IFA's Repair Café Lends New Life to Busted Gadgets

pcmag.com:

BERLIN—Among the many displays of hardware at IFA here, one featured tools that looked a lot grimier than most: the Repair Café.

This nod to repairability was staged as part of a “Sustainability Village” exhibit that also included a lineup of panel discussions, a rare-for-a-trade-show Tesla presence, and a massive “Wertgigant” artwork that resembled the AOL Instant Messenger running-man icon as recreated in electronic waste. It gave IFA attendees a chance to have their broken household gadgets made whole again by experienced volunteers.

(Sadly, phones with cracked screens were not eligible even though an event that involves as much walking as IFA will lead to more than a few dropped devices. The cafe’s helpers may have showed up with every size of Torx screwdriver bit available but did not bring a stack of screen-repair kits.)

Because IFA sells tickets to the general public, people showed up at this stand with a wider variety of misfit toys than I would have expected.

When I arrived in mid-afternoon, café volunteers had just finished putting one attendee’s broken blood-pressure monitor back into service by patching a gap in its inflation tube and had moved on to fixing wiring inside a lamp with a soldering iron.

Café volunteer Sebastian Kaminer then ticked off other recent devices that had been rescued: a subwoofer, a projector, a toy car, a coffee grinder, a stroller, set of headphones, a PC display, a watch, and a blender.

"And a Walkman, the original one," he added, explaining that this portable tape player had been suffering from a stuck capstan.  

Some of these repair jobs might have been accomplished at home—I was told the stroller just needed some oil—while others seemed much trickier. One mishap with a soldering