This page details all our blog posts about repair in Tog. Our next Repair Cafe will be listed below. If you would like to be a fixer, please get in touch via our Contact Us page.
- 🚴🔧 Bicycle Maintenance & Advice Meetup for Bike Week
It’s Bike Week from Saturday 9th – Sunday 17th May, and we’ve another event lined up at TOG. Many of us are keen cyclists and e-bikers, and tinkering with our bikes is business-as-usual around the space. So we’re opening things up for a relaxed Bicycle Maintenance & Advice Meetup. 🗓️ When Saturday 16th Mayđź•’ From 15:00 🔧 What to expect We’ll have tools available for basic bicycle maintenance, including: If your bike needs a bit of attention, bring it along and we’ll help you get it sorted. If everything is running smoothly and you just want some advice or a …Continue reading “🚴🔧 Bicycle Maintenance & Advice Meetup for Bike Week”
- A Green Glow from the Eastern Bloc: Bringing a Mera CM 7209 Back to Life
Not every evening in Tog involves waking up a piece of 1980s Eastern Bloc computing, but that is exactly what happened over a few nights recently. Our member Eduard Garanskij brought in a retro CRT terminal, a Mera CM 7209, also known as the MERA 7953 Z. It is a computer terminal rather than a full computer, the sort of screen and keyboard setup that would have connected to larger systems. The CM 7209 name was used for the international market, while MERA 7953 was the Polish domestic name. These terminals were made in the 1980s by Mera-Elzab in Zabrze, …Continue reading “A Green Glow from the Eastern Bloc: Bringing a Mera CM 7209 Back to Life”
- Fixing an Electric Shaver and some Battery Investigations
Nothing terribly complicated here. Just replacing the batteries inside a Phillips electric shaver. The batteries had gradually been deteriorating. Not even giving enough time to have a shave! Time for some replacements. We bemoan the fact that so many things are un-repairable nowadays. There was a time when repair services and shops for many household things were common. There are still actually repair centres for shavers however, where you can get a battery and heads replaced. TOG itself is no stranger to the Repair Cafe movement. We just had a big one this month, and our next one is in …Continue reading “Fixing an Electric Shaver and some Battery Investigations”
- Bringing a Cracked Flymo Back to Life
With summer on the way, you might be thinking about cutting the grass again and dragging the lawnmower back out of the shed. This Flymo Easi Glide 330 came into TOG on a Tuesday night with a fairly serious problem. The outer case was badly cracked. It was manufactured back in February 2014, so it has clearly done a good bit of work over the years, but this kind of damage could easily make you think it was ready for the bin. But what do you do with a crack like that? Glue was never going to be enough here. … - Repair Club: Lamps Edition – Shedding a Little Light on Lamp Repair
We are trying something a little different at TOG with a new event format we are calling Repair Club. Inspired by the work of Circular Square in Clonmel, this is a bit different from our usual Repair CafĂ© model. Instead of bringing along broken items for fixing, Repair Club is more like a focused class or workshop where we take one repair topic and explore it in more detail. For our first session, we are starting with lamps. We will be looking at common faults, how to test them safely, and some of the repairs you can carry out once …Continue reading “Repair Club: Lamps Edition – Shedding a Little Light on Lamp Repair”
- April Repair Café
Got something broken at home that you have been meaning to sort out for a while? Maybe it is a lamp that has gone dark, a toy that has stopped doing toy things, a kitchen gadget that has packed it in, or a jacket that is hanging on by optimism alone. Instead of letting it rattle around in a press for another six months, bring it along to our next Repair CafĂ© at TOG Hackerspace. We will be hosting the event on Saturday 11th April 2026, from 12 noon to 4pm, in TOG Hackerspace, Unit 1B Motor City, Kylemore Road, … - Reviving a 20+ year old mini-DV camcorder
This Canon mini-DV camcorder was bought new, sometime around 2002 / 2003. Even then however, the writing was on the wall for tape-based video recording. Mobile “feature” phones of the time were already starting to have better and better cameras, and the price of USB sticks and memory cards were falling rapidly while increasing in capacity. In 2005, the camcorder was connected to a PC via its FireWire socket. Many of the video clips were pulled over onto the PC. In the transfer process however, the metadata from the clips including the timestamps were not copied. It’s impossible to tell …Continue reading “Reviving a 20+ year old mini-DV camcorder”
- TOG Repair Café at DCU’s Climate Action Fair (Green Week 2026)
We’re heading to DCU Green Week as part of the Climate Action Fair — and we’re bringing a mini TOG Repair CafĂ© setup with us. Come say hello, meet loads of other brilliant groups on the day, and if you’ve something small that’s broken, bring it along and we’ll do our best to help you get it working again. Repair CafĂ© details What is a Repair CafĂ©? It’s a friendly, drop-in repair meetup: you bring the item, we bring the tools and volunteer know-how, and we’ll troubleshoot it together. Even when something can’t be fixed on the spot, you’ll usually …Continue reading “TOG Repair CafĂ© at DCU’s Climate Action Fair (Green Week 2026)”
- Repair Cafe for Trinity’s Green Week!
