Repair Café and Members Meeting Report

Looe Shedders very first Repair Café Took place 10am to 12 noon on Saturday 11th February.

Our biggest hurdle was initially insurance, but we were fortunate that the Cornwall Repair Café network, run by Cornwall Council Recycling unit, offered us free insurance for repair cafe events and with this covered, we felt assured that our first event could proceed without undue concerns about liability.

However, we are still considering how to manage insurance in the long term, as we plan to move forward with other activities outside the Repair Café which would not be covered by the Cornwall Council policy.

What we really need is a policy which covers everything, and I have been chasing quotes from different insurance companies, the latest being from Greenwood Moreland Insurance Brokers who have quoted £153.42 from Ansvar Insurance.

Note that it does not cover building or contents.

Our secondary concern was turnout.

As it was our first café we had kept advertising low key, to avoid being swamped by the general public. This meant we had just two non-members (clients) turn up and they eventually left having joined our ranks as new members.

The low turnout was actually a good thing as it gave time for our people to either test their new roles or to feedback their views on how things were progressing and what could be done to improve our next café.

On the admin side, we created a number of forms to manage the event and also safeguard our company.

These included:

Risk Assessment
Work Log - to record activity.
House Rules and Disclaimers – Sets out what terms and conditions and disclaims our liability.
Near Miss Log – To be completed in the event of a potentially dangerous situation arising.
Workflow diagram – Prompts our reception on their part in the process.
Feedback Form – Self-explanatory.

In addition, we created table signs for each activity and bought 2 large yellow donation tubs from eBay, placing one on the refreshments table and the other in the repair area.

Note that we collected £19.50 in donations over the 2 hours we were in operation.

The Repair Cafe itself was generally considered a great success. We had four successful repairs. A radio, a cordless leaf blower, multiple chairs belonging to our community hall and the construction of a large cabinet for the hall sound system. Ok, so that is not strictly a repair, but we considered it to be one.

We also had one item, a cube radio that could not be repaired.

In addition to the repair area, we had a seed swap table, where people could bring the seeds they did not want and swap them for those they did and a reading table for people to browse through books on DIY, cooking or gardening.

These were supplemented by an advice table offering tips and hints for computer users and another table offering tips and hints for householders.

The café part provided tea, biscuits and coffee for a donation.

Suggestions from our members for our next café on 11th March included:

Giving members and clients a talk on cyber security, prompted by the presence of our computer tips and hints desk
A watch battery swap desk
The addition of a fabric repair service, by one of our members
Ramping up our pre event publicity
And something else, the details of which escape me for the moment, so a reminder please if anyone knows what is was.

Overall, we were very pleased with the success of our first ever Repair Café. We managed to get four repairs done and the hall had a real buzz about it.

We have had some very positive feedback from our members and 'clients' about the event and are now looking forward to our next Café and continuing to provide a great repair service to the local community.

Leo's Lenses

Our IT manager, Leo Maxwell, has several hobbies, one of which is Photography.

He has been experimenting with Classic SLR lenses, which although they are unsuitable for modern DSLR cameras, can be used with adapters on Digital Mirrorless cameras. He brought some along to demonstrate at our 12th November meeting One example is shown below, beside an image taken with it at Millpool in Looe.

For those interested, more information is available on Leo's Blog

Peter's automata

One of our members, Peter Heywood, spends some of his time on art projects. He brought along a few examples of automata that he’s made to the 8th October members’ meeting.

The mechanisms of some of them are based on clothes pegs. An example of which is the flapping seagull shown here.

Why not check out Peter’s website, www.peter-heywood.co.uk which covers his creative adventures in inventing, designing and making all sorts of works of art (including some robot snakes).
The website is as much about HOW he made stuff as displaying the end results.