What is a do-it-yourselfer?  Please improve on this attempt at a definition.
A person who does something that most people would pay to have done.  This
includes both making and fixing objects, and other services.  It does not
include most aspects of such common activities as gardening, cooking,
cleaning, sports and recreation, but would for instance include building your
own toolshed or mending skis.  A do-it-yourselfer differs from a consumer by
investing more time and less money.  Do all do-it-yourself projects involve
tools?  Are hands tools?  Are heads tools?  What is a tool?
    Many of the items in dwellings, cars, and computer hardware are related
to this conference.  Should we link any or all of them?  Please also keep an
eye out for related items in laundry, radio, and other hobbies.
    To keep the list of items a manageable size, I suggest entering not
'vacuum cleaner repair' as an item, but 'small appliance repair'.  What would
be helpful categories?  Large appliances, small appliances, furniture, toys,
clothing, gadgets, tools, vehicles (including bikes and canoes), services
(piano tuning, haircutting, even dental work?)...

108 responses total.

Sounds good to me, although I wouldn't necessarily want to stop creation of
a "vacuum cleaner repair" item.  Maybe in a year or so I'll want to look up
something from that item, and having the header reflect the contents will help
a lot.  From the dwellings conf, I found that there won't be an unmanageble
number of items anyway.

Cool!  It's here.  :)  Well, I'm off to catch up and enter an item.

Wow...I like.  Cool.  I'll have to add this to my list of places to lurk.

"Use it up, wear it out; make it do, or do without."

(I like the handle, btw, grace)

heh

        This conf. should be dedicated to the free worlds greatest benefactor,
the inventor of duct tape. And i suggest Red Green as a FW.

There are duct tape people, scotch tape people (my mother used it to hold down
floor tiles), electrical tape people, masking tape people...  

I don't have too much use for duct tape.  I have some wrapped around my
kayaking water bottle should I put a hole in my craft.  Hot met glue is
useful stuff too.

How many uses are there for a wire coat hanger?  Dowsing rods....

It's just iron wire, if you have a use for such. It is rather too heavy
for a lot of uses. I keep a variety of guages of galvanized iron wire
(lighter than coat hanger wire). I don't even have any jigs or tools
that I've made from such wire. One uncommon use is to pass through -
i.e., start at your head the pass the wire coat hanger down over you
until you can lift your feet out of it. Cavers do this at parties. I
used to fit.....

We use a lot of coat hanger wire wire in making Halloween costumes for
the kids.  It's good for stiffening tails and ears.  Sometimes I will
bend it into hooks and such for hanging pictures, pipes, etc.

i prefer gaffer's tape to duct tape.  it is much easier to remove neatly, ad
is thus significantly more expensive.  that is a drawback...

We made clips to hold up the glass under a recessed porch light out of
coat-hanger wire, but it is not springy enough.  A piece of piano wire would
work better, from one of the lower strings.  Coat hangers make good tools,
probes.  (This is my roommate speaking, who just uses whatever is within reach
for the job at hand.  I lose a lot of paperclips that way too, they and safety
pins are indispensable for electronics work.)

(What is the difference between gaffers' and duct tape?)

gaff tape has a matte surface instead of the glossy surface of duct tape.
it is also a cloth tape, and functions very similarly except, as noted above,
it is much easier to remove cleanly.  in fact this latter characteristic is
the primary one for which it is preferred.  it makes great labelling tape for
cables ends for shows, when if a cable should come undone, you want to be
quickly able to find where it goes.  white gaff tape is also commonly used
for marking the locations of hazards in the wings where people would be likely
to trip over them in the low light.

What is a gaffer?

It's a stage or movie job.  Gaffers tend to tape things down a lot.

I know it has something to do with movies, but other than apply tape, what
do they do?

(They gaff, perhaps?)

I've always wondered that, too.  That, and what grips do.

