As you may remember from days gone by,
technology doesn’t really like sailing.
Our sewing machine, an industrial Bernina my mom helped pick out, was an early victim of our difficult conditions.
We eventually bought a new machine designed for marine use, and puzzled over what to do with the Bernina.
We hit on the clever plan of fixing it and giving it to our Colombian friends.
More locker space for us, a sewing machine for them.
Perfect.
We (read: I) didn’t get around to going to the sewing machine shop. It was far away, I wasn’t really sure where it was, I had no idea how to explain a broken presser foot in Spanish... I had many excuses. We had time. But suddenly our departure came over the horizon and, excuses or not, the thing had to be fixed. Crumbs. So we enlisted the help of the local expat technology connection. Two weeks, one car accident (his) and a lot of phone calls (read: hails on the VHF radio), we still didn’t have the machine back. So I trooped over to his workshop, reclaimed the machine and prevailed on the man to find a colleague who could turn the machine around quickly. After all, it was only the presser foot that was broken... it should be easy to fix, right? In this manner, last Sunday I made my way across town to hand over the Bernina to el mago de la tecnología.
There are days when I am heartily sorry that I don’t have a spy camera, and Sunday was one of them.
El Mago greeted me kindly when I arrived. I picked my way down a narrow hallway littered with electronic detritus. Halfway along, I handed the machine to El Mago over a four-foot-high stack of boxes, shimmied around them myself and followed him into the eight-by-twelve work area. Space had been carved out in front of the desk for two lawn chairs, but the rest of the room was filled with discarded electronics. Fans, televisions, motherboards; all were stacked higgledy-piggeldy along the shelves and the floor. An ancient set of huge DVD players were turned on their ends and shelved like books along the shelf by the ceiling.
El Mago gestured to the chair closest to the doorway. I had expected to drop off the machine and return the next day, but if he was willing to do it while I waited, then I was waiting. I sat down carefully, trying not to topple a forlorn-looking fax machine crouched directly behind me. By my knees was an open cubby filled to overflowing with wire coils, plugs, cords and unidentifiable metal bits and bobs. I settled in to watch the magic unfold.
Over the next three hours, I had a lesson in small appliance repair. Rather, I had a in lesson in How to Fix Whatever Comes Your Way. Back home, you would take your broken Bernina to your local Bernina repair shop where a Bernina master technician who studied the sewing repair arts for twenty years deep in the mountains of Switzerland would charge you the Earth to use genuine Bernina parts to fix your machine. And somehow we think that is normal and right, and deny we have wandered over the city limits into Crazyville. Here, instead, I had El Mago, a man clearly possessed of many years of experience with technology of all sorts. How many Bernina hours he’d racked up I didn’t know or care. He was reassuring somehow, like a Spanish Mr Rogers. Maybe not as tidy, but I could see my machine was in good hands.
El Mago settled back into his chair. He searched about his desk until he located a multimeter. There followed a long period during which each hole and prong in the pigtailed cord was tested against each other hole and prong. Sometimes there were happy noises, sometimes not. El Mago thought. He decided that he wasn’t happy with the part of the plug that connected to the presser foot.
Now. I don’t know if you have ever tried to open up a plug. What am I saying? Of course I know: you haven’t. Unless you once were an eleven-year-old with a do-it-yourself electronics kit, it has never even occurred to you that one can open a plug. My friends, I am here to confirm it is so.
How To Repair A Plug
As witnessed by Papillon Crew
- Examine the seam of the plug very carefully.
- Gently apply a hacksaw blade to said seam.
- Saw energetically.
- Repeat with opposite seam.
- Crack the seam. Listen to the distant death throes of the Bernina Repair Guild.
- Examine the innards.
- Jam the bare ends of the cord connected to your soldering iron to a powerbar.
- Plug random item over the bare wires to hold them in place.
- Cut a wire in the plug.
- Strip the plug wire with an 8” machete (handle missing).
- Gently pin the plug under the partially-disassembled 40” flat screen TV that dominates your desk.
- Re-solder aforementioned wire.
- Test the plug with your multimeter and pronounce yourself satisfied.
- Send your son out for local crazy glue.
- Snap the plug back together.
- Gob local crazy glue into the seam.
- Apply white powdered catalyst to the local crazy glue.
- Allow to dry.
- Use a black Sharpie to cover up the hideous white scar now encircling your plug.
- Pat yourself on the back for a job well done.
Et, voilà! C’est magnifique!
The plug now beeped at the appropriate times, but the presser foot still didn’t work. Time to get to the source. El Mago opened up the foot itself. There followed a saga of soldering, motherboard repair and switch fiddling that would be ripe fodder for an epic poem. I especially enjoyed the use of the soldering iron to melt off extraneous bits of an extra part El Mago had to cram into the presser foot to make it work.
Work progressed, and I continued to witness events that would give any workplace safety inspector a myocardial infarction. More than once I was glad to have the chair nearest the door while crackling sparks flew beside me. As the afternoon wore on, El Mago had a number of visitors. A few stopped dead when they saw me and walked away. Most stayed and chatted for a few minutes. His son, a man in his twenties wearing a white rosary and a black shirt stating, “The Demon Deacons Are Battleproof,” sat outside the front door on the concrete pad, stripping a flatscreen TV. A junkie came by, his eyes rolling in different directions, hair at full attention, selling metal things. El Mago bought a motherboard for a dollar. We had a dicey moment when El Mago needed something from a shelf on the side wall, and had to climb over a few piles of TVs to reach it, but I caught the falling stack before any harm was done. The time passed quickly.
Three hours after my arrival, the machine was fixed. I thanked El Mago in my best Spanish for repairing the machine so quickly, and was on my way. Tell me I would have had that interesting an afternoon in a shop with floor space and a soldering iron with an actual plug.
The sewing machine is now in the hands of our friends, and we are almost ready to set sail. Didn’t I say that last time? Now we are really, really almost ready. Swimmable waters, here we come!
