All day long people enter a warehouse in Longmont, dragging with them the broken things that they hope to leave with fixed. A dress with a jammed zipper, an air mattress that won’t inflate, a vacuum, a blender, an oscilloscope, a mobile cryogenic freezer that its new owner found (for free!) on Craigslist.
These people and their things have come to the monthly Repair Café, one of about a dozen similar events that happen all over the state, where expert tinkerers volunteer their time to put things back together.
“Most people can fix things. What they lack is the confidence to pick up a screwdriver and start taking it apart, because they worry they can’t put it back together,” said CE Raum, founder of the Longmont Repair Café. “It’s not going to be more broken than it already is if you try to fix it.”
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SUBSCRIBERepair cafés are as much about keeping things out of the landfill as they are about changing the broader culture of consumption. The events are part of a global right-to-repair movement that pressures manufacturers to provide tools and instructions for anyone to fix their phones, stoves and refrigerators. It’s a grassroots effort that takes many forms, from digital catalogues of manuals, to the global network of repair cafés, to lobbying for policy change.
Colorado was one of the first states to enact right-to-repair laws in 2022, when lawmakers passed a bill giving consumers the right to bring powered wheelchairs to independent repair shops, instead of needing to rely on the manufacturer for fixes. In 2023, that right was extended to agricultural equipment. And in 2024, a third bill required makers of digital equipment to allow independent repairs, and prevent manufacturers from installing parts that lead to reduced functionality or misleading alerts about third-party parts. That law took effect in January.
Senate Bill 90, which is moving through the Capitol now, would undo some of those protections, raising hackles in groups like CoPIRG, the Repair Association, iFixit and more than a dozen repair advocates who testified against the bill in April.
The bill creates exemptions for technology equipment used in critical infrastructure from the state’s right to repair laws. The bill passed in the Senate 22-13 on April 16 and is awaiting deliberation in the House.
Groups supporting the bill include Cisco, IBM, and TechNet, a network of technology CEOs and senior executives, according to lobbying disclosures. They argue that exemptions are necessary to protect against cybersecurity threats and intellectual property infringement.
Consumer protection groups opposing the bill say the definition of “critical infrastructure” is so broad as to leave that decision up to manufacturers, effectively canceling out any previous right to repair laws. (The determination will ultimately be up to the state attorney general).
“When you corner the repair market, you really undermine this basic idea that people own stuff,” said Danny Katz, executive director of the Colorado Public Interest Research Group, also known as CoPIRG. “Manufacturers fight very hard against any laws that require them to share their repair tools and resources.”
Pikes Peak Library District Repair Café volunteer David Koster of Colorado Springs solders a loose connection on a library-owned lighting instrument. (Andy Colwell, Special to The Colorado Sun)That’s why groups like CoPIRG have been “chipping away” at the repair laws sector by sector, Katz said. The group’s first attempt, a more comprehensive bill that would have introduced right-to-repair laws in 2021, was killed almost immediately.
While the cat-and-mouse game continues between makers and fixers at the statehouse, volunteers at repair cafés are more focused on cultural change, slowing people’s impulse to toss broken goods and buy something new.
“I just see this supposition that all of this is just magic, that something works or it doesn’t work, and if it doesn’t work, you throw it away,” said David Koster, a retired U.S. Air Force major who volunteers at the monthly Pikes Peak Repair Café. “That’s the culture that we’re developing.”
Inside a repair café
Inside the Longmont warehouse, a thrumming makerspace called the TinkerMill, people are chatting and chewing free pizza. Machines buzz and whir, plastic clatters against the floor as a large printer is pulled apart. At the front of the room, someone clangs a cowbell and everyone else claps in response: An item has been fixed.
Over the course of the day, volunteers at the TinkerMill will patch a jacket, unstick a zipper and get a shop vac back to working order. They’ll attempt to fix the cryogenic freezer, but fail to find an outlet for the unusual prongs of the power cord. It gets recorded as “assessed” on the sign-in sheet. Only one item out of about a dozen — some type of tuning device — is deemed “beyond repair.”
