repairing things

i love repairing things. here is a list of things i have recently repaired. post here when you repair something.

laptop:
replaced faulty dc port
replaced thermal paste

microwave:
replaced motor that turns plate

shirt:
repaired various tears and worn areas in favourite denim shirt (with linen patches and japanese sashiko stitching)

I enjoy undertaking light electronic repairs, i.e. replacing laptop batteries, brackets, hard drives and the like, but I've recently had to remap the 'o' key on my old Macbook due to an irreversible short circuit and it turns out the sole proper solution is replacing the entire keyboard outright. Merely scrolling through this guide is enough to give me a headache:

https://www.ifixit.com/Guide/MacBook+Pro+13-Inch+Retina+Display+Late+2013+Keyboard+Replacement/77657

i fixed my toilet - cistern was taking literally hours to refill. i think there's a limescale buildup on the inlet valve so it was sticking shut.

the toilet was also my most recent repair. the little rubber thing that sits at the top of the vertical tube thing had gotten all messed up, and as a result it was doing the thing where the toilet is always "filling up", because it couldn't detect when it had hit the upper water limit. very annoying! fixed it with twine tbh

i also recently repaired my toilet. it had been making noise for longer than i care to admit.

I fixed and painted my garden gate, I am happy with it but wish it could earn me money some day. Guess I won't have to pay for a new gate now?

my 14' telescoping pole saw was stuck at full extension, but I fixed it by C-clamping it to our deck rail, spraying the locked-up part with WD-40, and wrestling it loose with channel-lock pliers

any day I repair a thing is a good day

14 feet? holy crap!

now I have no excuse for not pruning some trees

you could cut off a basketball net from the free throw line!

or wait...no you can't. sorry, that's 15 feet away (plus 10 feet up). gonna need a longer pole saw, 14' just won't _cut_ it

I can't fix shit and even without a quarantine I don't like to go anywhere, so if I can't mail it in I'm gonna order a new one, alas.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/ENhudYfU4AAgN4o?format=jpg&name=4096x4096

When my Simplyhuman pedal bin stopped working (the plastic hinges broke through wear and tear) rather than buying a new one I sliced some wine bottle cork and superglued it into the hinge. it worked a treat and the hinge is good as new.

omg great repair!

i need to repair my sheepskin slippers that i have had for probably around 12 years, there is a hole coming through from my big toenail. i think some kindof linen thread darning, but it will have to look nice, and i don't have any linen thread, although I was wondering if a weft from some line fabric would work. probably not, but possibly if I wound three together?

Stevolende to thread!

Man I love "fixing" things (or modifying, I guess, for things that aren't technically broken). I've rebuilt every bicycle and rewired every single guitar I've owned to some degree, swapped out a fried diode on guitar amp, switched out resistors on a 1979 Princeton Reverb to make the tremolo crazier and swapped out a potentiometer while I was in there, fixed laptops and chairs and cars and parts of houses and so on. I'm not necessarily great at it but it's so incredibly satisfying.

Our dryer stopped heating a few weeks ago and I got a new heating element and set of thermal fuses and thermostats to fix it, as well as a new belt and belt roller to replace while I'm in there. I've been sick so I haven't gotten around to it yet but for like $50 and maybe two hours of work it'll work again vs. several hundred dollars to have it repaired.

how would you rerepair an acoustic guitar where the bridge is starting to peel away from the body of the guitar? is there a correct glue to use, does it need to be properly peeled off and glued all together?

Luthiers tend to use animal glues, IIRC. There are repair kits available online, that have a purpose-made clamp. Do check underneath to see if there are loose fittings - it might not be simply a glue issue.

THought I'd messed up my sewing machine for a while a coupl eof days ago. Wound up taking part so fi t apart that I hadn't done before.
Wound up with the handwheel getting really stiff which had me wthinking I'd damaged something nastily.
Had another go at it the next day and got it back working and it seems to be working pretty smoothly.
& now I know there is a section under the bobbin case/needleplate area that I have access to and had a lot of lint in and bent pins and things and gear wheels and things taht had a load of gunk on them.

