Yes Reflecting on it, making things last longer had some great side effects. For instance, almost every woman in my family knew how to *rafu* clothes (1), and people understood how things worked under the hood of a car (like you my father did all the maintenance too). These skills were passed down through generations, becoming a part of our everyday knowledge.

I guess a lot of things aren't that simple or accessible as most of it is often a black box nowadays. But anyway, Skills like these not only saved money but also fostered a sense of self-reliance, resourcefulness and stuff your parents taught you as life skills.

(1) https://m.youtube.com/results?search_query=Rafu+clothes

I cannot help but winder if, as a part of 'Fix, don't toss' mentality, there is an attendant[1] additional tenacity present.

[1] Or a pre-requisite. Correlation, not causation and all.

> It's only in the past 50 years or so that consumerism has gone up and the quality and cost of e.g. clothing has gone down.

The “quality” part is a big factor, cost optimisations and fast turnaround means it’s often not worth repairing things at all e.g. a fast fashion T designed to survive for a season (if it survives even a wash).

An other major issue is scams around price signals and brand degradation. It used to be you got what you paid for and some brands were known for quality, so you could pay a fair amount of money to a reputable brand and you’d get stuff worth maintaining and repairing.

But big groups and P-E have taken to “value extract” from brands, so they take a reputable brand and start white-labelling / cost-optimising, initially keeping prices in order to get maximum money for the moo their start selling instead of milk. Then they drop the price as understanding slowly spreads, until a once reputable brand becomes bargain-bin fare even to the general public.

There’s a similar issue around more bespoke products, which optimise for quality signals (e.g. external design and materials) and sell generic inner parts (or outright garbage) for top-shelf prices.

Then there’s the shuffling of 6 months brands on generic white label goods (amazon is absolutely infested with that, you’ll get the exact same product under half a dozen brands, and 6 months later most of those have disappeared).

It seems to me the real problem is that repairs are, in general, labour intensive. Few products today are sufficiently valuable that a repair is better than a new item.

Cars are worth fixing, a 10$ shirt is not, if you value your time. This only becomes more true as expertise becomes required to effect a repair, since you become less capable of repairing and the time of the repairer becomes more valuable.

You can avoid the copper washers! The main reason to change them is under compression the copper work hardens to seal up. To get a good seal though you just need to re-anneal the copper so it's soft - heat it to cherry red and let it cool down. Takes about 5-10 seconds with a blowtorch - I've been doing it for oil changes on my car for several years now with no problems.

The best tool I have bought in the last 3 years was a 3d-printer... It lets me make other tools - even if they aren't as durable as steel, I can design them chunkier, or print a new one if they break.