An engineering background isn’t a requirement to volunteer at the cafés, but many of the current volunteers have some kind of technical know-how.
Ken Marchek, elbows deep in a Dyson vacuum cleaner at the Pikes Peak repair café, said his hobby is having hobbies. His wife nodded vigorously in agreement. He goes through phases, taking things apart and learning everything he can about how they’re put together. There was a pinball and arcade game phase, an anniversary clock phase, an antique lock picking phase. Conveniently for that afternoon’s client, he also had a vacuum phase.
Working nearby is Treschan Hawke, the son of an engineer and a mechanic, who grew up watching his parents repair things. He ran around the house “like a menace with a screwdriver,” he said. He learned to solder around age 7.
LEFT: Treschan Hawke, left, reassembles a Sunbeam stand mixer belonging to Janna Allen, right, during a free monthly Repair Café event hosted by Pikes Peak Library District’s Library 21c in Colorado Springs. RIGHT: Framed by the handle of her malfunctioning Dyson vacuum, Heidi Crist smiles as she listens to diagnostic remarks from volunteer repairman Ken Marchek as they try to make Crist’s machine run better. (Andy Colwell, Special to The Colorado Sun)
Raum, the TinkerMill repair café founder, said he has simply always been “the guy people are comfortable throwing broken things at.”
Fixing phones is his specialty, and for a while it was a breeze. He could replace a touchscreen in no time. Over the years, he watched the price of individual parts increase — a cracked iPhone screen can now put you out nearly $400 — while at the same time manufacturers paired the parts using software to lock out third-party replacements.
Those measures now affect anyone who buys a so-called smart device, including, but not limited to: vacuums, refrigerators, laundry machines, dishwashers, lights, thermostats, security cameras, coffee makers, speaker systems, alarm clocks and garage door openers.
Not all lockouts are done digitally. Some companies withhold parts, tools or repair documentation. Others design proprietary pieces that force the consumer to send items back to the company for repairs.
If you’re reading this article on a MacBook, for instance, flip your laptop over. The bottom is likely held on by four little screws fixed with a cute flower pattern. On an iPhone, the screws look more like teeny tiny stars. Think you have a screwdriver to open that up yourself? You don’t. Unless you’ve ordered a special pentalobe screwdriver from iFixIt, which began manufacturing “iPhone liberation kits” in 2011.
“The right-to-repair movement is about telling manufacturers (to) actually make things so that they are repairable,” Raum said. “Make those parts available and do not overcharge.”
When you corner the repair market, you really undermine this basic idea that people own stuff. Manufacturers fight very hard against any laws that require them to share their repair tools and resources.
— Danny Katz, executive director of the Colorado Public Interest Research Group
Raum became involved with the right-to-repair movement about 15 years ago, when he was living in England. He brought the ethos with him to Texas, before moving to Colorado where he’d been raised.
Moving back home felt inevitable, he said, and he didn’t really care where in Colorado he ended up, as long as there was a good makerspace nearby. That’s how he landed in Longmont.
When he first proposed the repair café idea to TinkerMill he was met with “blank looks,” he said. “Nobody had heard of them. So I explained the concept and we decided to do a test run for (TinkerMill) members only.”
That first Saturday, the volunteers worked all day repairing cameras, telescopes and tripods (they’d decided to limit it to photographic equipment, one of Raum’s other specialties).
They started holding quarterly cafés, attracting a handful of people to the first one, and a line of people at the second. “By the third time we did it, it was just nonstop all day,” Raum said.
Raum’s favorite item to fix is a stand mixer. They’re heavy-duty, made mostly of metal, with a single plastic gear that’s designed to fail to protect the motor. “If anything ever gets bound up, that gear is stripped clean so nothing else gets messed up,” Raum said. “I love that concept, that the one part that is designed to fail is made out of plastic. And everything else is just rock solid.”
