Fourteen-year-old Owen Cunneely once spent five hours chipping tiny pieces of broken glass off a MacBook Pro screen with a metal spudger. The laptop’s screen was horrifically shattered—he couldn’t get a grip on the glass because the cracks ran in every direction. So he started the repair by breaking it even further.

“I carefully took a metal spudger and cracked the glass along the bezel of the screen where there is no protective covering on the back to keep the glass from coming apart,” he says. “I then carefully chipped for five hours straight to remove all glass around the top and halfway around each side. Then I heated the bottom and pulled the glass up from the top and it came right off.”

The repair was a success—one of many for Owen, who schedules time for his repair clients between school and homework—and he was able to replace the broken panel without scratching the LCD underneath. He even fixed a dent in the MacBook’s aluminum, using a suction cup (for which his client tipped him well).

A couple of weeks ago, we profiled Jonathan Edwards, a man who has started a brick-and-mortar repair shop in Pennsylvania, fixing and modding people’s iPhones with his Pro Tech Base Toolkit. Like Jonathan, Owen has started a successful repair business using iFixit tools. But Owen has done it entirely out of his Tennessee bedroom.

Owen was eleven when he started fixing stuff. His parents owned a G5 iMac with an ailing graphics card. When it finally died, they decided to buy a new computer and gave the G5 to Owen, who wanted to try to fix it. Using iFixit guides, he took the computer apart and put it back together again. Though he didn’t fix it right then, seeing the G5′s insides inspired him to take more stuff apart. Soon, he’d taken apart every piece of electronic equipment in his room. He then moved onto his friends’ computers, which he fixed successfully. After a couple of years of repairing computers with improvised tools, he decided to buy some stuff more suited to the jobs he was getting: a Pro Tech Toolkit, a heat gun, a soldering iron, spudgers, suction cups, and a magnifying glass lamp.

Since then, he has successfully repaired the original G5 iMac that got him into fixing things (he ended up needing to reflow the graphics card with a heat gun). The G5 now sits on his repair desk, where he uses it to display guides as he does repairs. And it also serves to remind him of the inspiration and pride he felt when he first saw the G5′s naked motherboard.

Owen has built a steady stream of clients, based almost entirely on the recommendations of satisfied customers. He tries to do the highest quality work he can possibly do every repair, which means he’s developed “a reputation for going the extra mile.” He calls himself “The Repair Genius” and is saving up to buy a Mac Mini server to run a website for himself. Even without advertising, he usually has four or five devices to fix in any given week—sometimes mostly computers, sometimes mostly phones. He meets new clients regularly: “Many people that I meet have at least one computer that’s not working properly and haven’t had the time to take it in or don’t want to pay any ridiculous amount of money,” he explains. In fact, he sometimes has to turn down jobs to leave enough time to get his homework done.

Newspaper routes have been largely taken over by adults in cars. Suburban sprawl makes it hard for a kid without a car to move a lawnmower around. Child labor laws mean young teenagers can’t get jobs in shops or on farms. So for a kid who wants an after school job but doesn’t like lemonade or babysitting, the options can seem rather slim. But fixing phones and computers fills that need nicely—today’s teenagers have grown up with computers. It makes perfect sense for them to capitalize on that familiarity.

Computer repair is not Owen’s ultimate career goal. His dad is in radiology, and Owen wants to learn how to fix people in addition to fixing computers (although if Apple ever offered him a product design job, he might change his mind). For now, repair is a hobby, a way to make a little money, and something better to do than complaining about being bored. And his friends and neighbors reap the benefits of having a Repair Genius in their midst.

If you have a job for Owen, you can contact him at therepairgenius@gmail.com.

Component-level repair cell phone repair is becoming increasingly uncommon in the west. But in Delhi, any good mobile repair worker knows how to solder. I took this photo in a Delhi cell phone repair school. This student has decorated his soldering iron with cell phone speakers, held up by the same magnets that make the speakers work.

You have something in your teeth, and we wouldn’t have to be the ones to tell you if you’d just carry a mirror. And before you go telling us how you’re “too much of a manly-man to carry a mirror,” take a look at our latest offering: a mirrored rear panel for the iPhone 4 and 4S.

If avoiding awkward “you have something in your teeth,” conversations isn’t motivating enough, imagine all of the fun you can have taking photos of “the gun show,” and knowing you’re always in frame. Or perhaps you’re a lady (or a fella who fancies lipgloss, we won’t judge). Touching up makeup is so easy when your phone is your mirror. No more wasting time launching the camera app, just to reapply your lip-balm. Brilliant!

