The web is full of guides for repairing all kinds of things. Repair platform iFixit – our partner – offers tens of thousands of free repair guides in words and pictures. These are now also available via our website! 

You can use these step-by-step guides to get started at home. But you can also use them to prepare a repair in the Repair Café. This way you can read what to expect. Do you want to know if there is already a guide available for your repair? Find out here!

Finding repair guides via our homepage

You can find the search page for repair guides via our homepage in two ways.

1. Via the main menu in the blue bar > Community > Repair guides

2. Via the Tips & tricks section (scroll down a bit) > Repair guides

 

Share your repair knowledge – create a repair guide yourself

Have you performed a repair yourself that you would like to share via iFixit? You can! iFixit will help you step by step to create your repair guide in words and pictures. This way you can help other repairers with your repair knowledge. Good luck! 

Repairing broken items together and sharing knowledge: that’s the essence of Repair Café. Next to this in-person repair movement there is an online movement on www.ifixit.com: an international platform where fixers help each other fixing their broken stuff. Many Repair Cafés already share their knowledge on iFixit. Here you can find out how this is beneficial for the global repair community and how your Repair Café can contribute.

Step-by-step guides

Repair Café repairers will usually have a general idea about how to open or repair a device, but might not have worked with a specific model before. iFixit step-by-step guides with detailed photos can help find specific connectors or workable solutions for devices that don’t appear on the repair table every week. They can also serve as a good reference for first-time repairers. Having some tablets handy, with the iFixit website opened up, can be extremely useful at in-person repair events.

On the other hand, Repair Café visitors and volunteers come across both regular and rare fixes during their meetings. Sharing the knowledge they gain about a device online can teach many more people how to repair their broken device.

Taking pictures is always a good idea

It’s a good idea to photograph certain steps of a repair anyway, to track your path inside, locate screws, and the like. From there, creating a new repair guide on iFixit is easy!

A newly published repair guide doesn’t need to be perfect. Don’t hesitate to enter what you know, share the pictures you took, and leave the rest to the wisdom of the crowd, who will collaborate on making it better over time. This Wikipedia-style principle, where knowledge is created and shared collectively, is exactly what makes the iFixit platform so similar to the Repair Café experience!

Your Repair Café as a team on iFixit

Repair Cafés can create their own team on iFixit. You’ll gain reputation points for posting guides and completing fixes, unlocking rights and privileges and giving people a sense of the trustworthiness of your information.

Numerous Repair Cafés already use this option. You can find out if your local group is already represented here. If not, don’t hesitate to create a new team and invite your fellow fixers. Members can also see the unpublished guides and wikis of their teammates and collaborate to publish them.

Do you want to join? Then create your account at iFixit and contribute to the platform!