Repair Cafés: Come for the Soldering, Stay for the Stories - EMF 2026

hi. Um, I'm come to talk about repair cafes. Uh, just to let you know who I am. My name is Adam. I've, uh, worked in IT for 20 years. This is my fifth EMF camp, so I'm into fixing things and playing around and breaking things sometimes. Um, and for nearly four years I've been part of the Chisik Repair Cafe in West London. We wear these nice uh aprons like this when we're doing our repairs. So, you can see the logo here. I'm going to tell you about um what a repair cafe is, why we want to do it, and um why you might want to get involved. So, a question to ask you. When did you last throw away something that was fixable? I think for lots of us here at EMF, this is probably not too bad an answer. We tend to fix our things, but when did your family, your neighbors, lots of us are throwing away things that don't need to be thrown away? We've become a throwaway society. We've got um lots of the things we buy now, they're cheap, they're not well designed, they're not designed to be fixed, and it's often easier to buy something new than it is to uh repair it. We've got landfill. So this on the left hand side, this is a real Amazon warehouse full of often junk that we're shipping out over and over again. And on the right hand side, we've got the stuff we're throwing away. And the kind of discrepancy between these two things, we've reached a great phrase is peak stuff. We've just got too many things and we don't need it all and we can do better. Um, what can we do about this? Well, we can recycle things. But before we get on to recycling, this is a hierarchy of what we want to do. We want to if we can reduce the waste that we produce. If we can't reduce it, we can reuse what we've got, maybe reuse it for something else. If not, we can repair it. That's part of what we're doing at repair cafes. And finally, recycling is a last resort before it gets thrown away. Uh so there's lots of community events, uh community, uh workshops, things that are around. If you haven't heard of Library of Things, this is a great uh thing. You can go and borrow a lawn mower rather than owning a drill or these big things if you live in a small flat. Borrow things from the library of things. Uh refill shops can reduce the amount of waste you create in the first place so you don't have all this plastic waste. If you want to reuse things, there's apps like Free Cycle and Olio. They are great at getting these stuff back out into uh charity shopesque ways and tiny libraries, clothing swaps. All of these are beautiful things to get using things. Lots of us are repairing things, repair shops, also restart parties, men's sheds, websites like iFixit and all the stuff that people like us do at home. And uh also community events for recycling, upycling things into new and wonderful things if they can't be repaired. Uh remakeries where you come together and uh do that in conjunction with other people. The one I want to talk about, the one I'm involved in is repair cafes. So what is a repair cafe? This lady is uh Martin Postma from Amsterdam. She set up the first repair cafe in 2009. Uh that's now turned into Repair Cafe International. There's over 2,500 repair cafes worldwide and uh about 500 of them around the UK in one way or another, something like a repair cafe. And the idea is pretty simple. somebody, you guys, or anybody out there in the community brings in something that's broken in some way, they might know what how it needs to be fixed or they might not know what's wrong with it. They come and have a cup of tea while they wait cuz we usually make them wait and hopefully we fix it or at least we try to fix it. We're going to try and spend around 30 minutes. We run it for a few hours in our um repair cafe on a Saturday morning. So, we don't want to spend too long. We target 30 minutes up to 45 minutes of fixing things. So, sometimes that limits what we can fix. We are not to be confused with the repair shop. If you've seen this, it's a lovely BBC TV show. It's uh very uh heartwarming. When [snorts] you create something in your community called repair cafe, people get the wrong end of the stick and they think you are like this repair shop spend weeks and months with professional repairers and BBC budgets and we are um spending half an hour an hour with a bunch of enthusiastic amateurs and no money at all. So um people will bring you things that is like a family heirloom and you have to politely guide them. Occasionally you might be lucky and uh manage to fix it anyway. So what makes a repair cafe? Who makes a repair cafe? Who do we bring together to do this? I think there are roughly three groups of people. I'm going to call them the makers, the sparks, and the stitches. The makers, uh these do woodwork, furniture, pottery. These are a bunch of uh guys, usually guys, you know, if it's if it's come apart and it should be put back together again, you're going to screw it, nail it, work out how it fits together, and glue it. They are experts on 100 different types of glue and um they can get it back together again. The sparks, that's I'm one of the sparks dealing with electricals, electronics, computers. Again, we we've got to work out how to take it apart. We've got to follow it usually multimeter, maybe some soldering if you're lucky, and putting it back together again in a way that works either how it was supposed to or at least better than when it came in. And finally, the stitches doing clothing and fabric repair. So, if you've got something wrong with the, you know, shirts, jumpers that have got holes in them, they can repair them. They can sew, they can knit, they can do all sorts and either make it look uh as good as new or better than new or reuse parts of it in new and interesting ways. These