in case anyone ~~didn't grow up poor~~ is not used to having to fix things instead of buying a new one, "repair kits" outside of very specific things (like bike puncture repair kits) are not the best idea to buy, a basic tool kit will generally serve you much better
especially with cheap products from the PRC wildly increasing in quality over the last decade, i got an extremely well-equipped and durable screwdriver set for electronics from temu for ~$15
Even bike puncture repair kits are kind of bullshit. They're basically getting carried entirely by a small packet of vulcanizing fluid as per price per parts. You can buy sheets of 100 of the patches for the price of one kit and the 3cm² of sandpaper you need also costs fuck all.
i bow to your superior widom, Mr bicycles
(geuninely, i will now look for good vulcanising fluid and patches, thank youuuuu)
the real life hack is becoming known as the bicycle crank amongst your peers so everybody just gifts you their spare matchbox tube repair kits since they have no use for them. I genuinely have not bought any of them or the components in 10+ years
Even removed from right to repair, is capitalism making DIY harder by way of oversaturation of solutions?
No.
If anything the pressures of capitalism encourage diy repair, which is worse than taking the broken thing to a specialized shop, because of the combined push and pull of increased relative cost and encouragement of arbitrage over preserving function.
What you describe as oversaturation of solutions encourages diy repair as well, since being able to buy a cheap kit with crappy tools that will work a dozen times instead of a thousand times lowers the barrier of entry to people who will only use them twice.
There are only forty different kinds of wood glue in the hardware store because you don’t go to specialty woodworking shops. Titebond I, II and III are not the extent of what’s out there.
I’m far from an expert woodworker but if you wanna know the difference between specific different glues I can try to answer.
It will end up being the difference between park lube and white lithium grease, or the different centistoke grades of rc car differential fluid.
I think regardless of shitty companies, DIY repair gets inherently harder as stuff becomes more specialized.
Stuff I'm talking about isn't specialized in the sense that it's my solar array battery. The origin of this post is I had to fix a floor tile where a piece chipped of, at which point I was barraged by 800 products promising to help me do that that are all either superglue or two-component-glue and the plastic shit and there's so many of those cases
Why is there 40 chemically identical woodglues at the hardware store
It's the same reason why there are 40 brands of canned tomato paste at the grocery store. The illusion of choice.
This is a fine comparison but yet somehow I feel like I need "It's a tomato in a can, how much difference does it make" is a far easier hurdle to clear than "I need this to be somewhat structurally sound"
san marzano tomatoes canned > all other tomatoes
true but also not using them doesn't mean my shit will fall apart, it just means i get like 20-30% less tomato taste
Idk san marzano "style" tomatoes are effective as well, don't gotta be the real thing
"Nope, we changed the standard again and the thru axles are 10 mm wider. Fuck you and the hubs you rode in on. Also, the only new cantilever brakes we're making are bespoke CNC hipster crap and cost more than a set of hydraulic calipers."
I don't know if they're available where you are but Dia Compe still makes new non bullshit cantilever brakes
Huh, looks like they're available at Crust bikes. Thanks for the info!
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