Not only does it look completely awesome (we’re pretty sure Clooney himself would use one), but it’s simple to install, it’s just as protective and durable as the rear panel that comes on the iPhone originally, and it’s priced lower than a regular replacement rear panel, making it an excellent option if you’ve shattered the back of your phone. All good things.

But perhaps you want to see it in action. I’m excited to give you a look at the mirrored rear panel in action, so take a look at the video below:

Convinced? Buy a mirrored panel for the iPhone 4 here or for the 4S here.

Photo credit: Worldreader.

Getting textbooks into classrooms can be expensive and challenging anywhere, all the more so in rural sub-Saharan Africa—where those textbooks are in direly short supply. In five African schools, a non-profit organization called Worldreader is piloting a high-tech solution: a Kindle for every student. Though the initial cost is higher than a set of textbooks, it’s much easier to add new textbooks and offer a huge variety of content.

Worldreader has already distributed a thousand Kindles, each already stocked with hundreds of e-books: everything from storybooks and “Easy English Learning for Junior High School” to Crime and Punishment. They’ve particularly worked to make books by local authors available, by establishing publishing partnerships with Ghanaian and Kenyan publishers.

But there’s some irony in the fact that the top item on the list of Worldreader books is a short story called “E is for E-Waste.” School children didn’t just get to read about e-waste, they got an unanticipated firsthand education in the delicate lifecycle of electronics. Over the course of the pilot study in Ghana, 40.5% of the Kindles broke. In their report, Worldreader called this breakage rate “unexpectedly high”; Andrew Webster of The Verge called it “a surprisingly large amount.”

The Kindle screen is just 2 millimeters thick and is glued into a plastic shell. When iBooks Textbooks debuted in January, our primary concern was broken iPads—kids are not known to treat their belongings delicately. Why didn’t Worldreader have a contingency plan for broken Kindles? The elementary, middle, and high schoolers in the study, 43% of whom had never used a computer before, were all from rural Ghana, primarily living and working on farms. Those who took the Kindles home shared them with younger siblings, read while working, and stuffed the devices into pockets and bags. Searching Amazon’s site alone returns 82,500 results for “broken kindle screen,” including reports from people whose screens broke before they’d even touched the device.

A broken Kindle is disappointing, yes. Expensive, yes. But unexpected? How could it be?

Photo credit: OLPC.

Perhaps the best implementation of educational technology in the developing world, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) designed their own laptop—it’s durable, light, can withstand extreme conditions, and, most importantly, is easily repairable by the children themselves. Remove four Phillips screws, and the screen’s off. Four more screws, and the motherboard’s off. Their repair and troubleshooting guides are available on each laptop and online, and they are also developing a list of sources for repair parts.

That’s how it’s done right. Giving kids a bunch of Kindles is not. Kindle repair parts aren’t widely available. Amazon representatives have even evidently told customers that they have no Kindle repair facilities. When I broke my Kindle’s screen a couple of months ago, the representative I spoke to would neither confirm nor deny this claim—but she spoke repeatedly of perhaps being able to “replace” my broken Kindle, never even using the word “repair.” I attempted to repair it myself by salvaging parts from another Kindle, but discovered to my dismay that the e-ink screen is practically welded to the plastic frame with a powerful adhesive. Getting the new screen out of its frame presents a high breakage risk. Yes, it is possible to fix a Kindle. But it’s prohibitively difficult for most people, especially teachers in Ghana without access to replacement parts.

Photo credit: Worldreader.

So, what could Worldreader learn from OLPC? First, pick durable hardware. Kids need stuff that will hold up to rough conditions, all the more so when they’re living and working on farms. Worldreader and Amazon are developing more rugged Kindles “with more durable screens.” And they’re encouraging kids to be more careful by requiring parent-teacher conferences and a verbal warning for anyone who breaks a Kindle.

But that may not be enough. The devices should be repairable, too. There’s no reason why a kid should have to wait three months to have a screen replaced. Five-year-olds fix their own OLPCs. Every day, we hear from kids who have used our repair guides to fix their own electronics. I just got back from the USA Science and Engineering Festival, where I watched hundreds of middle schoolers fixing iPods and DVD players. With good guides and the right tools, kids don’t have any more trouble repairing electronics than they do putting together a Lego set.

Why not ship the Worldreader devices with repair manuals? Why not give schools a supply of repair parts? Why not teach all children in the program how to fix their own e-readers? Fewer devices would break. Kids wouldn’t go three months without access to their textbooks. They would learn valuable engineering skills.