two groups of people uh I hate to say there's a huge stereotype here. The makers and the sparks tend to be men, often older men. I think uh I'm one of the younger I'm in my 40s and I'm one of the younger people here. And the stitches tend to be older women, often retired, but a few of us uh younger as well. just want to get our hands dirty and uh rebuild things. But to bring us all together, there's a bunch of organizers. What uh I've learned at Repair Cafe, you want people who bring us together. I know I like fixing things. I do not like booking church halls, getting insurance, doing all those things. The the women who organized our repair cafe, uh these lovely ladies on the right hand on the right hand side, uh knew that they wanted a repair cafe. cared about waste and they've got together people who can fix things. So, this is wonderful uh marrying up. You definitely want organizers on your front desk as well to politely turn away people who shouldn't have their things fixed because it's beyond repair or to explain to them why the queue's long. Uh to sort out the insurance, uh the organizers insist that we do pat testing. The electrical guys really don't see the point in pating when we've just rebuilt it. But, uh if the insurance says we have to do it, then we have to do it. But finally, there was one really important thing that I think is an important part of our repair cafe, and that's the tea and the cake. This is what brings us all together. So, when you first arrive at the repair cafe, before you even see any of the repairers, we'll give you a cup of tea. You'll hopefully pay for a cup of tea and get some cake. Uh we run our repair cafe in a church. The ladies at churches are legendary for making tea and amazing cakes. Uh up here, this was to celebrate our birthday. We had a birthday cake and um not only does it keep the people happy while they're waiting, the tea and the cake fuel the repairers and just a general sense of community. Everything is better with tea and cake. So, um there's a whole bunch of people here. What I know most about is the sparks, the electrical side. So, I'm going to focus on that as I talk through things. Just give you a few mentions of some other bits. But, if you're going to come through a pair cafe, what should you actually expect? Well, I'm going to tell you what I expected four years ago when I first heard about Repair Cafes. I expected that I was going to be taking apart laptops, doing some really fancy surgery on laptops and components. Actually, when people bring in their laptops, they've spilled something on the keyboard. It's sticky. It's often beyond repair, but you know, we can advise them to plug it into a monitor instead. And the clever electronics repair isn't really worth it. I thought I'd be doing some really clever electronic debugging. you know, all sorts of component uh rework things. But in fact, I'm more often working out why a vacuum cleaner's got something stuck inside or exactly which part of it should be spinning and shouldn't. And I thought I might be doing some skillful soldering. I'm not sure the stock photo is skillful soldering, but actually very much rarer. I usually get my soldering iron out perhaps once at each repair cafe at best. more often just checking the batteries on a radio, explaining why it isn't working, and talking through what's going on. So, the tools and skills you will need if you want to do electrical repairs at a repair cafe. The first thing you're going to do, and this is more than half the work, most of the time I spend whenever I'm fixing anything, is getting it apart. You're going to have to a good screwdriver set. I fix it screwdriver set like this. You're going to try and find all the damn screws and work out whether it's supposed to be taken apart. And of course, most of the stuff we're fixing now, the screws aren't enough. You're going to need a spudger or a good bit of elbow grease. You've got these people who brought these things to you. They think that we're experts. They think that we're geniuses and we're going to take everything out. And then they watch us just shoving bits of plastic and screwdrivers in and hopefully not snapping any plastic as it comes out. But if you can get into it, you're probably going to fix it. Um, if you can't get into it, if you can't work out how to get into it, iFix it is wonderful. It's got some things the things that people are bringing to our repair cafe though they are not 2B laptops that are on iix it website. Most often it's not there but there's a wonderful community on YouTube. Every Dyson vacuum cleaner some guy has spent an hour videoing himself taking it apart and you will discover that the one you've got is very slightly different and the screws are slightly different but eventually you'll figure out how to get in. Um, and again, great to watch the reaction of people who thought you knew what you were doing and then you just watch YouTube and get a screwdriver to it. Once you're in, clean it. Often this is the only thing that's wrong with it. If it's a vacuum cleaner, it's usually the only thing that's wrong with it. Clean it out. Electronics as well. Clean out all the dust from the fans and that might get it working again. And then you haven't done any electronics at all. You've just smiled and that's it. So, we're now at like 60% of the things we're going to fix are fixed. Check the connections. Get your multimeter out. Look, the stock photo is a lovely picture of somebody following electronics. We're usually just checking the power. It's the power most of the time. Follow it through. Have a bit of logic about where you're going. Reason about which parts are which and work out uh which bits are working and where it stops working. Finally, if you're really lucky, you might get to get out your