repairing things

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.

i need to re-affix one of the metal struts to my little library stepladder (with just one i think i am asking too much of it when it clamber into it)

a professional carpenter and refurbisher who i know a little -- but have somewhat fallen out with via unrelated ambient internet beef -- said i should drill out the hole the old screw was in, completely fill it with broken-off matchsticks and superglue them, then allow to dry. this would hold any new screws fine.

however the old screws are lost and he replacements i have seem too long for the drilled-out hole as is. i've tried screwing them further into the unscrewed original wood at the bottom of the hole, but it just seems too hard to be screwed into, even using an electric drill and phillips head bit, or even just to drill further into this wood :(

might fuck around tomorrow and drill out all the match sticks and glue, then try and drill out more of the old hard wood with a larger bit, then refill with matches and superglue -- then (eventually) screw into this

I wonder if I can replace the screen glass on my 2010 MacBook Pro ... judging from YouTube videos, it's a pain in the ass to do, but the replacement glass is pretty cheap

I would attempt many fewer DIY repairs if not for YouTube

i know, there is no way i ever would have started disassembling my laptop for repairs if it wasn't for youtube

fyi i have been watching The Repair Shop on iPlayer and crying at the stories

xp my job includes repairing laptops and I'd be stuck without Youtube teardowns.

i've just spent about an hour with bf repairing brazilian figurines that have been in pieces for over a decade. Now I'm going to figure out why my bread won't rise!

I broke the pressure cooker last night; I left the inner lid off and it overheated. After some poking around I assumed the thermal fuse had gone (as it should) bought a multimeter to confirm and a replacement fuse. Now it works again. I was pretty pissed at myself for breaking it in the first place but I’m pleased I could fix it.

Ico Letting salt and sugar get too close to the yeast before it starts working can prevent it fully rising. I remember having to put it in a different part of the bread machine when setting up a loaf.

I remember the giddy feeling of walking through my house and checking off the things I had made serious, appliance-saving repairs to: dryer (replaced frayed internal wire), washing machine (replaced faulty control board, and stator motor for the spin), fridge (replaced thermal sensors and fans in the freezer), stove (replaced jets, thermal cutoffs, elements, etc.), stereo amplifier (power supply and signal caps), plasma TV (main power board), plus pretty much every computer in the house ...

Turns out I wasn't giving my bread enough time to rise

It's all looking beautiful now

to revisit the saga of my little library stepladder i am having to busk recharging the battery of my black and decker with the only mains lead i can find in the flat that fits (i have no idea if it's the correct one)

i guess the worst that can happen is that i have to buy a new battery which is probably good sense anyway, i've had the drill like 15-odd years minimum without ever recharging it afaicr

(did it once have a lead? i'm guessing yes. is this its actual real lead: i think no, the conversion factor is not what the internet tells me i need tho who tf kno if this matters that much)

Dryer in new house sounded like an artillery barrage. I’ve never attempted an appliance repair before but decided fuck it. From what I saw online it was pretty clearly the roller, so I ordered a new set as well as a tool I had never been aware of before — snap ring pliers. About $45. Watched YouTube videos. Disassembling the drier wasn’t all that hard but the bolts for the roller axles were rusted on and it took a lot of different approaches before I found a way to break them off (I basically attached pliers to a socket wrench so I could get more torque). Getting the belt back on was also confusing (the pattern of my pulley and motor shaft didn’t match the videos and getting the “zig zag” was tricky). Putting it back together was also harder than taking it apart. But after 3-4 hours and having filth permanently tattooed into my skin, we have a normal, not too loud dryer and I probably saved us a few hundred bucks. And it was kind of fun.

I feel ready to take on a lot of handyman stuff now, much of which I think will be easier than the dryer.

The fuse has gone on the microwave, the 5000v fuse.

Search on Google and it links to a video that looks easy enough but it links halfway through the video and skips the bit about discharging the capacitor containing said lethal voltages.

Anyway, I have new fuses and it's been unplugged for 3 weeks and they reckon it discharges itself within a week so...

to remove all doubt you can get one of those twin probe capacitor discharge units for about £20, but you could probably get a new microwave for the same price these days!

I replaced a wall socket the other week, shit was easy

Yeah I’m looking to do a bunch of those soon - I apparently need to rewrite some of them (polarity is reversed?) and also I want to put some usb outlets in for device charging.

Lol usually apprentice electricians are let loose on second fixing the sockets because apparently it's too simple a task to fuck up!

Although I often seen houses where the polarity is wrong at the incoming isolator of the supply side. God knows how that works, I'd guess motors in fans and vacum cleaners all run backwards etc...

I was thinking of replacing double switches where only one worked effectively or removing the actual switch part of the excess switch after finding myself clicking the wrong one recently.

If you don't have any kind voltage tester, always make sure you don't forget which are the permanent lives, switch wires, two-ways etc because if you get them mixed up while swapping the switch, sorting it out without test leads can be a bit of a pisser!

its not repairing things, but me and bf built a new kitchen table a few weeks ago which was fun.

I've got to switch out a fluorescent fixture above our kitchen sink and really don't want to blow myself up.

oh, i fixed a broken lightswitch! Have never done anything that was directly connected to the mains so was a bit nervous even of something that simple!

it was just fixing a loose wire

There was a time I'd casually fault find on switches when they were live, like touching every arcing sparking wire to the live until we'd worked out which was which. Lol my snips have been hung up for 9 years and I wouldn't dare do such craziness these days. Mind you I have had hundreds of electrical belts over the years. Which some say is either a sign that you are either a shit electrician or working with too many shit ones!

lol u mad bastard

It's not like there is anything complicated about a 2 or 3 gang switch or whatever, but if you lose track of what is what it can become a confusing jumble of wires, especially if there is an intermediate switch on there as well.

