May 2013 – Brighton Repair Café

Think street party but everyone is repairing something!

We are taking our next Repair Café out into the streets of Hanover (Brighton) on the 2nd June from 1-5pm.

We’re encouraging Hanover residents to take their tables & chairs outside their houses and to do those repair jobs that have been put off for another time. It will be a chance to meet neighbours and share repair tips and tools (perhaps even some tea, cake or a bottle).

People who don’t live in Hanover are also welcome to join in.

The Brighton Repair Café will be set up on Jersey Street with textiles, electrical & jewellery repair and perhaps furniture.

SpacePlace will have their Radical Repairers out in Washington street with sewing machines, bike repairs, crochet and darning experts and The Lost Mitten Project.

Anyone who repairs something at the Street Mendathon please take a photo and send it to us via weareonthemend@gmail.com and we’ll post them up here and tot up the total number of repairs!

We were so pleased to have a new volunteer on board for the last repair café… Mattia who has just arrived from Italy with lots of electrical repair skills and brought with him a great kit to help us repair our electrical goods.

Mattia got to work straight away helping to fix my solar powered garden lights that had a loose switch. Stage one was to open up the control box and switch to find out what was going on inside.

Then in discovering that one of the small metal sliding elements (which forms a circuit to enable the lights to turn on) had fallen out of the switch and was loose in the control box it was possible to put it back in it’s place.

Then putting the switch back into its case we discovered that a small metal sphere was also loose in the control box. This tiny piece of metal is what gives the switch the tension to click into place. So we popped it back in then screwed everything back in place.

And hey presto, the lights then worked. It was great to be guided through this process to give me the confidence to open up the device and see what was going on inside without worrying about electrocuting myself accidentally! It felt like detective work and now my lights are fully functioning in time for lighting up summer evenings in my garden.

Then Zosia of Lonely Parts brought along her kettle to fix and found another kettle which had been left out in the street on the way to the cafe. She brought it along in case she needed the parts from one to fix the other, but managed to fix both very easily and went home with two kettles!

Then Mattia moved on to help Sam repair her reading lamp whilst others darned, sewed and repaired jewellery.

What a productive day! And to top it all off Donald from Radio Reverb came along to interview organisers and participants, which can be heard if you click here.