Share Bristol – A Library of Things

Most of the time HN feels a little alien to me being from England.

But here we have something that's less than 3 miles from where I live.

We have a lot of these at the libraries in Portland! You can borrow all sorts of stuff for free - board games, puzzles, baking stuff, tools, a huge gamut. They also have 3d printers, button making machines, tshirt presses, sewing machines, cricut machines, and all sorts of stuff like that that you can use for free (but not borrow).

My friend borrowed a tent from Frome's equivalent over the summer. When he unpacked it at the site there were no pegs. He managed to borrow pegs off other campers and got it set up. It rained heavily that night and he quickly discovered the waterproofing had worn off and his tent was actually absorbing instead of repelling water. The water pooled in their tent and gradually soaked all the bedding and possessions. He gave up and went home in the morning.

A similar thing in Norway is BUA: https://bua.no Focused on outdoor equipment and for children / young people being able to try out new sports for free. Adults can rent stuff too though for a very reasonable price. The major difference is that it operates nationwide, nearly every bigger city has a BUA location. We got Ski equipment from there as students and it was actually super high quality. They seem to look after the equipment carefully and also sort out half broken stuff.

Obviously would like to be able to enter my zip/postcode and get a list of links to tool/thing libraries local to me. Does this exist already? Googling it seems like these are few and far between except some hardware/auto parts stores will lend some tools, and there are commercial tool rental places for a fee. I once borrowed a post hole digger on Craigslist, and lent a stapler on Facebook.

As a Bristolian native living abroad I’m absolutely fascinated and would really like to set up something analogous.

I live near this and looked into it a year or two ago. They didn't really have anything difficult to get (e.g. I don't need to borrow a drill or hand saw) but it looks like they've expanded quite a bit since then!

This is very cool. I'd love them to open source everything they could to help kickstart as many people as possible to open such libraries in their own cities/ neighborhood/ area. This is much needed.

I hope it does well. I always wonder how well these things work in practice rather than theory. In theory borrowing things should be cost effective.

Another one, in Edmonton, Canada : http://www.edmontontoollibrary.ca/

For those in the US unfamiliar with Bristol UK, the drivers there are just as mercilessly aggressive as the ones near Boston MA.

So how well do you expect this to survive long-term? Surely there's a reason I can find a rotary hammer drill rental, but not a library-like borrowing?