Explore Topic Ideas
Teaching repair is fun, empowering, and—most importantly—saves the planet by keeping consumer goods out of landfills.
The ultimate goal of your project is to create a repair guide that teaches the best practices for repair. In other words, a Fast Fix is not a "hack"—your guide should be thorough, effective, and worth documenting for real people to actually use.
Before you choose your fix, complete the Repair Experience Inventory with your team. You can print out a paper copy of the inventory, or you can complete this online inventory instead. The information you collect will become part of your proposal, so don’t skip this crucial step!
What’s the point of the inventory? We’re glad you asked. As we like to say around iFixit, one person can’t repair everything, but everyone knows how to repair something. This inventory will help you dig up the secret repair superpowers and knowledge buried within yourself, your team, and your community. Your project will be more successful if you choose a Fast Fix project that taps into this collective repair knowledge.
We get a lot of proposals for temporary, hackish fixes that we can't publish, so here are five instructive examples:
Fixing a cord with electrical tape? That’s a hack. Resoldering it and applying heat shrink? That’s a repair.
Using nail polish to repair a dented windshield? Hackish. Using windshield repair resin to fill the ding? Repair gold.
Spraying WD-40 on a door hinge isn’t a repair. However, replacing the door hinge would be a great project.
Degreasing your stove? That’s cleaning, not a repair. Replacing the infinite switch on your electric stove? That’s a solid idea.
Topping off your car's windshield washer fluid? That's not a repair, it's about two steps, and most people don't need a guide for it. Replacing a leaky washer fluid tank and/or pump? Now you're onto something.