Six Months of Fixing Things, Healing Planet
First Sunday of October brought us all together for the 6th edition of RE:Community in Vadodara. It was a special Repair Community as we had invited our engineer friend Ashish Ranjan to teach the basics of electronics and circuits to our young friends. The intention was to get more children involved in repairing things, by first learning about how things work and what could go wrong. So, armed with breadboards, batteries, LEDs, resistors, crocodile clips, connecting leads, and microcontrollers, Ashish got the children and adults hooked to learning about breadboards, circuits and using coding through microcontrollers to control the switching of LEDs. It was like magic, but as Ashish said, “All magic is science” and we coudn’t agree more 🙂
We had a few new friends who joined us for the repair community Edition 6 with new items to repair as well. A friend brought a steam iron that was leaking current from soleplate, a wooden temple that was to be put to an alternate use, a blender that made sound and the blades did not run and an old video game with a missing battery terminal.
For the wooden temple, we suggested first cleaning and sanding it thoroughly to see what were the weak spots and how well finished it looked after cleaning. Our young friend Vedika, cleaned and sanded it and realized that the inner plywood was in bad shape- so that was removed. The good part was that the entire wooden structure looked good and could be just varnished or oiled to give it a sheen and then be used as box for showcasing. Vedika has decided to put in a small wooden slab inside for showcasing things 🙂
The blender was diagnosed as having an issue with its coupler that would need replacing. Thank you Jagruti ben for getting it to the repair community and giving it a chance.
The steam iron challenged us a quite a bir and we could not resolve the current issue on the soleplate. However, it was a good challenge and we are thinking that may be from next time we can also use you tube repairing videos to understand what might be the issue with an item before beginning to diagnose it. Thank you Dharmesh bhai for joining us and travelling a long way. This new friend of ours also shared how his father is a repair enthusiast and how he was happy to find a space like this. Although, we could not solve the issue with iron, but hopefully we were able to forge an iron clad community bond.
Our dear friends Neela ji and Ravi got a lot of ewaste from their home too. Thanks for taking up the idea. We have now sorted that waste and found a few things that are useful. There were two old film cameras and we might already have someone who is leaving for US and was looking for an old film camera. We will gift it to him. Remaining items will be sent to our ewaste recycling partner to be recycled and disposed-off responsibly.
We are so grateful to the friends, families and new friends who join us and support this initiative of using resources responsibly and increasing their life span wherever possible. Thanks to all who are the sustainability and community weaving champions.