Worldreader, if you’re reading, we’d love to help: if you develop a more repairable device, we’d be happy to write your repair manuals for free. Know anyone else starting an educational technology non-profit? Our offer is open to them, too. But please, factor repairability into the beginning of the planning process. Hardware can and will break—that’s expected and normal. Building a plan for maintaining the hardware should be normal as well.

The Space Shuttle Discovery travelled 148 million miles before being retired last year—that’s the equivalent of flying all the way to the sun and more than halfway back. I saw it last week resting in its new permanent Washington DC home, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, where it replaced the Space Shuttle Enterprise last month.

As David Gergen and Michael Zuckerman wrote, the shuttles remind us that we can accomplish great things and overcome great challenges under leaders who unite us. But I think there’s a more practical lesson to learn from the shuttles, too.

The Space Shuttles were made to last, repaired again and again, sometimes even while in space. Their end-of-life is anticipated and planned for: Discovery will now educate museum-goers and inspire the next generation of astronauts.

When it’s critical, we can think ahead. We can build complex equipment that lasts long into the future. We can design for maintenance and repair.

Kyle was interviewed last week by Jamillah Knowles, of the BBC Radio 5 Live podcast Outriders. Interview begins at 15:17 of the “Sir Tim Berners-Lee” episode here.

Excerpt:

I think we can go back to the way we were when we were kids, where we were constantly taking everything apart because we wanted to know how the world worked. Let’s get back to that idea of discovery and learning and get a bit more connected with our things. That’s the fun thing about our teardowns: I take apart an iPhone and I show you what’s in it. Now, a little bit of the mystery is gone, and you’re more connected to it, because you really understand how it works. You know if I drop my phone and I break the glass, that it’s just glass. You can replace glass. You wouldn’t throw away a car because you broke the windshield.

In a low, canary yellow warehouse in Kumasi, Ghana, eleven men command a mass of tools—a band saw, grinder, and drill press—to clean and prepare a huge pile of bamboo. What are they making? Bikes: inexpensive, lightweight bikes strong enough to stand up to Kumasi’s long rainy season.

These men are employees of Bamboo Bikes Limited, the Ghana factory of the Bamboo Bike Project, a non-governmental organization dedicated to providing more affordable transportation options in rural Africa and teaching job skills to last a lifetime. It was started by a group of scientists and engineers from The Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York and sponsored by the Millennium Cities Initiative.

Bamboo might seem flimsy (it is a grass, after all), but it’s actually a great bike material. Far from flimsy, it’s stronger than steel—28,000 Newtons of tensile strength per square inch, compared to steel’s 23,000 Newtons. It absorbs shocks, for a reportedly silk-smooth ride. Because it’s hollow, it’s light, too. Bamboo bikes can be made and repaired with fairly simple tools and common materials. (Many people actually cut bamboo using a dozuki, the Japanese pull saw after which we’ve named our work instruction software—the Bamboo Bike Studio’s logo includes a dozuki.)

Bamboo’s also a sustainable material. Unlike trees, which die when cut, bamboo can live on after harvesting. And since decomposing plant material releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere (over 60 gigatons of it per year), it may actually be better for the environment to harvest bamboo before it dies than let it rot. Plus, bamboo can grow unbelievably quickly under the right conditions. When a bamboo seller charted the growth of some particularly fast-growing shoots, one went from 10 feet to over 22 feet tall in just five days. Bamboo Bike Limited’s bikes are made from bamboo gathered locally in Ghana. Other parts are imported.

Bamboo Bike Limited isn’t the only group making bamboo bikes. A splinter group led by Craig Calfee, BambooSero, broke off in 2008, to start another Ghana factory. They sell Ghana-made bikes worldwide via their website. The Colorado company Panda Bicycles also sells handmade bamboo bikes online.

Or, even better, you can build your own: last week, our product manager, Eric, spotted a woman cutting through the parking lot of our San Luis Obispo office on a bamboo bike. Thinking the bike looked awesome, he flagged her down (no DIY project is safe from our curiosity—at least not in our parking lot!).

Her name is Kathy Reed. She built the bike herself at the San Francisco workshop of the Bamboo Bike Studio, a group started by Bamboo Bike Project volunteers Justin, Marty, and Sean.

The Bamboo Bike Studio sells kits with all the parts and tools you need to build a bamboo bike, including a jig that holds all the bamboo pieces in place as you attach them with resin lugs, then wrap the resin with tape. Following their website’s step-by-step video guides, or going to one of the group’s workshops, you can turn raw plant material into a finished bike in just a single (if rather long and difficult) weekend. Kathy went with her adult son, and they were at the workshop together from 8 a.m. Saturday morning until 9 or ten at night, and then similar hours on Sunday. “It was a lot of work,” Kathy admits. “Parts of it weren’t so fun, like gluing all the parts. But it made me feel really good.”