YouTube videos and the like have been a godsend when it comes to repairing stuff, but I find it really frustrating when a thing I really need isn't some skill or online help but some obscure screwdriver or other tool that has one use. Looking at you, stuff like snap ring pliers, or Apple, with your funky one-off T5 torx screwdrivers.

uh, it's pretty easy to just buy the obscure tools -- most of which aren't all that expensive, in general. ... the most frustrating thing for me is when I can't find the fucking manual online. ... though I did learn that magic chef refrigerator/freezers are the same as three other brands of refrigerators.

It's super easy to buy the obscure tools! But then you have an obscure tool that you use once. Like my own snap ring pliers, I'm pretty sure I bought them to repair a gear in our stand mixer. And that's literally all I have ever used it for. Repairing that stand mixer, once, 10 years ago or whenever. Was the repair easy? Yes. Did I save a bunch of money doing it myself? Yes. And that was maybe my realization that so many repair shops are really in the end just convenience stores. They're not necessarily selling skill, they're not selling knowledge, they're selling that one weird screwdriver that you don't have or have the time to research and order. I have an oscillating tower fan I once wanted to disassemble to clean. Something like 15 regular screws ... and one weird screw. Why the one weird screw? To make it hard to do yourself.

I've had a couple of instances lately where there were actually two manuals, the consumer manual that comes with the product, but then a repair manual that repair people have access to. The former was no help, the latter took me forever to dig up, And that was only once I learned it existed.

my most recent repair was unclogging the defrost drain in our side-by-side refrigerator ... no more ice on the bottom of the freezer or water on the kitchen floor

the owner's manual was useless, but sifting through YouTube videos got me going in the right direction

the funniest "repair" or more like rough-as-fuck bodge in this case, I ever witnessed was: when some dodgy fucker I worked with had put an electrical distribution board way too close to a front door to the extent that if the door swung open with any force it might smash into it. The clerk of works was wandering about and if he noticed this the whole board would need moving, which would be a massive pain in the arse and some of the cables might not have been long enough to do it. So he improvised by screwing a plastic coca cola lid into the floor as an improvised doorstop and his pièce de résistance was then colouring it black with a sharpie marker pen!

I once saw the same guy fixing a lighting pattress to a ceiling with decorators caulk, by wedging a sweeping brush on a toolbox on a bed to hold it up till it it dried! He was one of these cowboys that took a perverse pleasure in doing terrible work!

I recently "repaired" a slat on an outdoor table by holding the slat in place with a paint stirring stick that I wood glued under it.

My fave DIY story was when I had to change a lightbulb in my car, which shouldn't be that difficult except that everything is more difficult in cars these days because they all require computers and stuff (which is ironic, because the computers make things easier ... for the people with the right program/disc/whatever; see: special screwdriver). I look up a youtube video and it was a bit trickier than I might have expected but even so, the video was something like 45 minutes long, which seemed a bit high to change a lightbulb. I get what I need from the store and dive in and ... it takes me more like 10 minutes, because it turns out that the only reason the video was 45 minutes was because the dude was filming himself with one hand while he did the lightbulb change with the other. With two hands, it took 10 minutes.

screwing a plastic coca cola lid into the floor as an improvised doorstop and his pièce de résistance was then colouring it black with a sharpie marker pen!

omg this is hilarious!!!!! hahahah

a repair manual that repair people have access to.

yes, this was what I was trying to find online for my fridge/freezer ... and how I learned that so many fridges are the same fridge with different names.

btw, apparently there is a product called the 'sharkbite' which makes it so you don't need to do old school plumber work anymore. i have not tried one as i've not come across a broken valve... yet. i did replace one of the pieces of pipe under my sink that had corroded apparently from dishwasher runoff (which is caustic and may make your copper pipes eventually corrode).

jesus that sounds like serious work

id have slunk away in disgrace after the merest hint it wasnt a switch/click fix

one bit of advice i can pass along -- when connecting pipes with a slip joint nut, hand tighten the FUCK out of it and then maybe wrench it just a touch. if you wrench that shit all the way the gasket gets pierced and you get leaks. ask me how i know

ha, yes. the same is true of supply line hoses, which also come with gaskets fitted inside that can be damaged by cranking too hard (i too learned this the hard way)

i have not used a sharkbite, but they definitely open up a lot of options for people who aren't comfortable working on copper pipes with a torch and solder

washer stopped working last night.
my partner is off work today and taking a look at it. might be the lid switch (which can be relatively easy to fix). if not we're gonna have to call someone i'm afraid and i think we'd be looking at $200-300 total. boo.

I have three really good stereo amplifiers that have crapped out over the years and I really want to work on them but I keep hearing that amplifiers can hold a charge and kill you so I'm scared. It's also probably advanced for my skills, but it's going to kill me to take them to e-waste and nobody near me works on them.

Be careful around capacitors

nobody near me works on them

sadly becoming more & more common, even in urban areas

Caps, as Lee says, are the danger. But they don't hold a charge _forever_ - they leak over time and if you haven't powered from mains in an age, you'll probably be ok. Check with a multimeter and actively discharge any that you're worried about - eg clip a resistor across its leads. Pretty sure it will be ok (if you die, I am sorry cow_art)

I want an old Land Cruiser to rebuild from the ground. Also the time, space, tools and ability to do so.

I have a stereo amp that’s finicky and I keep putting off on taking in. Glad I now know to not try and accidentally kill myself.

The part of my bike light that clips to the holder broke, so now I’m trying to figure out how to improvise a new way of holding it.