soldering iron and do the thing you thought you were going to do. Get yourself a good soldering iron. Um, and you're going to fix whatever, you know, put put back together the pieces that are there after you've hopefully worked out where it was. But there are weeks at repair cafe where I never get to use the soldering iron at all or where the only soldering I do is on a piece of jewelry because the stitches have brought it over and soldering is uh something that they regard as magic. The most important skill you're going to want at repair cafe is conversation. Throughout this whole time, you're spending 30 minutes sat opposite somebody with their broken stuff. You want to tell what tell them what you're doing. We're usually telling them about the importance of repair, why we're doing what we're doing, all of the things I talked about at the beginning. And if you get it fixed, you want them to appreciate why you fixed it. And if you don't get it fixed, you really want them to appreciate why you've tried and to explain. Sometimes it's not even about what you managed to fix. It's about explaining to them. Perhaps you fix a lamp and then you tell them you should replace this light bulb with an energy saving light bulb. We've got uh I'll talk about radios in a minute. So, you're going to pass on advice as well about what you're doing. And even if you can't fix it, then you're going to explain to them. It's often they just wanted permission to throw it away. They felt guilty about putting it in a landfill. And if they brought it to you and you spent half an hour showing the components don't work, then uh that's all part of it. Great. Some stories here about what actually comes through the door again on the electronic side and what actually gets repaired. Our repair rate is 71% which is really impressive. We are slightly cheating because one of these some of these stats come from a guy who sharpens knives and blades and he has a 100% fix rate. The electronics I think we're we're over 50% on most weeks depending on [music] the bits we get in. But it's, you know, pretty good for what we can get. The the easiest ones are the simple electricals. We get these in. It might be a lamp. It might be a fan. Last week I did Repair Cafe when it was 30 degrees, 40 degrees, people are bringing lots of fans and desperately trying to get every fan working because you can't buy a new one. Usually this is just a power lead. If you can find the power lead, the lamps might be tricky to get to it, but if you can find the power lead, you're just reconnecting a wire. Like putting a plug on, sometimes just putting a plug on. Vacuum cleaners. We get a lot of vacuum cleaners. We get so many. This is picture of me and a co-reer with nearly identical vacuum cleaners on the same day. you're fixing them at the same time. Uh, pretty good hit rate on repairing vacuum cleaners. You what you want is the organizers at the front to have checked that it's clean. If you've cleaned your vacuum cleaner before you bring it in, I will take it apart and try and fix it. If it's still full of your groy dust, please don't bring it into repair cafe. Um, the the hardest thing here is getting them apart. Dyson's used to be easy. The old Dyson are easy to take apart. The new Dyson are impossible. Very frustrating. And we've even got on the side here a little kid. Even the toys are vacuum cleaners sometimes and we can make them work. I'm not sure whether he does vacuuming with that one, but it was uh he was very happy that we got it working. Toasters. Don't bring toasters to repair cafes. If they're broken, you're not going to get them fixed. They are horrible. They're full of crumbs at best. And so I think we have now banned them. Hence why the I've got stock photos. And if you were watching Wallace and Grommet this morning, it's a lovely toaster. But um yeah, buy a new toaster. Even the expensive ones, I think this is a very expensive toaster, doesn't get fixed. They're not any better than the the cheap ones. We got lots of radios. I think there's something about the people who listen to the radio and the ability to bring it into repair cafe. We get really old radios, almost as old as this one here, maybe 50 years old. They're just a wooden box with some pretty low low tech components in it. If you can get into the wooden box, you can find the right screws, you're probably going to be able to fix it. Loose connections, a bit of cleaning out, or maybe repairing a simple component. Uh, then we get on to DAB radios. I don't know if you know anything about DAB in the UK. We were an early adopter of DAB. So, this kind of middle radio we've got here runs DAB, not DAB plus. And, uh, that means that they're kind of turning this off. Even the one on the left, longwave radio, has been turned off. Um, but it turns out that although you can only get certain stations, so nowadays you can only get DAB plus stations on your modern radio, your DAB radio isn't going to pick up any uh digital stations, but almost everyone who comes to Repair Cafe only listens to Radio 4, which is a really good indication of the crossover between, I guess, EMF also, um, Repair Cafes. So, as long as you can get Radio 4, they're usually happy. I mean, uh, we haven't literally done this, but if you did hard wire it to radio 4, it would still be okay. Uh, finally, laptops. I thought we'd get lots of laptops. Uh, over the years I've been at repair cafe, probably only had half a dozen. I think there's something about bringing them in. Uh, they're either beyond repair or there's still repair shops that you can get your laptops fixed at. Often when people bring in laptops, uh, we're helping them guide them through Windows reinstall. it doesn't fit very well into our way of doing it with 30 or 40 minutes of things. Um, in the wider