Probably needs a service, probably has done fora while . Could do with learning how to do that .
Especially if thisicurrent situation drags out.
Have wanted to for a while anyway.

BUt now hjave 2 new pairs of trousers. & I think I need to learn to actually draft rather than just customise clones.
SDhould be doing real bespoke jeans in like one go instead of several fittngs.

& now I know there is a section under the bobbin case/needleplate area that I have access to and had a lot of lint in and bent pins and things and gear wheels and things taht had a load of gunk on them.

yes! that section! removing the gunk from that area is often the problem w/r/t sewing machine problems.

re: plax's slippers -- my thought would be to pad/patch from the inside with sturdy materials privileged over aesthetic, and then join that to the exterior to make that look nice -- could maybe do a double layer to reinforce?

Thinking about doing my first oil change -- OOH, my honda is approaching the needs service mark, OTOH I'm barely driving it so it could be a while before it actually gets there

guess that's not technically a "repair" though

i made my dad teach me when i was like 19. i like doing things myself but he tried to convince me it wasn't worth it and he was right. you have to have a place to take the oil to, also, don't you?

I used to change the oil myself, but then I bought a new car (my current VW Golf) that requires expensive synthetic oil in a weight so rare that Pep Boys didn't stock it until recently. Since buying my own oil + filter cost almost as much as paying someone else to do it, it became pointless DIYing this. I've done only the most basic of maintenance on this car myself - rotating the tires, changing the wipers, adding fluids, changing light bulbs.

I’ve never learned what the oil does, or why you need to change it.

When you have a big long shaft-like thing repeatedly sliding in & out of a receptacle sleeve, you need proper lubrication to prevent discomfort and damage.

Why does the gasoline explode but not the oil

Why they hide the bodies under my garage

Tombot explain cars to me

just put oil in your gas tank too it's fine and cool

it's all made of carbon, it's the same

I mean, right?? Why not put fullerenes in the tank

That's how I changed the oil in my first car. Enough of it would leak through the dry-rotted gaskets (from sitting in my grampa's garage too long), burning out the tail pipe. I just had to dump a quart of it in every month or so.

But yeah, I don't change the oil in my cars anymore myself either.

But I did fix these nice vertical blinds we have the other day! One of the little plastic rider/worm screw assemblies got jammed. I pulled it all apart and fixed it. Feels nice.

Mostly I appreciate that my previous house owner was a completely crazy fixer, making a giant welded cast-iron i-beam workbench I still use. He was also a dangerously incompetent electrician, but the house is still standing,

That's how you changed the oil in old "foreign" cars with two-stroke engines - just pour a small amount of oil in with the gasoline/petrol. Some small engines that power lawn mowers or chainsaws still work like that.

stevolende, dm me yr email and i will send you the best trouser draft I have ever found online. alternatively you can find it on the cutterandtailor.com forum which i highly recommend checking out regardless

sarahell, that sounds much smarter than my plan. and now that you mention it i could probably do something with a fairly large patch....

I replaced the igniter in our old clothes dryer when someone wanted $300 to fix it. My wife told me it was such a turn on, lol.

I am good at electrics but wish I could do plumbing. I don’t know if it counts as repairs but I am pretty pleased with myself for putting a sensor and timer on the hall light so it comes on when we come through the front door.

Embarrassed that I had to get a guy out to fix the dishwasher and it turned out to be a blocked waste pipe.

Not a sparky, but I’ve been doing electrical stuff for years at work ( I even had a guy working for me for a bit that sat on the committee that writes the wiring rules for Australia). I get electricity and I can stay safe with electricity, with plumbing and water I just don’t have the same intuition. I really want to put an outdoor tap on the deck on the water line that feeds the boiler, but I don’t even know where to start.

dishwashers are a lost cause often. I had a dishwasher that broke my heart repeatedly. i had to replace the same seal on it over and over again.

the rollers on the drawers had corroded, meaning the drawers no longer lined up properly and thus new seals got busted after only maybe a month of use. I eventually got rid of it. my current dishwasher is great!