I'm fuzzy on the actual definition, but I think that gaffers work in a "catch
all" capacity, such as taping down wires that might trip people up.  In
theatre, sets are worked on by carpenters, lights by electricians, props by
propmen (prop people nowadays), so there isn't anything obvious left over.
Cable taping is usually handled by the department that put the wires down,
so I'm not sure there really is a "gaffer" role in theatre.

We see them in the credits for movies and videos.  Grips move around the
lighting and sound equipment, microphones etc.

BTW, who is the "Best Boy" in movie credits?  (I have heard of madcap 
comedy movies whose credits list Adolf Hitler as "Worst Boy.")

i'm not an expert on film title usage, but i'll try:
grips move equipment, such as lighting and frames which support it.
electricians set up the lighting on those frames (and cable them?)
best boy, i think, is head of the crew of either electricians or grips
gaffers deal with cables after they're run, either keeping them out of sight
        or from being hazards.

that's a list of educated guesses.

I know a grip. He works for both stage plays and TV programs. He arranges
and maintains all the sound and lighting equipment and a lot of props,
short of things that require the "trades" (installing permanent wiring
and such). 

A big influence on these titles and their tasks is the union rules wherever
a production is being mounted.  Also, various specialties can be *very*
territorial, such as sound tech not wanting their cables run in the same place
as lighting cables (usually with good reason).

such as magnetic fields generated by high voltage power lines for lighting
causing inductive current which interferes with the signal in the sound lines?

(or, I would imagine, not wanting lighting people messing with sound equipment
and vice versa)

When is something not 'worth' fixing?  How do you assign value to your time?
In the case of our clock, it would have certainly saved time to replace the
drive mechanism, but how much is a feeling of satisfaction worth?  Or the fact
that you are not adding to the dump, no matter how little?  Is an item more
worth fixing if it cannot be replaced with something identical, or would a
new but different version be just as good. (Sentimental value).  What criteria
have you used to decide whether to fix or junk something?

For me, part of it has to do with knowing roughly how much my time is worth
and deciding that it's economically better to just buy a new one (or pay
somebody to fix the old one, rather than doing it myself).  However, there
are some things that fail that test, but still seem sufficiently interesting
to be worth taking apart myself, and some things where it would be cheaper
for me to fix them, but where it seems so dull that I would prefer to buy a
new one or pay somebody.

Then there's my car.  It is, of course, worth maintaining, and it would be
interesting to learn to do the work on it myself.  However, my car is
expensive, and I can't afford to screw up on it, so I always pay professionals
to work on it.

Jim says 'Write ha ha ha after that.  You think professionals don't screw up.
They've got to learn on somebody's car, and it might just be yours.  That's
the very reason I decided to learn to fix my own car, because the
professionals were either learning or screwing up on my car, and I couldn't
always tell if it was done right.  Once I knew how to do it, I knew how to
tell other people what I wanted done.  Then it was sometimes worth my time
and money to have someone else do it.  (Typist cannot keep up here.....)  Once
you know how to do it, you don't have to do it yourself all the time.  It is
a matter of gaining the knowledge.'

A professional is much less likely to screw up than I am, since I absolutely
don't know what I'm doing when it comes to car repair.  Also, with a
professional, I can in theory make them fix it if they screw up.  If I screw
up, I'm screwed.

  When I am doing car repairs, I usually use and refer to Chilton, since
my uncle Howard is now dead. Chilton is usually straitforward, to the point
and helps me decide if the problem is too big for me to handle.
  I would replace a starter, but when it comes to U-Joints, that is
the domain of the professional, and I know a great place in Sterling Heights
or Mt. Clemens who are absolutly THE best at driveshafts and U joints.

Sometimes something is not worth fixing because too much is wrong with it.
Fix part x, & part y will break.  If the whole thing is just worn out, so that
no reasonable effort will keep the thing going, you're better off junking it
& (if it's something you need or something you want badly enough) buying a
new one.

I've found this out the hard way, a few times.

