NS Repairs

Some numbers about the Mahone Bay Repair Café event

Published on May 20th 2026

The Mahone Bar Repair café earlier this month was a success! Lots of people showed up, to get something repaired or just out of curiosity. In any case, this was a great oppotunity to socialize with neighbours and friends around a cup of coffee.

If you have a Facebook account, you can check out photos taken at the event here.

We also gathered some statistics about what ended up being repaired or not. We compiled them and here they are, on this chart. We're still working out the best way to capture this type of data: we know that the reporting of a couple of repaired items fell through the cracks. However, these numbers paint a good picture of what the impact of this event was.

Like at the Riverport event back in March, the knife and tool sharpening station was a very popular one! Two people were operating it and they were busy the entire time. These numbers also show that items brought to the small appliance tables were not often fixed: as we noticed during past events, some items are unfortunately beyond repair or they can require a follow-up with a professional party.

We'll keep capturing this type of statistics, with hope that they'll highlight adjustments to make for future events.

Mahone Bay Repair Café - May 2nd 2026

Published on March 26th 2026

It's been less than a month since our last Repair Café event in Riverport and our next event is already coming up! Join us at the Mahone Bay center, on Saturday May 2nd, from 1pm until 4pm. Here's what you can expect this time:

⛺ Camping gear: This is our new repair table! Camping gear is expensive and it can take a beating when you're in the backwoods. Bring your damaged packs, torn tents, sleeping bags that won't zipper shut, etc. and we'll try to help you get one more season from them. Note that because this Repair Café is an indoor event we cannot work on camp stoves or other fuel-burning devices.

🚲 Bikes: it's also the season for biking! Three fixers will be there to try to help fix or adjust your bikes. As you may expect, we don't have spare parts for everything that can be replaced but we have a few (eg. a couple of tires, some brake pads).

🪡 Sewing: Clothing mending, knitting and various small sewing repairs will be provided. Sewing machines and an ironing board will be made available for the fixers at the event.

🔌 Small appliances: our team of fixers will attempt to repair your electrical household items, like small appliances, or table lamps, etc. Bigger products won't be repaired, as it would be logistically challenging given the limited scope of the event. Also, recent electrical household items with electronics (screens, etc.) are typically more difficult to repair than older electrical items, but feel free to bring any small electrical items along - we can at least take a quick look!

💍 Jewelry: a jewelry repair table will also be set up at the event! Broken links or clasps will be repaired, re-stringing of beads, or gluing of separated cabochons (or similar) will be performed. Not-broken but "poor fit" improvements may also be possible (e.g. chain extensions can allow too-small jewellery to be lengthened; extra large jump hoops can be added to improve ease of attaching clasp).

💻 Computers: if your computer runs Windows 10, you've probably stopped receiving security updates. More than one billion computers are in this situation. One way to solve this problem is to use an alternative system (Linux) as explained by this campaign. We'll be providing this service at the repair café, we'll bring with us a laptop that runs Linux so that you can give it a try yourself, and external hard drives to make backups if you wish to do this migration. If your laptop has a hardware problem, we'll also be looking at it.

🪑 Furniture: feel free to bring a small furniture item (like a broken chair or stool for example), or a broken wooden toy or other small item, we'll see what we can do to fix it.

🔪 Knife and tool sharpening: Given the massive success of this station in Riverport (about 100 tools and knives sharpened on that day!), this popular station will be back in Mahone Bay! We will sharpen any straight or curved steel knife or tool (garden tools, woodworking tools although we won't have the equipment to sharpen planer or jointer blades) but not ceramic ones. We might try to sharpen micro-serrated edges, if needed. We can do most scissors and shears as well.

♻️ Angela from Region 6 Solid Waste management will join us too. She will provide information and insights on reduction, recycling, reuse and compost!

See you there 🙂

Events and previous activities

Repair café event in Riverport

Published on January 12th 2025

Details about our Repair Café event in Riverport, taking place on March 7th 2026.

"Mending matters" at Broad Cove

The Broad Cove mending group met earlier this year for a few meetings.

Bridgewater's first repair café was a success! 🎉

Published on November 21st 2025

Thank you for making the November 15th repair café event a success!

How about starting your own repair café?

You've been to a repair café event, you've been inspired and would like to get one started in your own community!

But how to get stated? 🤔

We can help! Head over to the Resources page, you will find documents, templates and tips on what to do and when, written based on our experience organizing repair café events. Feel free to use whatever you find on that page! 🙂

What's a repair café?

A repair café is an event where people come to meet and have some of their belongings fixed.

Repair cafés are generally run by volunteers. Some of them are the fixers: they are the ones with a specific skill that they've developed over the years (through a hobby or through their professinal life). They are the ones helping guests to mend their items.

And yes, there's usually coffee (or tea) served at a repair café!