We Fix: A DIY Manifesto (2014) | Hacker News Reader

We Fix: A DIY Manifesto (2014)

popularmechanics.com

82 pointswallflower32 comments

On this topic: I recently learned that if you possess a soldering iron, you have all the tools you need to weld plastic!

Since a lot of household objects are made from plastic (or partially plastic) this is extremely useful. I had a couple bike lights where the plastic clip had broken at a stress point. Instead of having to throw them away and buy new ones, I just plastic-welded them back to functionality.

I did a rough and ready job without regard to esthetics - the results work just fine for me - but if you want to do it more thoughtfully here's a blog post on how: https://www.circuitspecialists.com/blog/welding-plastic-with...

If you do this, ideally do it outdoors and with a fan to blow the fumes away from your face. Burning plastic creates some pretty nasty gasses that you definitely don't want to be breathing in; I learned this the hard way, unfortunately.

You can also use a screwdriver or a nail heated up by a gas stove, blowtorch, even a lighter... yeah, I love MacGyvering shit out of nothing :D

The screwdriver on a stove (even electric) technique was needed for building plastic models (e.g. Revell) back in the day.

You can also reinforce plastic joints/parts with metal wire by heating and pushing it into the plastic.

(As a side note, I don't think there is any other DIY material that is as cheap and versatile as metal wire. All you need is some imagination and you can repair just about everything.)

Are there any particular reasons to use a soldering iron? Cyanoacrylate glue seems to work well for parts that mate cleanly.

Two issues. First is they have to mate cleanly, which is a matter of luck when some materials break. The other is that cyanoacrylate (aka Super Glue) does not stick to some things at all such as polyethylene.

In addition to attaching pieces together, you can sometimes also weld on additional plastic to buttress the repair.

iFixit is so great. I recently paid £200 to a charlatan who bodged a phone repair, so I took the leap and attempted to fix the bodge. iFixit had simple photo guides, it was a piece of cake, and I'll never send my phone away to get fixed again.

You think they're "professionals"... but they're likely just like you and me, learning on the fly and doing their best.

I don't trust my stuff with others, but that's probably because I can fix everything myself heh.

Last couple of times I had computers fixed, I got a missing RAM stick and a piss poor BGA reball job that failed within a month. They probably didn't have the best tools, but I paid a lot and they didn't even fix it for free a second time. I just replaced the system board.

>they're likely just like you and me, learning on the fly and doing their best

Correct. In my experience of working at a cellphone repair shop, we looked up most Android repairs on iFixit and/or YouTube before quoting a price. If a tutorial suggested that there was a high likelihood of breaking a given part (usually the screen) during the replacement of an unrelated one, we would throw the cost of that part into the initial quote. Apple products are standard enough that the repairs which can be done were well known to everybody, and we didn't have to research those before giving a quote.

Whenever I hear of right-to-repair I'm reminded of Farenheit 451 - one of often missed points that Bradbury made was that it was the willingness of the people in society to ditch books and information ; it was about populist mandate, not fascist overreach.

With right-to-repair, these things aren't hard to take apart and put back together because of some cabal of greedy corporate overlords. Customers genuinely do not care about the repair of these products.

> Customers genuinely do not care about the repair of these products.

If customers knew that a cracked smartphone screen could be replaced for 30$ and a dead battery for 10$ at the local shop down the street, do you really think they would put up with the current state of affairs, paying five or ten times as much?

People aren't stupid, they know the shops exist and the risk associated with third party repair. It's not first party manufacturers or government's job to mitigate that risk or convince people its acceptable for the price - that's the job of the repair shop.

They aren't stupid, but they don't often have any good reason to know such shops exist or that their specific problem (e.g. phone dies quickly after charging) can be quickly and cheaply fixed at such a place and doesn't require purchasing the latest and greatest iDevice. In the last year I've taught a half-dozen non-technical acquaintances that such shops exist, and they all opted for the repair route instead of a new phone.

A lot of the risks are caused by the status-quo. There are indeed more risks if the devices are built not to be repaired (adhesive vs reusable fasteners, serialized parts so unknown software of dubious origin has to be used to reprogram them, etc) than if the devices were built with repairability in mind.