repair cafe community, there's Linux repair cafes who are getting out there, especially with laptops we're seeing where Windows 10 is end of life. Linux repair cafes are a pretty neat idea kind of um I think what it needs though is rather than being part of a general repair cafe, it's bringing in a bunch of people and teaching them all about Linux and reassuring them that Linux works. So, um there's some talk about that in repair cafe community and it's a great uh way of putting a new lease of life into old laptops. So, I promised you some stories. Certainly, uh I've gathered lots of stories over my time. Some of them are better easier to tell than others. Some of these are my stories. Some of them are from the other repairers. Uh the first one we've got here, this is the dancing lady. This lady was I think the so it's actually belonged to one of the other repairers. One of the stitchers had this in a box. She said it belonged to her great great great great aunt and it had fallen off the family mantel piece at some point and there was a bit of dispute as to whether to blame the babysitter or the children. But it had uh they'd gathered all the pieces, put it in a box, and it had sat in this box for 25 years. She came along to repair cafe and of course all of us repairers have got the repair spirit with each other. So, um, one of the makers got out exactly the right kind of glue and spent took it home. This was not done in 30 minutes, but, uh, pieced it back together into a perfect representation, perfect as it was before. [applause] And, uh, yeah, it's gone back to the family. A similar, this is repaired by one of the stitches. This teddy bear uh, belong So, a young man came in and his, this had been his grandfather's teddy bear that he told him stories with. So, he remembered it from his grandfather. His grandfather had passed away. Uh, and he brought the teddy bear in. The teddy bear, I mean, if a teddy bear comes in looking like this, you're not going to be able to make it look like new, but I think it was a case of cleaning up, sprucing it up, and we put a lovely bow on it to make him smile a bit. And certainly, I think the point here was this uh young man, the memories of his grandfather had come along with this. So, we do get some of these repair shop vibes on good days. Uh, an electronics repair. This was me and a co-reer. The one of the things about running community events like this is that politicians get really interested in it. So, we've had I think three local MPs, two different local mayors, and this was at our birthday. One of the mayors came along. She was really into it. She knew what needed to be. She um credit to her. She brought in her son's old PlayStation, which didn't work. Uh she brought it along. We very quickly identified she'd got the wrong power lead. Nothing was wrong with the PlayStation. Nothing was wrong on the power lead. We plugged in a new power lead. It worked immediately. probably the easiest repair we've ever had. And uh but we thankfully because not repairing the mayor's PlayStation would have been more embarrassing. Uh slightly slightly actually more embarrassing. Uh trying to fix an Xbox. My most nerve-wracking repair. So uh they brought in a PlayStation sorry brought in an Xbox. Mother explained that it was her son's. He spilled some drinks over it. Uh I took it apart, realized there's not a lot of, you know, if the circuit board's gone on an Xbox, it's beyond repair cafe level of repairs. But we realized that it was the power supply that had gone. And we sort of explained, well, if the power supply is gone, that's quite likely to be the only part that's broken. Helped her find on eBay the part and said, "You can come back next month. We can fit this." And uh so she did. I think she spent £25 on the power supply. Came back with her son. We took it apart very carefully. Uh put it back together again, realized the power supply worked and the rest of the Xbox didn't work and it was actually beyond repair. The worst part of this was hearing her son very quietly whisper to his mom, "I thought this guy knew what he was doing." And she understood. I'm sure he understood later. I'm not sure whether they ever got it fixed, but unfortunately they didn't get it fixed by me. But kids, kids are one of my favorite things about Repair Cafe. So, even the disgruntled little boy, um, this was last week, a little girl helping me. Her and her brother bought in their old night lights that had been hers when she was a baby. She said, "They're egg-shaped. I love them. We want to make them work. Now, they were cheap, right? They didn't It wasn't worth repairing them for any financial reason, but what was great is that she got involved, gave her the screwdriver, her and her little brother got the screwdriver, and when we were fixing it, we got the multimeter out and they got the leads and they were, you know, learning about circuit draw circuit boards. We did get one of the two working, although I didn't really do anything. If you take things apart and put them back together again, sometimes they start working. That seems like magic, though, and that's the vibe I want to give across to the kids. re encouraging the kids to go away and whether next time they try and fix it themselves or next time they bring they encourage their moms to bring it in. Certainly she took away the one that was broken insisting that it would be fixed one day which might not be true but and uh kids toys you know on the smaller end this is a little boy who brought in a car little girl brought in a car that we got fixed and moving around again. relatively easy fix, just fixing the power. And uh a story that from another one from one of my co-reers about um an old plastic till. So a father and son and it was a 30-year-old plastic till I think