"I even had a guy working for me for a bit that sat on the committee that writes the wiring rules for Australia"

as an ex-sparkie I've met plenty of these reg-worm types who can accurately quote amendment 1 section 274 blah blah.. but they are basically incapable of doing the most basic electrical installation work! You are right about plumbing though, it's much harder than it looks.

I was hearing a few stories about people's attempts at attaching bidet hoses on podcasts a couple of weeks ago. People thinking they would be able to do it withouit hassle and then finding the attachments didn't seal properly or something similar.

Would be a good skill to have though. Plumbing like. Always useful.

there is no amount of pro-tips/online guides that is a substitute for the skills you attain doing the same shit every day.

I've worked at a few companies that had a mechanical side as well as electric but never talked seriously with plumbers. It took me years to realise you turn both the taps off where the silver flexi pipe connects the boiler with the water main when you need to add water because of low pressure fault. I'd just turn the secondary tap off where it connects to the boiler so it was slowly adding extra pressure to the boiler! I'm a fucking idiot though.

I remember having a big existential crisis about calling a plumber to seat a toilet - I’d done it once or twice but always fucked up the wax ring in the process and I didn’t want to worry about it leaking. But it’s such a straightforward thing that I felt like a sucker hiring someone to do it for me.

The plumber was a youngish guy and we talked for a while and it was cool - he told that he’d installed hundreds of toilets and me paying $100 for the peace of mind was totally worth it, and that he had no idea how to do my job and had no shame about that. It made me much more comfortable deciding what I was comfortable with and what I wanted to entrust to experts.

I'm shit around the house but primed and painted the box around the gas meter and laid some matting (all in the porch) and goddamn I feel good. Also bought myself a laplander saw with no real idea what I'm going to do with it.

My old man was a gas fitter and plumber, the father-in-law was all manner of shit: made ship's lanterns, fitted out gas tanks, carpet fitter. I'm generally in awe of tradesmen.

Currently fixing not being pissed.

Also listening to Outfit by the Drive By Truckers and weeping about being shit with a paintbrush.

if you ever wanted to bang some extra sockets in a stud wall with fast fix boxes your laplander saw is your friend. When I was in the game we called them "pad saws" but there is a lot of different names for that particular tool.

Yes! Also great for fiddly jobs in the garden (like dealing with rhododendron in tight spaces, I've found). The thing is so pretty and compact.

other cool thing i did this week was finding a way to use snaptoggles to install a wall control pegboard for our kitchen into our mid-century rock lath walls which are both super sturdy and a real pain to hang anything on

that immediately joins the pantheon of pipecockean yank unintelligibility

wagos are the norm on the continent! its us yanks who are stuck in the stone age with wire nuts

"mid-century rock lath walls"

are these like the black lime with wooden lath type walls we had in the UK as well? I used to despise them when I was a sparky. When you breath that shit in and it sticks to your skin because you are sweating, it's just hideous stuff to have to wire around.

jic, i'm rooting for you to fix your leaky pipe with a sharkbite

xp no rock lath walls is plaster over an early form of drywall (what you might call plasterboard in the UK?)

the us also has lath and plaster walls. it's annoying because searching for plaster wall tips in the us just turns up loads of tips about how to work with lath and plaster walls and next to nothing about rock lath walls

here's a cool video about rock lath walls, which i watched all the way through to better understand what my walls are made of, but also because it's just a cool piece of mid century americana

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-1CACkgUJcU

in the old UK walls they used to mix horsehair into the plaster which was the probably starting point of lots of electrical fault related fires back in the day.

Going to watch that vid later, looks good!

i'm rooting for you to fix your leaky pipe with a sharkbite

I couldn't find the exact source of the leak, but it wasn't at the fitting/connection/thread/whatever. It's got to be some tiny thing that needs to be patched, so I don't think a sharkbite would have done it. Also, it's a metal pipe, so I'm not in a position to mess with them. It's a go big or go home situation. I went home (DIY), but I assume at some point I'll have to go big (pro).

i replaced the wheels on my used v expensive german office chair with roller blade wheels. fantastic upgrade. good luck with your closet rollers!

i love snaptoggles.

