Repair Café

Repair Café Amsterdam-Oost

A Repair Cafe is a meeting in which people repair appliances/devices, organized by and for local residents. They meet at a fixed location where tools are available and where they can fix their broken stuff with the help of handy volunteers. Objectives are to reduce the waste pile, to maintain repairing knowledge and to strengthen the social cohesion.[1] The New York Times[2][3][4][5][6][7]

History

The concept was invented by Martine Postma in 2009. On October 18, 2009, the first Repair Café was held at Fine Wood Theater, Amsterdam-West. On March 2, 2010, the Repair Cafe Foundation was set up. This foundation was made to support local groups who want to set up their own Repair Café. In September 2013, there were 150 groups in the Netherlands who held a Repair Café on a regular basis.

3D printing of broken parts

Some repair cafés have begun to use 3D printers for replicating broken parts.[8] Broken parts of domestic appliances can often be pieced/glued together after which they can be scanned with a 3D scanner(David Starter-Kit, 3DSystems Sense, Makerbot Digitizer, Fuel 3D, Microsoft Kinect, Asus Xtion,[9] ...).Once that's done, the scanned 3D model rendered (in .skp, .dae, ... format) can be converted to a .stl or.obj format, revised using mesh software (makeprintable, netfabb, MeshLab, Meshmixer, Cura, Slic3r[10] ...) and printed using a 3D printer client (Repetier Host, Cura, KISSSlicer, ReplicatorG, Printrun/Pronterface, Slic3r, Skeinforge, ...) outputting a part using the 3D printer. It should be noted that, given the steps required, the process still takes some time to do. To reduce the time needed in the repair café, people may hence also choose to use a pre-made part from a website with 3D models (skipping the scanning step),[11] make the 3D model themselves by taking many photos of it with their digital camera and using 123D Catch and/or choose (in the event the repair café is not yet foreseen with an own 3D printer) to have the 3D model made in the repair café, but print it out with the 3D printer of a private person living in the vicinity[12] (or alternatively use a 3D printing service like Ponoko, Shapeways, ...) and then return to the repair café to actually have the new part installed to the broken equipment.

See also

References

External links

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