They'll put up with more than they need to in order to run whatever plops out of Apple.

Go ahead and try getting your friends to use a pinephone where both of these "repairs" are trivialy doable by the end user.

People will take out loans just to run snapchat and iMessage.

Yes.

Apathy is an expression of helplessness. Consumers rightfully understand they have virtually no power over whether companies make do things like make products impossible to repair. This is a problem to be fixed at the level of government.

They can buy devices that are easier to repair. Shops can refuse to accept devices that they can't repair. Consumers aren't sheep, and I don't believe in legislation predicated on the assumption that they act like bovine.

I'm all for regulating tech companies, but not when it harms their ability to create products that fit market demands. When it comes to market demands today, repair-ability is at odds with other areas that companies innovate like device complexity, size, form factor, etc.

There is little market pressure for repairable devices. I don't think it's the role of government to create it. The most compelling argument I've heard relates to recycling and reducing landfill usage of electronics. But I'm not sure what levers government can pull in that regard that make repair easier.

The incentive for companies is to design products that are obsolete after a few years, such that they can sell a new one and make money on the new sale. While it's beneficial for customers to be able to repair their devices, their choices are limited by the availability of repairable devices.

The government has plenty of levers to use to improve repairability and reducing the amount of discarded electronics. They could mandate a minimum service life for electronics, where the manufacturer has to repair or replace any device that fails during that service life, for free, as long as the repair isn't due to customer negligence. They could mandate having a serviceability score label on electronics, just like the energy star rating or nutritional information label. They could require that manuals and parts are available to third party repair shops, without discriminatory pricing and availability. The list goes on.

It's not unlike fuel efficiency and clean air mandates. Once all the manufacturers had to abide by the same rules, unsurprisingly, fleet efficiency and air quality improved.

I agree. Devices deserve to live as long as they'll function.

This is why I love the Web so much.

A properly designed site will still work with a 20-year-old device.

That’s somewhat debatable. A site which uses https and requires TLS 1.2 or later, as is common/good practice today, will not work with a 13 year old device. (TLS 1.2 RFC was published Aug 2008.)

Unfortunately, those are few and far between.

It's true, we're currently in a valley of compatibility. I think it's only up from here. More and more people talk about making the Web accessible again.

I'm debating a lot whether to reply in this thread, because I hesitate if it's worth my time only to be downvoted by people who use that function to express disapproval with legitimate opinions. I don't work for any of the device manufacturers, but I put myself in their place to think about why I would object. Maybe you should too as you debate over this.

It's possible that a certain class of things in modern life are not repairable in the way that they used to be. Things have generally been repairable because their size, complexity, and more importantly, their connectedness related to function is able to operate at the size of a person's hands.

Your lawn mower, your car, your refrigerator. These are the things that are self-contained and you can see the parts and handle them competently. Those are the kinds of examples he gives. He doesn't talk about trying to resolder the memory controller on a hard drive. Yet even hard drives have been around for 20 years, and no one talks about how they should be able to self-repair those.

Your cellphone is getting farther and farther away even from that. Its parts are microscopic. It takes an advanced factory to put those things together, and you demand at the same time that it be small and light and have good battery life. It relies on communicating with other hardware that are upgrading all the time. You don't play networked Doom II on your old computer for a reason. Do you use a 10 year old cell phone? How many of your friends do?

People every day are giving companies the signal that they value new and cool and small and light over the ability to repair and keep hardware around for a decade.

Those tiny earbuds are selling like hotcakes. They're impossible to fix, yet people buy them.

With your purchasing choices, you are signaling what companies are incentivized to make. Yet at the same time, you wish to tell the companies not to make those things in that way. Are they compatible?

I mean, have you really thought about what would result if you imposed requirements that batteries be interchangeable now? If those earbuds had to be maintainable by the user? Would they exist in anywhere near the form they do?

I think you have to think about the unintended side effects of what you want, and not just imagine that the one thing you want is all that happens. Very few people who advocate for this stuff seem to be responsible for designing the hardware, which makes you think whether they're completely right.