How much energy I spend on fixing something depends on how much I want
or need it.  I learned to fix my own stuff since day one simply because
I liked it and I couldn't afford, or didn't want to afford, to replace
it with a "new" item.  If something won't stay fixed or if it has not
been touched in years, I will get rid of it simply because I believe
that one becomes a slave to ones things.  (At least if you take care
of them, as I prefer to do.)
 
I prefer to fix my own cars when it comes to some things.  I have learned
that some jobs are best left to the shops like exhaust, clutch, wheel
balancing, flat repair, strut replacement, etc.  However, I will do
things like brakes, cylinder repacement, fluid changes, filter changes,
electrical work, etc.  These things are easy to do and the shops charge
a lot of money to do them.  Last year I shaved $1,000 of a $1,400 estimate
simply by doing most of the work myself.  I also have found that some
cars are a *LOT* easier to work on than others!  I have done significant
work on my Opel (German), AMC Spirit, Ford Falcon and Chevy Nova (Same
as Toyota Corolla.)  Of all of them, the Nova has been by far the easiest
to work on.  (It has also been the most reliable, most fuel efficient
and cheapest to maintain thus far.)

Jim just junked a printer that was not working because he had another just
like it that needed a part, and it was an obsolete dinosaur.  He recycled what
he could not use for parts.  Nobody wanted it, the new ones are better and
there are too many working old ones around now.  Same for Maytag washers when
they get to the oil leak stage.  There are too many other used washers around
that don't have to be rebuilt to change a 10 cent oil seal.  (Maytag claims
you have to buy a $90 gasket kit to put it back together with.  Their
excellent repair record is only through 10 years).  He did fix another Maytag
that needed the transmission rebuilt, using a part from a junked oil-leaker
which had older and better quality gears (forged instead of cast), because
he had already gone to the trouble of redesigning the timer so that it did
not dump the water out at the end of the presoak cycle.
The problem was that he found a drift pin adrift, he has no idea where it came
from, he was the original owner, it was never worked on, probably an
accidental inclusion at the factory that worked its way into the teeth and
chipped them so the gears needed replacing.
Jim prefers to do his own car repairs because he knows enough to recognize
bad work, such as professionally replaced brakes where they had put in too
short retainer pins on one side (which caused the shoe to tilt and bind and
scored a groove in the brake drum an eighth inch deep);  body work that only
covered up the rust and let it get worse;  truck shock absorbers put into a
car;  a perfectly good one-year-old muffler replaced;  a rebuilt transmission
where they did not bother to replace the oil seal nearby when it was out...
These errors don't show up for a few years, when they damage something else.
By the way, Jim has tackled most repairs, including engine replacement (with
a smaller and more efficient engine), getting the old one out with a chain
hung from the garage door, U-joint replacement, transmission replacement. 
That way he knows what he is getting.  He keeps his vehicles a long time.

For me, whether something is worth trying to fix myself, having someone else
fix, keeping in its broken state, or throwing away is mostly based on how
attatched to it I am.  Recently there's been a lot of discussio about fixing
cheap plastic clocks.  I'm not terribly attatched to my alarm clock, so I'd
probably just toss it and buy a new one, but if I was attatched to it and it
broke, I'd try to do something about it.

The clock we fixed was not actually cheap or plastic (unless you count the
used price of 50 cents).  But I am interested in what sorts of things you have
fixed, and how and why.

I have fixed at home: furnace (new motor); exhaust fan (new motor); 
dishwasher (new water valve); coffee maker (put clamps on hoses to stop
leaks); boot dryer (new thermal fuse); camera (rebuilt shutter); clocks; 
toilets (new float mechanisms); disposal (replaced); leak in bath fixture
(new coupling); broken dishes (glued); broken table leg (glued and
rescrewed); refrigerator (new timer motor); and lots of little repair and
replacement jobs too numerous to mention. I have a shower head on the
bench now. 

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss