Low-tech makes for a funky fix

In case you’re searching for a maxim to live by, something that will truly make your daily struggle easier, try this one from a clever tradesman I know: “The solution to every problem is within 100 feet.”

I first heard it about a decade ago, and I can’t tell you how often it helps me achieve feats of home repair, not to mention the delightful bonus of avoiding yet another trip to the nearest big-box home improvement store.

Nowadays when a fix-it job calls out for a particular type of bolt or other hardware, I take it as a personal challenge to think my way outside of that box. I have thus become very handy at making do with found chunks of wood, abandoned brackets, rubber tires, wedges, steel wire and, my favourite caveman tool of all, scraps of leather from which strips can be cut for stout lashing purposes.

While neither term may inspire much respect in TV handyman circles, my improvised repairs are what’s called makeshift, or more formally, jury-rigged. The latter expression comes to us from sailing, where turning one superfluous thing into an essential other thing is part of an ancient and venerable tradition. Being alone on a wide, wide sea pretty much defines the 100-foot rule for solving problems.

Whereas I realize I’m not the only backyard doofus to cobble his way to something funky but functional, I didn’t know how many others also take pride in it. Then, I stumbled across a website which shamelessly promotes ancient, often simple technical solutions to all manner of contemporary challenges.

The site, practically enough, is called lowtechmagazine.com. Written in English by a small international cadre of tinkerers, and headquartered in the design-savvy city of Barcelona, its stated rationale is very plain: “Low-tech Magazine refuses to assume that every problem has a high-tech solution. A simple, sensible, but nevertheless controversial message; high-tech has become the idol of our society.”

A false idol, too, I would suggest. One need only examine the average contemporary kitchen to find five or six electric devices which chop foods, i.e., what one single knife can do. Meanwhile, our lives are filled with other “laboursaving” gadgets that, after one or two abortive tries, fail to improve upon the original and never leave the drawer again.

Yet, Low-tech Magazine tends to focus not so much on gadgetry, but on major and persistent human problems like transportation. A prime example is its series on the green potential of electric trolley buses (and even trolley trucks), a century-old technology still operating in some corners of the world, though largely displaced by diesel in “forward-thinking” cities like Calgary in the 1960s. I’m old enough to remember the quiet, pleasurable ride of the old number three, and I say bring it on back.

Then, there are those brilliant technologies that simply disappeared. Wood-fired cars were once common. In the 1600s, the industries of the Netherlands used five times as much wind-power as they do today.

Two centuries ago, the French communicated at near-modern speeds with an “optical telegraph,” a network using towers, telescopes and semaphore.

Apparently, one of the top disappearing technologies is rope and knotwork; the website contains etchings of gravity-powered ropeways for transporting cargo — sort of like ski lifts — that date as far back as medieval times.

With articles like “How to make anything,” Low-tech Magazine is keen to remind us that, in contrast to the presumption that low-tech solutions are suitable only for the developing world, these technologies could be useful for all of us.

Of course, they also come with the promise that what you can build you can also fix — using nothing but items likely near to hand. The older auto buffs among us will certainly relate, since they often think back wistfully to driving cars they could actually understand and repair.

So call me a Neanderthal, but I’ll continue to try staying ahead of the curve by getting way behind it.