radio and say, 'Okay, now permit's meet what'due south going on in there.' Once they do that information technology really breaks the water ice, and shows them that things aren't immediately dispensable."

"The goal of the repair fair is to take the guest sit with the fixer and walk through a repair to learn something" adds Logan.

Davis may be crazy handy, but he says that he himself has learned from the events. "We've had a number of different fixers that specialize in things like vacuum-tube driven amplifier things from 40 or l years agone," says Davis. "I had e'er kind of understood how those things worked, but there's a lot of intricacies that go into making them work properly. Through that I've learned a bit nearly electronics."

Roughly 85 people have called Davis  asking to be volunteer fixers, and Davis says early repair fairs drew upwardly to 110 people. Equally of now, they draw around 50 per event, with 15 volunteer fixers. The Order's most recent repair fair was held on October 22 at Greensgrow Subcontract in North Philadelphia; they currently host four repair fair events per year. Davis says roughly l per centum of those who attend the repair fairs go dwelling with fixes.

According to Logan and Davis, the oversupply at repair fairs is considerably mixed, drawing guests from North Philly to Due south Jersey to Maryland. Later all, if there'south any cultural universal at all it's a wobbly desk-bound chair, right? And if, along the mode, they larn a little something about existence green, all the better.

"Generally, we're really trying to educate folks in the community to prevent waste," says Logan. "The inherent goal is more than environmental consciousness. We're also trying to equip people with a improve understanding of how their items work."

The Fixers Gild plans to hold their side by side effect at Fishtown'south PlayArts in belatedly January or early February.

Header photo courtesy of phillyfixersguild.org

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Source: https://thephiladelphiacitizen.org/philly-fixers-guild-repair-fairs-2/

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