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This was a fairly quiet event held at the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. library at SJSU. I spent most of the time working on a Thinkpad W530 laptop that another fixer had salvaged from his neighbor’s garbage, wanting to save it from the landfill. He didn’t know how it failed. After running many, many…
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This Repair Café occurred at the Mountain View Senior Center from 11:00 to 3:00. The first item was a Presto heat dish that wouldn’t turn on; the bimetallic thermostat was completely destroyed. Unfortunately, an exact replacement was not to be found in the Repair Café’s store of spare supplies, so I took a thermostat with…
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This was my 2025 Synopsys Science Fair project. Regrettably, I didn’t get to spend as much time as I’d have liked on it. Introduction Clay is an extremely important material because it is cheap (often literally dirt on the ground), durable, and easy to work by pressing, casting, or forming. However, drying clay parts presents…
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A problem that I’ve had is that I keep forgetting to close the garage door at night, which lets in the elements (and also rats). After being pestered for some time by my parents to find a solution, I finally came up with this. The solution is to turn on the overhead lights any time…
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This repair was not completed at a Repair Café or Fixit Clinic, but it was kind of interesting so I’m writing a post about it. Machining often involves arithmetic on very precise numbers. This is very tedious, so having a small calculator is very helpful. Being of a helpful nature, my school’s machine-shop has a…
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Part of my bicycle-lighting project involved crimping a splitter cable to split the output of the dynamo to the front and rear lamps. I used a DuPont connector for that because I had recently bought, after 4 years of consideration, a proper DuPont crimper. The input and output wires were 24 AWG solid wires with…
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Recently finding the need to bike home in the dark, and not wanting to regularly charge a battery-powered light, I decided to buy a used bicycle dynamo (for $40) to power a front and rear bike light. The dynamo is a bottom-bracket dynamo, which means it’s meant to be mounted on the bottom bracket (where…
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I recently bought a used cross-slide vise on craigslist for $35. It is a machinist’s vise mounted on two ways at right angles, with leadscrews controlling the vise’s movement along each way. It’s meant to be used on a drill press so holes can be located in the same manner as in a vertical milling…
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This event took place at the San Mateo Library. I mainly spent the 3 hours working on a broken IBM Selectric typewriter; I’ve had some experience restoring manual typewriters. The owner had taken it to a repair shop because the keys were a bit sticky, and it had come back broken. It appears the repairman…
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This Fixit Clinic occurred at the Maker Nexus in Sunnyvale. The first item was a Saeco Vienna Plus espresso machine. It automated the entire brewing process, including grinding and measuring the coffee, dispensing it into the “brew group” (the removable assembly where the actual brewing takes place), tamping it down, forcing water through the grounds,…
