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Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

One of my grandfathers was illiterate as well. Not a finance whiz, but not stupid either. He was a rural blacksmith and he was rather good with engines and small appliances, repairing them for paying customers.

This is also a good moment to meditate on "right of repair". As recently as approx. 1970, most of the machinery in daily use could be repaired by a skillful, even though illiterate, person. The advent of semiconductors did away with that and nowadays even highly qualified people struggle to update a firmware against the vendor's wishes.

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It's interesting you mention this. I got a chance to visit the family holler (rural mountain farmstead) when I was a teenager. Everyone back there was still driving old pickups, most of their tools were pretty old as well. You could tell a lot of things were kept just because of that very idea that they could repair them.

I know my grandfather, growing up as poor as he did, NEVER threw anything broken away until he was absolutely convinced that it could not be repaired. I wouldn't be suprised if most of his gardening equipment was from the 60's and 70's.

There is a little bit of a survivorship bias with regards to old tools. The crappy ones broke long ago but the quality ones survived. But also, there were not the modern manufacturing methods we have now back there. There was no hammer with a plastic integral handle, everything was wooden and cast iron or tool steel. You could easily buy or make a wooden replacement handle when the old one rotted away. There was no dirt cheap Chinese forged metals so everything was more expensive and you took better care of the metal parts. Dulled edges were sharpened, peened hammers would get grinded down, broken rivets could be replaced. The few electric tools were beefy, simple, and offered easy replacement of the brushes. You also may have just experienced what happens when poor people have little access to the latest and greatest cheap stuff at the store, they make do with what they have. Compare that to the numerous old cars still on the road in Cuba, parts are difficult to source so when something breaks you'd go to the mechanic with a rudimentary machine shop that could fabricate a replacement part.

We still have quite a few tools from the early 1900s at home. Scissors, a hammer, an old meat grinder. Everything made of iron, heavy as hell, but nigh indestructible.

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