Repair Cafe News
The Old Courthouse, 4 Station Street, Maesteg.
Our Repair Cafe went too well,some may say. We got in a load of technical repairs, kitchen and garden appliances and clocks. While upstairs there were small mechanical repairs, downstairs John Lewis was inundated with electrical repairs.
We need more technical people to make this an ongoing success for the County, especially people with some electrical knowledge. It's only a couple of hours a month on a Saturday morning and the reward for your skill is seeing people go away happy with something that was deemed economically unrepairable.
The residents of Bridgend are extremely grateful when they come to us, please ensure this Repair Cafe continues by coming to help us next April 23rd.
We also issue Tempo Time Credits to volunteers which give, among many other things, free entry to Rugby venues and Cinemas.
In the war time spirit of “Make do and Mend”
The Welsh Government is concerned about the amount of household items that are ending up in landfill sites. To send defective items to landfill, when it may be possible to fix them is a
Repair Cafes are similar to the Repair Shop that in on TV but it is run by volunteers rather than professionals. But the aims are the same; to bring back items into use, that would be otherwise be thrown out. Bridgend County Council got in touch with BAVO (Bridgend Association of Voluntary Organizations). Who in turn got in touch with us at Maesteg Shedquarters to see if we would help in setting a Repair Café in Maesteg.
The Shed had a meeting and we agreed to help. We felt the aims of the Repair Café fitted in with the ethos of a shed. That is to make use of the skills accumulated by its members over their lifetime and to help them to gain new skills. It also fits in with another aim of the Shed: to be of use and active in the community.
If you are not confident in making repairs, or handy with tools, there are a wide range of volunteering opportunities within a Repair Café. Yes we would need people with skills in repairing whatever objects would be brought in but there are jobs for “meeters and greeters”. There is quite a bit of paper work and record keeping to be entered onto a computer. It is called a Repair Café so there are jobs for people to make teas and coffees and to make people feel welcome.
A date has been set to run the first “Café” on the Saturday 22/01/22 from 10:00am to 1:00pm at The Court House, 4 Station Street, Maesteg CF349AL to see how things go.
To get a flavor of a “cafe” in action, in particular to see how the administration is carried out. Two representatives of Shedquarters and a representative of BAVO visited the Repair Café held in the Scout Hall, Cowbridge, on Saturday 20/11/21. We were given a warm welcome and they were happy to answer all our questions and explained the paper work.
People soon started to arrive. In the time we were there we saw a drill being PAT tested, it was being to be donated to someone whose drill couldn’t be repaired. Two Vacuum cleaners turned 
On the BBC program “Morning Live” that was broadcast on the 25/11/21 at 9:15am there was an interesting piece on the Repair Café movement. The message they gave out was that if you would like to put you skills to good use, or if you would like to volunteer your time. Get in touch with the Repair Café Organization to find your nearest café. If there is not one near you, think about starting one up yourself.
Space” groups across Bridgend County and are based in Bettws. The “Breathing Space” sessions are a free, weekly, drop in sessions. The aims of the groups are to encourage the development of confidence and communication through creativity.
weeks, we already have a couple of budding artists.
Mike gave us a short talk about his new acquisition and I asked him to repeat it for the video below where he demonstrates the sound using finger picking and a bottleneck for old country slide effect.
callsign is MW7CCS. Over the past couple of months, the local Ragchew Net group have been contemplating creating a digital club, they have already been on an outing (field trip) and are booked to go to Llansteffan in August.
our laser engraver, to enable cutting or engraving next week. We are due to have a film crew visit us in August and they are very interested in the music, unfortunately two members of the group were away today.
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names the Gin Pit because they produced gin. It did produce coal and also iron ore to be used in the iron works. Which was where the Tesco’s store is situated today, just below the Gin Pit. It is believed it was named the Gin Pit after the horse driven machinery that wound the coal and iron ore up the shaft. The depth of the shaft was only 345 feet deep. Maesteg town centre is built where the coal seams come very close to the surface. The coal was worked on an incline, so the actual workings would have been lower than that.
The coal part of the pit was worked using the “Pillar and stall” method. The stall was a narrow road way driven into the coal in a grid fashion. Leaving the pillar squares to help hold up the roof. The stalls are worked to the boundary and then worked in retreat. It is then that the coal within the pillars is removed and the roof allowed to fall in. This method of working was notorious for the difficulty of ensuring good ventilation for clearing any gas(methane) out of the workings. 