Michael George learns the bad news from TinkerMill volunteer repairman Rene Hamer, both of Longmont, that George’s nonfunctional audio receiver is likely unrepairable, one of several electronic diagnoses Hamer delivered during a Repair Café event hosted at the nonprofit TinkerMill makerspace in Longmont on March 21. (Andy Colwell, Special to The Colorado Sun)A DIY ethos
Along one wall of the Longmont warehouse are Ruth Williams, a professional beekeeper, and Crosby Davis, shop manager for the textiles department at TinkerMill, sitting side by side at a foldout table. Davis is learning how to add a blind hem to a pair of trousers, Williams is meticulously unscrewing panels from a Necchi sewing machine.
“It’s so empowering and it’s so satisfying,” Williams said, prying the bottom off the machine. “Especially for mending and darning, it usually takes me, you know, 15 minutes to fix something. And then you think, gosh, that’s 15 minutes, and now that can be worn for as long as they want.”
“I find that it gives me confidence in other things, too,” Davis said. “Like, if I learn how to repair one thing, I find myself stretching a little bit. And then all of a sudden it’s like, oh, maybe I can fix the vacuum cleaner.”
“There’s a really gendered aspect, too,” Williams said.
“Oh my god, yeah,” Davis said. “I could go on a whole tirade about that.”
“Women and girls are not at all encouraged to fix things,” Williams said. “Well, besides, sewing. And I do want to point out that every human in here is wearing clothes.” Her eyes darted around the room, a few men huddled around the oscilloscope looked up and grinned.
“Bras, now those are feats of engineering,” Williams added. “It’s not a coincidence that Playtex made the first spacesuits.”
LEFT: With her recently repaired dress in hand, state Rep. Brianna Titone, left, of Arvada, smiles with TinkerMill volunteer Lynn Wysolmierski as they discuss the lengths to which a TinkerMill textiles volunteer went to unjam and repair the dress’s zipper. RIGHT: TinkerMill volunteer repairman CE Raum, left, looks on with a smile next to Ruth Williams, both of Longmont, as Williams strikes a cowbell to celebrate Raum’s successful repair of her shop vacuum. (Andy Colwell, Special to The Colorado Sun)
Ever since HGTV launched in 1994 there has been a market for DIY and fix-it-yourself content. The shows that HGTV has aired for decades are a mix of practical and aspirational (most often skewing aspirational) that give audience members a sense of satisfaction when the improved product is revealed.
The home improvement and remodeling market soared during the pandemic — so did the DIY influencer market, targeting younger homeowners looking for more cost-effective ways to revamp their spaces.
It’s these sensations of satisfaction and empowerment — that Davis and Williams have experienced, that home improvement shows have marketed for decades — that the right-to-repair movement taps into.
Most of the time, it starts with a personal frustration — a broken keyboard, a jammed garage door — and blooms into a DIY ethos.
That’s how iFixIt, one of the most comprehensive sites for repair manuals and specialty parts, was formed in 2003, with two college classmates trying to fix an old iBook. That same year, a Polish physicist set out to create open source fabrication blueprints for what he considers “the 50 most important machines that it takes for modern life to exist,” according to the Open Source Ecology website, including a tractor, an oven, a wind turbine and a “microhouse.” (The blueprints are still in development.)
In June, a couple of right–to-repair advocates founded the FULU Foundation (FULU stands for Freedom from Unethical Limitations on Users) to combat manufacturers tying themselves to their digital products through subscription models and software updates. FULU offers bounties for modifications that sever products from manufacturer control. There’s more than $20,000 on offer for whoever can figure out how to cut off Ring doorbell cameras from Amazon servers, another $15,000 for a modification that makes it so certain GE refrigerator models accept third-party water filters.
Raum’s favorite item that TinkerMill volunteers have fixed is an oscillating fan with a hand-stamped serial number from 1928. Though, “fixed,” is probably a mischaracterization, Raum said. The team just took it apart and cleaned it — for nearly five hours, by Raum’s telling. They stripped it piece by piece and scrubbed away nearly 100 years worth of gunk. “That’s a lot of gunk,” he said.
“All they did was clean it, they just showed it love, and it started oscillating again,” Raum said. “Smooth as the day it was manufactured.”
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