We’re teaming up with Unit 18 (Trinity in the Community) to run a special Repair CafĂ© as part of Trinity’s Green Week. It’s a smaller Repair CafĂ© than our usual big TOG events, but it’ll still have all the best bits: friendly fixers, practical repairs, and plenty of good chats. Got something broken? Bring along your small household items, small furniture, or electrical bits that have stopped working, and we’ll do our best to help you repair them while you wait. Expect a bit of hands-on problem solving, a cup of tea, and a nice lunchtime vibe. When: Friday, 13 … - New power tools added to “Repair CafĂ© in a Box”
We’re delighted to share an upgrade to our Repair CafĂ© in a Box programme: we’ve added a range of power tools to the equipment kit that community groups can borrow to help run repair events. This work is funded by the Community Climate Action Programme (Round 1) under the Government’s Climate Action Fund. It builds on our 2024 funding and helps us expand what we can offer through our Repair CafĂ© rental programme, making it easier for more groups across the Dublin region to host repairs safely and confidently. What’s included? Alongside the usual Repair CafĂ© essentials, we now have …Continue reading “New power tools added to “Repair CafĂ© in a Box””
- The Salvage Squad came to our Repair Café and the lamp lived to tell the tale
Back in August last year, we had a great surprise visitor at one of our Repair CafĂ©s. The team from Virgin Media’s The Salvage Squad dropped in with a lamp that needed a bit of TLC. Cameras and curiosity in tow, they joined the usual Repair CafĂ© buzz at TOG, with fixers working away on everything from small electronics to household bits and bobs. The lamp landed on the bench with our member Shane, supported by the other volunteer fixers on the day. With a bit of careful troubleshooting and plenty of know-how, the lamp was brought back to life. …Continue reading “The Salvage Squad came to our Repair CafĂ© and the lamp lived to tell the tale”
- Learn to Wire a Plug (Engineers Week Edition) – Workshop at TOG
We’re running our Learn to Wire a Plug workshop again at TOG Hackerspace — a practical, confidence-boosting skill that’ll serve you for years. If you’ve ever looked at a broken plug or a dodgy extension lead and thought “I should know how to sort that”… this is the evening for you. What’s it all about? This is a hands-on session where we’ll guide you through safely wiring a 13A plug and connecting it to a 4-gang extension lead. No prior experience needed — we’ll go step-by-step and explain the “why” as well as the “how”. Each participant will: All tools …Continue reading “Learn to Wire a Plug (Engineers Week Edition) – Workshop at TOG”
- Back On Air: Repairing a Broken Encoder on a Yaesu FT-857A repair story from our own Ben EI9IUB. Today’s repair is on one of my radios – a Yaesu FT-857. While testing a new headset and tuning around the bands, the select knob twisted its last and came out of the front panel and into my hand: disaster! This encoder is vital to using the radio, so its breaking rendered it a paperweight. The radio itself has been out of production for a number of years now, but unlike most “consumer” devices, amateur radios have very good technical documentation available to end users. I dug up a PDF copy of …
Continue reading “Back On Air: Repairing a Broken Encoder on a Yaesu FT-857”
- More Philips Boombox Tinkering
Having recently fixed the Philips boombox CD player, we decided to review the battery compartment mod, done at least 20 years ago, and still working. The original idea was to fill the battery compartment with 8x rechargeable D cells and arrange that they would be constantly trickle-charged while the mains lead was plugged in. The battery compartment’s positive terminal was connected via a current-limiting resistor to the power supply section of the PCB. This trickle charges the cells at about 10mA. This is enough to charge them up over a few days, but not enough to cook them. Good quality … - January Repair Cafe
Bring your broken tech and trinkets to get them fixed by the skilled volunteers at TOG Hackerspace – with a bit of help from our friends at Dublin Maker! On Sunday, 18 January 2026, between 12 pm and 4 pm, TOG Hackerspace will host the first Repair Cafe of the new year in our own space. At this event, volunteers will share their expertise and passion for repair, helping you fix your broken items and breathe new life into them. Whether it’s a malfunctioning gadget, a piece of clothing in need of mending, or a household item that’s seen better … - Another “Miracle” Repair
OK, so not quite as old as that 1970s tape recorder that we fixed last week, but a 1996-vintage Philips AZ8640 Radio-Tape-CD boombox. The CD had stopped working, but the tape and radio were still fine. Opening up, these things are not meant to be easily disassembled. They tend to be built from the inside out, with not much thought about future disassembly or serviceability. When we fix old electronics, there are a few “usual suspects”, which quite often give us a fix. Old electrolytic caps are one…. they dry out after a decade or two of service. Another is … - A Christmas Miracle Repair, Bringing a 1970s Tape Recorder Back to Life
We got a message in the run-up to Christmas with a simple ask. Could we pull off a last-minute repair of a vintage tape recorder and save the day? When the request came from our long-time friend Claire Downey, the person who first introduced us to Repair CafĂ©s over ten years ago, we knew we had to give it a proper go. The patient from a charity shop on the bench was an ITT Schaub-Lorenz SL54 Automatic, a Taiwanese-made radio cassette recorder from the mid 1970s, roughly 1974 to 1976. A proper bit of kit, and the kind of thing …Continue reading “A Christmas Miracle Repair, Bringing a 1970s Tape Recorder Back to Life”
- Repair Café At Leixlip Library
Bring broken bits from home to Leixlip Library for a morning of repair, chat and climate action with volunteers from TOG Hackerspace. On Saturday, 13 December 2025, from 10.00 to 13.00, Leixlip Library will host a Repair CafĂ© in partnership with TOG Hackerspace and the Kildare County Council Climate Action Office. Skilled volunteers will help you give worn and broken items another shot at life, instead of sending them to the landfill. Multiple 30-minute slots run through the morning. Booking is through Leixlip Library, so contact the library desk or check the library website for full details. What you can …
