For a few years, we’ve been helping to repair things that members and the public bring to us. Ideally, we’ve tried to teach the owner how to repair the article, letting them do all the work, but we’ve done the repairs with their help where it was too complex or dangerous to give them the necessary knowledge. We don’t have a dedicated repair event, but you can come to any of our free open meetings, 6:30-8:30 every Wednesday evening, with your broken items. You can alternatively learn to make or upcycle materials at the same meeting!
One of our volunteer experts working inside a computer
Will this cost me anything?
Repairs are nominally free, but we will accept donations to help us keep the place running.
There may be direct costs for materials, such as for 3D printing filament, or for spare parts, such as a new SSD for your laptop. If we don’t have something immediately available, we will give you a link to buy it yourself and you can bring it in to a future session.
Examples
These are just some of the items that we’ve helped members of the community to repair, largely by themselves:
Other community repair events
We can only handle so much repair volume ourselves (we are available weekly, but we only have one or two repair experts available at each meeting). On the other hand, we do operate in a dedicated workshop and have a wide range of heavy equipment, tools and storage parts, which couldn’t be easily brought to a general repair event!
There are several other local options for you, which might suit your repairing needs better than we do:
Or members have attended the repair cafe run at Brookhouse Community Church Hall, as repair experts.
The Sewing Cafe have been specialising in textile repair for years!
Please note that larger, dedicated repair events have started recently, which are not related to us: Lancaster and Morecambe Repair Cafe .
For large pieces of furniture, we recommend contacting the Lancaster Men’s Hub. We can probably deal with smaller items like chairs and side tables, but not larger jobs like dining tables.
What about old laptops?
Separate to our Repair Shop, we also refurbish laptops and give them to other local community organisations, charities and refugee groups. Do you have an old machine taking up space in a cupboard? We gave well over 100 usable laptops to schools during COVID lockdown!