Just bought a mess of snaptoggles - I was today years old, thx JiC! I've been using butt splices and wire caps forever. And I've been dragging my feet on an outdoor light fixture replacement so new toys might help.

ok ye are absolutely doing a bit now

xpost I don't think the thing I used as an alternative to wire caps is called a snaptoggle, as cool as that term is. A snaptoggle is ... a kind of drywall anchor, right?

LOL likely so now that I've read back. I bought those wego lever toggle things for electrical wires

LEVER NUTS not toggles argh

yes snap toggles are drywall anchors (aka "rawl plugs" darra)

roller-skate wheels

Honestly roller skate wheels with full enclosed bearings that are built for a lot of RPMs are probably WAY higher quality than any sliding door hardware out there! Good fix and potentially also style points depending on wheel color and graphic choice.

I used to hate working on stud walls. Even though with solid walls there was the hard work of chasing out brick and plaster for cable drops/rises and capping the cable to protect it from the plasterers. The fiddlyness of stud walls used to tire me out more and I was never happy with the quality of those awful fast fix boxes for switches and outlets.

snap toggles?? jesus. what?? that is not what i imagined they were

i used to call them, that is, rawl plugs, screw sinks before i moved to the uk; no doubt this was wrong in some way

they are the best wall hardware unless you are working truly tiny bolts, or there is no cavity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SC1ZuxuZ2PU

Back to the sink disposer - one thing to be careful when installing these is that unless you don't have a nearby dishwasher, you'll need to remove the dishwasher inlet plug from the disposal before connecting the dishwasher drain hose. I've known of many people who installed a new disposal and thought everything was fine until they first ran the dishwasher, after which their sink cabinet and floor under the dishwasher was flooded. Conversely, if you don't have a dishwasher, you must leave the inlet plug in place or else there will be a hole for water to leak from the sink drain into the cabinet below.

two year old sofa, heard a twang and the seat started to sag. do i

a) open it up and see if i can fix it? means doing things i cannot undo, like cutting the bottom out of it, but which you won't see unless you are under said sofa

b) just phone argos and get it replaced under the 10 year guarantee it claims? this will be faff and they don't have an exact replacement.

Iirc there is often a lattice of braces and staples and stuff across the bottom, and if one of them snaps loose that can cause the sag. Sometimes it just has to be pulled/squished back into place and reattached, which admittedly can be a little tricky. If it's something internal ... I dunno, that sounds too invasive to DIY, and often not cost effective enough to pay for, esp. if it's under warranty.

yeah, i fully expect to just see those wavy springs stretched across the base. but will i be able to reattach easily? and the base is sealed, albeit just by a bit of cheaper fabric on the bottom, completely invisible from the top. but...

warranty usually only covers manufacturing faults. but i'd say not being able to function as a sofa after only two years is a fault. (it's actually holding up ok, it's just a bit saggy. i could just sit on the other, non-saggy side, but it's less lined up with the tv)

warranty, if you open it up i'm guessing you're voiding the warranty too

and that trickling sound in the kitchen is the fridge spontaenously defrosting. not having the best day for appliances.

(did i not quite shut the door? is it the ambient temperature? is it fucked? i turned the thermostat up a bit and the pump came on so it does seem to still be working but...)

(i've been here 25 years and the fridge was here when i moved in, and already had blue insulation tape holding the drawer on so...)

is it a samsung fridge?

i have never noticed what make it is until now - Ignis.

two year old sofa, heard a twang and the seat started to sag

I was standing on my sofa washing a window and this happened... it's a cheap sofa (think it was originally from Urban Outfitters) so I've just decided to live with it... I put another cushion in the crumpled pit. Let me know if you have luck with the repair, I have no warranty so nothing to lose

If the sofa has loose seat cushions, put a wide board or some slats down?

ignis... seems like an italian brand. surprised it's been running that long then :)

Jaq, the cushions are built in, not separate... I don't think there's much I can do

Yeah, that's beyond diy and into full rebuild/reupholster territory

don't get me started on modern sofas, they are weak plywood shit. My son is big, heavy, strong and autistic so he can wreck £600 of modern sofa in a relatively short time. The replacement I got was some old strong shit from a British Heart Foundation 2nd hand furniture shop. It was a dowdy looking old thing that nobody was going to buy. The price was £25 and the delivery charge was 60 odd quid. It doesn't matter how shit it looks because those stretch sofa covers are a cheap way of making them look better. And least the legs won't go after a year because the supporting parts of the sofa are made from timber.