Most sane right-to-repair advocates don't oppose microscopic parts or glued batteries. They oppose deliberate measures against repair, such as:

- Parts which are produced by a third party who signed a contract with the manufacturer to not sell the part to other people. So you cannot find whatever $2 power management unit in your phone's main board even if you are willing to use complex equipment to replace it.

- Parts which "marry" their devices and refuse to work when you plug them into another device.

This kind of behavior actively fights against you repairing the device. I find it unacceptable.

I am a life-time fixer of things. And I support right-to-repair. However, I agree with everything you are saying. Your cellphone example is excellent. I grew up in the 70's and recall how HUGE anything electronic was. Sure, they had piles of discrete, reparable parts, but there is no way anyone would go back to that old tech. It's a wonder how cheap the modern stuff is today... I remember the $4K 1Gb HDD... and now it's pennies. People want cheap and easy and small. The form factor these new things come in form a huge part of their general utility...it's not just good enough to work... it needs to be small, and portable, and pretty, and cheap. In the end, I think some things (like the lawn mower or compressor) can be optimized to be fairly easy to fix...and building them otherwise is just assholery. Some things...well, they are gonna stay disposable. Vote with your wallet people.

I've been lamenting the increasing difficulty of fixing phones, tablets and ultrathin laptops, and I just concluded that since I can't change anything, I might as well get more advanced tools.

It used to take a few screwdrivers and a soldering iron... well, newer tech is much more complex, so you just need better tools. A heat gun, thermal glue, prying tools, magnifier, a rework station, and you're good to go.

Everything being soldered on one board is a real travesty - a failed system board on a new laptop means you throw away the CPU, GPU, RAM and even the SSD.

That just seems insane to me, a laptop that's a few mm thinner is not worth it, I'd rather have the CPU socketed, GPU, RAM and storage slotted.

People with laptops that use MXM slots are upgrading from Kepler GPUs to Maxwell, Pascal and newer, everyone else is buying whole new machines. What a waste.

But that might actually make it cheaper to fix or upgrade BGA chips since you can buy the whole failed system board pretty cheap. Just gotta have the right tools.

I've fixed things all my life. I just fixed a wireless mouse by harvesting a switch from a wired mouse in my junk bin. It took not much more time than ordering a new mouse.

I get that things have gotten smaller. I can't do transistor level repairs when the transistors are 7 nanometers across.

I've fixed nearly every appliance in my house, some twice or more.

What I've learned is that a remarkable number of repairs involve something that is basically mechanical, and big enough to work on, if you can get at it. I resoldered the headphone jack on my son's cell phone.

But design measures that frustrate repair and don't really add much value, such as tamper proof screws, prevent what might otherwise be a perfectly legitimate and easy repair. That bothers me. Design features that seem to gratuitously frustrate repairs. IP built into components to prevent aftermarket replacement parts from working.

Your comment is unfair, and if I'm being honest sounds very disingenuous if you've really spoken to people in the right to repair movement.

If a business is willing to invest time, learn board repair, and offer it as a service without demanding Apple or anyone else change their design, what right does Apple have to block that?

Apple prohibits sale of spare parts (by third-parties) to anyone but themselves, they outright ban people from accessing schematics, and other tools that repair shops need to fix boards. They are extremely hostile to the repair industry.

Its one thing to demand Apple change their design (as if anyone can do that), its quite another to politely request that maybe perhaps Apple shouldn't focus their energy on crushing the repair industry. Its laughable that Apple happily certifies their own products as "green" when they are so hell bent against repair. Apple's (and others') anti-repair policies generate a ton of e-waste.

“Eat it up. Wear it out. Make it do, or do without.”

Growing up in a poor (and large) family, we lived by those words and I’ve carried the mentality into adulthood. Of course there’s always a trade-off, but everyone should have the change to experience the joy of bringing something “broken” back to life.

"Where Apple leads, other follows".

I wonder how long it's going to take for Apple to get backlash. Their customers (or at least online presence) is unusually apologetic.

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