Rob's Rants

I’ve been a pretty handy person for most of my life. I’m pretty good with tools and passable at electricity and electronics. I can wire a house, sweat copper plumbing, overhaul an engine, and make things from metal. I can change the brakes on my car, calipers and all. I can weld. About the only thing I truly suck at is woodworking.

Yesterday I was repairing a simple little ladybug cap for our backyard bird-feeder when something occurred to me: this is already starting to rub off on my four year-old, and I think that is a very good thing. In what has become a disposable society, particularly for the middle and upper class in America, when one of her toys breaks, her first words aren’t, “I need a new one,” but rather, “Daddy can fix it.” And lately, this changed to, “We can fix it.”

At four, she has watched me repair several of her toys and helped as much as she can (she’s pretty good with a screwdriver). Together we’ve disassembled her Bubble Mower and fixed it at least three times. We’ve fixed her “bubble cow” toy which is just a little cow with a trigger and a fan that shoots bubbles out of its mouth. We’ve also fixed her Elmo bathtub semi-submersible submarine thingy.

So as I was bringing probably close to $1000 worth of tools¹ to bear on a $5 steel ladybug cap, I realized that it wasn’t about saving the money by re-using something. In this day and age, with hyper-efficient supply chains and cheap overseas labor, it’s rarely cheaper to fix something that costs less than $500 than it is to replace it. But the lesson for my daughter is priceless. Perhaps, as a child of this Depression, she will grow up and continue to think, “I can fix it,” rather than just tossing broken things aside and  filling up landfills while wasting resources.

¹ This stupid little repair was tackled with the following tools:

• Husky air compressor ($300)
• Air die grinder ($30)
• Lincoln Electric mig welder ($500)
• Various hand tools (~$50, housed in a $400 Craftsman tool chest)

Why use all this technology instead of some glue (like my wife asked)? This Orbitz commercial explains it all very well: Because We Have a Hovercraft.

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