Feb
1
I broke our fifteen-year-old vacuum cleaner’s carpet cleaning attachment over the holidays when I tried to repack the bearings on the roller brush with fresh bike grease (my favorite lime green Shimano Dura-Ace grease, by the way). As a bike geek, I was pleasantly surprised when I discovered that the vacuum’s roller brush spun on tiny cartridge bearings. “Hey, I’ll just clean them out and inject some fresh grease in them!” They were pretty much were shot, though, and as I tried to clean them out, one of them just felt apart and there was no way it was going to go back together.
As is now the norm, my first reaction was to Google “Eureka vacuum spare parts” to see if I could just order up some new bearings or something online. No such luck since our vac is a bit old for the online sellers. I knew there was a vacuum store in the next town over so I brought the attachment over to my LVS (local vacuum shop) to see if there was any hope for it.
Where am I going with this story? Well, it dawned on me as I was being helped by the man at the vacuum store that I was taking part in an increasingly rare activity: having something repaired rather than throwing it out and buying a new one. It also occurred to me that bikes and bike shops continue to part of this great legacy of non-disposable machines and their service centers.
What got me thinking this way was the way the gentleman at the store looked. He must have been in his seventies with white hair and a cardigan sweater and he walked a bit slow. He also had on one of those Navy baseball hats with “U.S.S. Midway” embroidered on it in gold. He wore it as if it meant something to him – as if he had served on it much earlier in his life but remembered it as if it were yesterday. Standing there telling him my name and phone number and describing the problem I was having with my vacuum, I found myself wondering whether there would there be anyone to take over and continue the vacuum cleaner repair shop when this man decided to finally retire.
I can’t imagine that the shop would continue. When was the last time you saw an appliance or electronics repair shop? Or even a shoe repair shop? We used to be able to take our VCR down to the local electronics repairman to get it back up and running if it stopped working back when I was a kid. I remember I had a nice Patagonia jacket back in college that I kept breaking the zipper on. I used to hang it behind my dorm room’s door, and every now an then, someone would throw open the door, and the zipper would get crushed against the wall. Luckily, just down the street from school there was a “zipper hospital.” It was mainly a tailor shop, but they had a sign out front that looked like an emergency room sign with the red cross and text on a white background. I could bring in my jacket and 5 minutes and a few bucks later the zipper would be as good as new
Regardless of whether you have a repair shop close by, I understand the realities of modern technology and the fact that it’s usually much less expensive to buy a new iPod or blender than it is to have it repaired. There is something very satisfying, though, about avoiding sending something else to the landfill, or as is often the case, having it sit in a drawer unusable, by having it fixed.
Now, while you could argue that bikes today are slightly less repairable, to a degree, than in the past with all the cartridge-style bearings and parts like bottom brackets, I think it’s great that they are still easily serviced, maintained and repaired by any one of several thousand great local bike shops around the country or by its mechanically-inclined owner. I think that this is a great legacy to keep alive and one that we should be proud of as an industry.
The man at the store called me up two days later saying that the vacuum was ready to be picked up. He had replaced the roller brush and checked out the motor, too. He also noticed that the drive belt was old and replaced it. Since the belts come in two-packs, he gave me the second one to keep as a spare. $30 in parts and labor. What a bargain. I hope he’s still around the next time the Eureka needs some work, but I’m not holding my breath.
Just a thought that occurred to me this week…
Comments
One Response to “Vacuums, Zipper Hospitals and Bike Shops”
i saw disposable bathing suits the other day at a store. in this world that we live in, it is still nice to products that can be repaired instead of replaced. there’s even a certain amount of pride that goes into keeping a bike running well for many years.