The joy of fixing things

Yeah. Though I wouldn't recommend super glue on soft plastics like those on polycaps. It makes them brittle if not cured properly

I wouldn't dream of sullying an E type with my mismatched battered tools. 

I’m restoring a customers E type at the moment, I’ve spent the last week putting the rear axle and suspension back together, everything has shims as no two parts would have been machined the same. I’m also restoring a Beetle, the German engineering is spot on, unfortunately most parts are now made in Brazil or Mexico  and don’t fit.  Fettling is a good British word for what usually happens next.

That is one of the reasons I love British engineering. In theory they are well designed but poorly machined.  It is possible to take a British vehicle and make it better than it was when it left the factory. Not so easy with say Japanese or German machines. 

I’ve taken things apart and put them back together since I was a child, my work is with classic cars and involves a lot of repairing things. I actually enjoy being alone all day and focusing on one thing. I get so annoyed when I recondition parts that large companies have supposedly already restored and changed a lot of money for, I strip them down and little work has been done. 

I completely understand, fixing things is my favourite past time. I think I purposely buy rubbish cars and motorbikes just so I can spend my time fixing them. The thought of a nice, new, reliable vehicle appeals to me but I soon get bored with it and need something to take apart.

So impressive, Iaian. There are so many young people without jobs, I'm sure many could be encouraged by doing things like this with their hands.

I love to fix things and have been doing this for around 40 years since my first motorbike needed some repairs and I couldn't afford to take it to a garage.

I ended up doing more and more complex repairs and eventually complete restorations of old motorbikes, stripping engines down to the last nuts and bolts, measuring and replacing / repairing parts until the bike was in showroom condition.

Then came married life and around 20 years of a different focus but in the last 5 years I started buying old properties (150 years old apartments) and renovating these in a back to bricks / rafters renovations. The scale of this was daunting but was incredibly satisfying when the end result was a beautiful place to live and a huge profit when resold too.

The last few years I retired early at 55 and renovate 60 year old apartments in Brazil now - somewhere warm and cheap to live where I only need to work a few months a year in my own time to cover all my living costs as well as enough to travel the world.

Once you realise that the techniques you use to fix small stuff actually form an approach that can scale up to almost anything then with a bit of research you can tackle anything you have the tools and strength for.

At one stage my company was selling off its old server room contents after an office move so I bought these for a few hundred pounds, hired some guys to move everything to my home and I cleaned, tested and reconfigured everything then resold it on eBay to make around £10k profit

I found instructions to do all that work online and anything that was broken was stripped down and I sold the circuit boards and steel cases for scrap too - environmentally friendly as well as profitable.

Good luck in your projects and I hope your confidence and skills continue to grow.

Plastic cement and sprue good are your friends here and for paint si found arty x to he very good model paint 

I often have to fix my plastic models. Sometimes, it even improves them! Unfortunately, not all fixes work, though

That's how I feel about this register toy rigjt now I feel like even if it was beyond repair in the first place I now know what makes it work 

That said I'm. Still trying lime I feel like the plastic has come loose on the main joint so I'm reinforcing them with plastic cement and if need be s small amount of sprue goo

I've dabbled in whittling but I couldn't get very far  lie at I get to making things from scratch is model kits 

I love DIY and small repairs. Been doing DIY since a small child which made me happy in our tense household. I love all the stages - planning, buying materials and fixing, then the joy of looking at the result. Truly, one of life's under rated joys.

I repair old pocket watches. On one, an American Waltham watch dating to 1901, I cleaned up the balance that was clogged up with old congealed oil, which was making the watch run very fast, repaired the mainspring, which had broken at the 'loose piece', then replaced the mainspring when it broke again.

When my future wife was living in a shared house in London with three other young women, they were having a lot of trouble with the lock on the front door sticking. Not having any WD40 available, I just sprayed furniture polish into the lock. Furniture polish contains silicone which acts as a lubricant. The lock stopped sticking and they thought I was a genius.

Be careful, fixing things is only a step away from making things from scratch. I have been doing the latter since I was about 4 years old. Great way to switch off from the stresses and strains of the world. 

I feel the same.

I've also broken a few things beyond repair, but I don't regret most of them, because each taught me something.