I even did some due diligence on the £600 sofa and contacted the manufacturer to ask about weight/strength specs and obviously they fed a load of bs. The legs went after a year, the arms were going next when it was sitting low and flat on the floor for another 6 months like a katatsu

there's parts of my sofa that probably aren't even plywood, more like thick cardboard

the sofa and divan bed industries are a fucking disgrace, the prices they charge for such inferior shit is a scam.

https://www.argos.co.uk/product/5590962

i wanted one as close to the old one as possible - the wide, flat arms were good for using a mouse on - but the arms on this are slightly too high and the back slightly too low. also quite a bit narrower.

I went through about 4 swivel chairs in rapid succession a few years back. Wasted hundreds of pounds on inferior shit. Then I picked up an old swivel chair that looked at least 20+ years old from a charity shop for £15. The back panel needed screwing on and it wouldn't win any design awards, but most importantly it is indestructible!

i had a quick look and the bottom of the sofa is just stapled on, i reckon i can undo it to take a look and redo it invisibly if i don't like what i see.

lol, i turned the sofa over and there was a spring sticking out the bottom like you'd see in carry-on films. factory repair it is, although that throws up various logistic questions.

I got an F05 Hotpoint fault on my washing machine. I looked it up and it indicates a drainage issue. It made some horrendous noise yesterday so something was up. It was half way through a cycle when it went into fault mode so there was a lot of water to empty out before I could check the pump. I tilted the machine back and wedged a Chambers Dictionary underneath it and used the dog bowl as a drainage bucket. Fuck yeah, an elastic zip tag from a jacket was stuck in the pump wheel - a lame achievement but it's good. I'm just happy because I don't need to buy a new washing machine or pay some grunt to fix it!

Diagnosing any fault code in 2025 is a worthy repair!

my fridge freezer is on the way out and is already long past the standard obsolescence age the crappy ones tend to last these days. I have got a new one paid for and ordered, meaning if any other appliances go wrong then at the moment I don't have the money to replace them for at least a month. So it was just a huge relief that it was only a minor washing machine fault. Phew!

Texas one signature away from passing right to repair bill
https://hackaday.com/2025/06/09/texas-right-to-repair-bill-is-a-signature-away-from-becoming-law/

my dishwasher was slowly filling with water and was still doing it even after i'd thoroughly cleaned the filter, checked the impeller motor for blockages etc. i watched a couple of youtube videos about this and got a sinking feeling as they all involved replacing the oulet valve, which meant ordering a part, turning off the water supply, changing the part etc.. so i go on the bosch website to walk through the steps for a callout, to see how much it would cost, and they have a checklist of questions which are NOT in the troubleshooting section of the user manual, including the seemingly inocuous "have you reset the dishwasher?" so i look at the steps to "reset" the dishwasher, it's basically pressing a few buttons, turning it off and on again, and.... voila, problem solved !??

I saw a Hotpoint service repair van slowly driving past the front of my house and was thinking about the time I nearly called them out over a warp in the supply hose. If the fault is your own stupid fault they charge you an absolute fortune.

I am adding this one as a lesson for others. Occasionally *some* things in the bottom rack of the dishwasher would not be cleaned, at all. It was as though the impeller arm was not rotating and only cleaning the things directly above. I took the arm out and cleaned it on multiple occasions, span it round in the bottom to check there was nothing inside blocking it. Obviously the easiest way to do this is either with the dishwasher empty or the bottom drawer open. Obviously when the dishwasher is actually running the bottom drawer is closed and full of stuff. I can't even remember how I finally figured out that certain small plates, if put in the middle of the rack, would protrude through the bottom enough to stop the arm spinning, but it took me far too long.

Put your phone in there in a clear plastic bag and press record.

Getting a gopro did cross my mind...