Heute mehrere Stunden zu zweit unsere Waschmaschine zerlegt...

Grund: Das Hauptlager der Trommel muss gewechselt werden.

Wenn man es selbst macht, dann viel Zeit und zusätzlich 45€.

Zusammenbau dann morgen...

Jemanden dafür bezahlen kostet mehr als eine neue gute Waschmaschine!

Ein Problem unserer Zeit!

#selfrepair #reparierenstattwegwerfen

keeping your electronics happy doesn't have to involve phone calls for warranty service. many are straightforward jobs that require a sink, a screwdriver, and an episode of DS9 playing in the background.

today's fun bit of elective surgery and preventative maintenance: taking apart and cleaning the brew unit on my GE Profile automatic espresso machine

(if you recognize the shape of this machine, that's probably because SMEG re-shelled the machine and uses identical parts internally. so anything i've done here equally applies to its cousin.)

the manual assures you that there are no user serviceable parts inside, and that only GE's warranty service can do it. it doesn't say that GE stopped offering any kind of service or parts for these machines two years ago.

espresso machine elitists are of zero help as well, toeing the usual line "just go buy a REAL machine like a $2k Lelit that uses standard parts" blah blah.

understandably, everyday people give up and toss these machines in the landfill.

i've owned a half dozen machines and grinders in my life - some in the $3k range, and none of them make an *excellent* espresso for the $200 this machine can.

in the interests of extending its life for as long as possible, some preventative maintenance is super easy to do:

the brew unit detaches from the side of the machine with two squeeze-clips. it has six beefy phillips #2 screws to remove. once those are off, you'll see the guts of the brew unit. it's just a few plastic gears. look how vile they've become after 2 years of daily use 😬 (pic 1)

as soon as i started cleaning it, my fingers got gunky - sticky! all of the parts were gooped in white lithium grease, which had mixed with old coffee and produced quite a mess. i took out all of the gears, and scrubbed them all in the sink with hot water and lots of dish soap. an old toothbrush worked great.

pic 2: the cleaned up parts. cleaning off all the gunk also removed all of the grease, so i re-greased each gear using an old tube of food-grade silicone grease i had laying around from years ago.

pic 3: the brew unit back inside of the machine. you can see the orange plastic squeeze-clips that let you easily remove the brew unit for cleaning.

pic 4: the re-assembled machine, working happily.

#selfrepair #diyrepair #mottai #coffee #permaculture

Liebe Fedi-Schwarmintelligenz,

ich habe mir einen Ersatzakku für mein (noch in Betrieb befindliches) altes ThinkPad bestellt. Der gelieferte Akku weist an der Ecke diese kleine Beschädigung auf. Der Händler hat mir zugesichert, dass es sich dabei nur um das Etikett handelt und der Akku völlig intakt und sicher zu nutzen sei.

Kann ich das Ding sicher einbauen?
#ifixit #selfrepair #thinkpad

Apple have recently posted or recently updated various hardware quick checks and hardware troubleshooting and hardware self-repair articles.

Here are some:

· iPhone camera troubleshooting:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/101967
· iPhone mechanical troubleshooting:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/123921
· iPhone display troubleshooting:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/101966

· Mac laptop troubleshooting quick checks:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/117308
· Mac laptop communications troubleshooting:
ttps://support.apple.com/en-us/117309
· Mac laptop display troubleshooting:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/117310
· Mac laptop input/output troubleshooting:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/117311
· Mac laptop mechanical troubleshooting:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/117312
· Mac laptop power and startup troubleshooting:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/117313
· Mac laptop sound troubleshooting:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/117314

· MacBook Pro 14" M5 illustrated parts list:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/123176
· MacBook Pro parts:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/123921

· Studio Display troubleshooting quick checks:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/103990

#apple #applerepair #applerepairability #selfrepair #iphone #ipad #mac

Video - Cuba: Technological Disobedience

https://lemmy.ml/post/43790894

I realise that since they started getting connectivity they became risky devices to have in the home, but the design of the iRobot Roomba for repairability is fantastic. I just swapped out some sensors on my 650 (released 2012) with nothing but a screwdriver and a spudger.

#RightToRepair #SelfRepair #Repairability

Louis rips CTIA and Samsung to shreds - because they deserve it

https://peertube.gravitywell.xyz/w/fNuu9ZEZqiQgan61zbpXoA

one of my policies is to get about 5-10 years out of a cell phone. that's a big ask sometimes, but it usually just involves replacing cracked screens and poofed batteries

yesterday's job was replacing two things that failed on my iPhone SE (2020): the proximity sensor in the earpiece stopped working (the one that turns off the screen when you put it against your ear), and i had been living with a cracked screen for about a year. altogether, about $20 worth of aliexpress parts

a straightforward job, under an hour, mostly just dealing with tiny screws and my sausage fingers. the flex cables are finicky to position properly when re-assembling, especially in the earpiece+proximity sensor area which has very tiny parts.

i tested it during assembly, and everything looked good and seemed to work. i sandwiched it back together and - the top half of the phone sat about 1mm outside of the frame. i chalked this up to re-using the old sticky gasket/bezel tape which had weakened over the years.

after an hour, i noticed that the digitizer wasn't detecting my finger properly. sometimes it would stop in the middle of a drag, and twice it stopped working altogether until i rebooted the phone.

damned aliexpress. sigh. sent off a request for replacement from the merchant i purchased it from, and waited for a reply.

i checked my voicemail and... couldn't hear anything from the earpiece?

sat down and tore apart the phone once again. this time i focused on the earpiece area. it *looked* okay.

when i re-disassembled the earpiece area, it was a different story. the earpiece connects to the flex ribbon via four tiny spring-loaded electrical contacts. i had mis-aligned the earpiece by 0.5mm, which meant that half of the contacts were connected to nothing.

worse, due to the mis-alignment, the earpiece was propped up vertically by 1mm. i re-aligned everything, working much more carefully this time.

when i put it back together, suddenly the lcd panel fit perfectly in the frame. it no longer sat outside of the frame. the digitizer started working correctly again. and now the earpiece was working fine.

had to send an embarrassing "oops" message to the aliexpress seller asking them to disregard my request for a replacement 😬

i've done this job a half-dozen times before. sometimes repairs just get borked.

#selfRepair #permaComputing #apple

I was thinking this morning, there should be more things like Goodwill, more thrift stores like that everywhere, for even LESS things going to landfills. Just people getting together, even as a trade or barter system, things like flea markets or garage sales-- people do some of this already.

Reusing things is so important, and repair, when possible-- I've been seeing some cool self-repair fix-it meetups on here, too.

As I was talking to my wife about it, and I remembered this screenshot (I think about it a lot) that's attached below, that I saved from a Wired piece (right after the death of Twitter: https://archive.ph/YSCR9) about billionaires not knowing how to 'monetize' smaller groups of happier people, as we keep our tech, some try to fix their own stuff, etc. About how it's not enough to 'build a town square' on. Which is hilarious and ironic.

Billionaires don't give a FUCK about creating a 'town square'. They don't care about people, about us, about the rest of the 99%. They want to extract value until they can't, at whatever cost.

So reuse, keep things, fix things, as much as possible. That's the way of the future. Not these fuckin billionaires and their shitty corporations.

#repair #SelfRepair #RightToRepair #reuse #FixIt #DIY #DIYRepair #thrift #ThriftStores #FuckBillionaires