FisherPriceesque. The dad had remembered playing with it when he was young. He uh brought it in not as an electronics repair, just as a moving parts. It got taken apart very carefully, cleaned all the springs, gradually put it back together again. But the what my co-reer mentioned was when you push the button it goes ding and the father's face lights up and the son's I'm not sure the son's face lit up. He his attitude was more why is my dad so excited by this terrible plastic toy. But uh so yeah we're pass he gets to pass this toy along. He gets to evoke these memories and the satisfaction of putting it together. So what's the reward that we all get from doing this? I mean I think hopefully you've heard some of my excitement here. I don't know if you can read these. This is some of the feedback that we've got. If you can't read them, there is one particular one that uh is my favorite or at least my wife's favorite. So, um it says, "I had wonderful help from Adam, that's me, who fixed the radio I had brought. He was so charming and helpful. I could have taken him home and uh the lady found another radio to bring back in the next month and asked me again. I was out that month, but uh yeah, apparently it was a popular thing." So, there's lots of stories here. And the vibe that we get from people is not just about fixing things. It's about the community effort that they see and that we see. So they got all these wonderful um things from it. The repairers, this is most of the repairs at Artistic Repair Cafe. What do we get from it? We get the satisfaction of fixing things. It is great fun to put things back together and to save it from landfill and all the positives that we get. Um also a shout out uh community WhatsApp groups. The repair cafe WhatsApp group is a wonderful place to be. You can if you need anything fixed yourself, you can get advice from other repairers. One of my favorite parts was when somebody said, um, "My fridge is gone. Has anybody got the right, um, fuse part for this?" And there was a big debate from all the guys about, well, I haven't got the right fuse, but if we short it out temporarily, it will work for a while. And what's safe to do? And what's your wife approval factor? So, if we go to a fridge working for 24 hours and um, I want to talk about what we call the ripple effect of these things. So, there's a ripple effect in volunteering about in all these things. the at the center of it, we've got the repairs that we actually do. Outside that we've got the both the people who've got their things fixed, they're happy. Of course, the people who are doing the repairing, we're happy. I go home happy every week from Repair Cafe. I've got things working and tea and cake. That's a positive ripple effect anywhere. It's going to even if you've had a bad day, the tea and cake is going to take the edge off it. So, rippling out from that, that means things aren't getting remanufactured. You don't have to buy a new radio or, you know, you're only having to buy a replacement component rather than a whole new appliance. That means less CO2, less wastage, all of those things. Uh, a lot of the time we're going to encourage people to go and fix their own things next time. So, either to fix it themselves or to tell their friends to come to repair cafe. So, there's a positive snowball effect of these things. And somewhat wonderfully, even though we all love this, we're all happy about this. They are giving us money. They are spending money in our cafe. They are donating money at the end if they want to. Uh, so we have very few expenses. is we buy a few fuses and bits of glue and uh disposable things, but we have a huge surplus of money. We've got thousands of pounds that we've raised to community projects to fix the church roof, to spend on children's projects, and to growing flowers and trees in the parks in the local community. So, if you've enjoyed this, what can you do? Well, um I haven't met Dermit Jones yet. I don't know if he's in the thing, but there's two more about how to repair things going on tomorrow. um which look like they're really interesting both for adults and kids. If you haven't heard about this, there's a right to repair. So since 2021, there's been a law in Europe and uh the UK covering the UK as well. That means we all have the right to repair. Appliances have to come with they don't have awkward screws. They have to supply you with the spare components for up to 10 years after it's produced. This is really great. It's really powerful. It's a great um law. But there was some lobbying that means these spare parts only have to be available to professional repairers. It's not great for repair cafes. It's not great for you at home if you want to repair things. So, uh, the restart project in the UK are involved in lobbying the government. Get your MP to sign this to protect the rights we've got and to, uh, push for stronger rights in the future for repair. And finally, find your local repair cafe. You might want to find this because if you're like me or if you're like lots of people here, whether you're good at the one of the sparks, the makers, or the stitches, you can go along and help fix things. You don't have to get really organized. I don't do any of the organization. I just turn up for 3 or four hours on a Saturday morning and have fun repairing things. Uh if you're really enthusiastic, you can set up your own repair cafe. I've heard lots of uh stories from people around the UK in various places in different styles of cafes or Linux repair cafes or repair shops. Or if this has just inspired you so that next time something's broken and it's repairable or fixable, you can take along to repair cafe and have somebody like me or some one of my fellow repairers come and fix it. Thank you very much. [applause]