“They show you how to put on the tires and the braking system, the cables, everything,” she explains. “If you don’t know anything about bikes, you’re not on your own. I just had my son come because he and I share a love for bicycles.”

Kathy does love the bike, and she knows it inside and out. She says, “I’m really attached to the bike because I built it. I constantly am putting tung oil on it to shine it up, and I wipe it down after a ride. I’m really proud of it.” Her familiarity with the bike makes DIY maintenance and repair relatively simple. She has even upgraded it from three speeds to eleven. Kathy was a special education teacher in San Francisco for 38 years, and from when she built the bike in 2010 until she retired this year, she rode the bike to work every day. Now, she goes on a lot of charity rides and runs errands on her bike—she was visiting San Luis Obispo as part of a nostalgia tour, since she is a graduate of our local university, Cal Poly.

Today, a weekend workshop at the Bamboo Bike Studio in Camden, San Francisco, Toronto, or Greensboro costs $1000, and Bamboo Bike Limited’s bikes are sold to Ghana locals for about $65. Bamboo Bike Studio founder Justin Aguinaldo says they are always looking for ways to bring down the cost, and that’s their primary goal going forward. “We’ve made great bikes for a while,” he says. ”Now we want to make them with more people for less money.”

The bamboo bike craze is growing—a few enthusiastic Studio customers have set up new studios, and the Studio offers weekend-long workshops in cities around the country. With cheaper bikes and greater availability, maybe some day bamboo bikes will be a common alternative to their carbon-fiber cousins.

The cell phone is unarguably a “stupid phone”—it can place and receive calls, but offers no mobile web capabilities. It runs off a 9-volt battery. It can’t store phone numbers. But geek street cred-wise, it’s unparalleled: its case is delightfully low-tech laser-cut plywood, and its old school blue and white command line-style interface will make you feel like a leet haxor ten times over.

Engineering PhD student David Mellis, who demonstrated the phone to Engadget, is part of MIT’s “High-Low Tech” research group—they’re behind such awesome projects as the piezo-powered tambourine and self-folding origami paper.

Treehugger technology editor Jaymi Heimbuch’s commentary is spot-on:

While it’s not a practical option for a quality cell phone, it could be an interesting science project for students learning about electronic devices when the kit comes out on the market. Getting comfortable with electronics, including something as ubiquitous as cell phones, is important in getting people to repair their own gadgets when they break, rather than replacing them. And projects like this are just such a way to make electronics less intimidating.

As a kid, I made my own telephone and doorbell out of kits like this—and those kits definitely sparked an interest in electronics. Electronics kits have been teaching engineering to the unwashed masses at least since Heathkit‘s first kits in 1947.

It sounds like there may be some legal hurdles to overcome before this kit can be made available commercially, because the FCC rather heavily regulates cell phone airwaves. It’s not really any cheaper, either: the kit is currently priced between $100 and $150.

So, no, this phone is not (yet) a viable competitor to other phones on the market. But it demystifies “black box” electronics. It’s also fantastically geeky.

See for yourself:

Jonathan Edwards (no, not this one or that one) of Shickshinny, Pennsylvania (and yes, that’s a real place), has managed to quit his “day job” and is now self-employed, doing phone hardware repair full time.

He started about six years ago, jailbreaking iPhones for family and friends. But he quickly discovered that jailbreaking was more tedious than he’d thought. He hated spending hours Googling and trying to get other people’s software hacks to work.

Then one day, a friend asked Jonathan to fix a shattered screen on a first-generation iPhone. “It was a pain in the butt,” Jonathan says, as changing the display assembly requires disassembling almost the entire phone, “but about 4 hours after receiving the parts he had a fully functional iPhone.” He found the hardware repair much more satisfying than jailbreaking—it has clear, measurable, exciting results.

In the years since that first repair, Jonathan has fixed and customized hundreds of phones: not just iPhones, but also Androids, Palms, and Blackberries. He’s even fixed a couple of computers. In fact, he’s doing so much business that, last week, he opened up a brick-and-mortar location in Shickshinny.

His Pro Tech Base Tool Kit is the heart of his tool collection. “To be honest, I don’t even recognize some of the tools in the base kit or the other kits,” he admits, “but the metal spudgers, lit up magnifying glass and unique screwdriver bit set was worth every penny. Side note: the Pro Tech Base Kit makes you look like a doctor. Seriously, people take one look at your tools and fully believe you can do anything! Unbelievable ‘street-cred.’”

Jonathan offers some advice for anyone looking to turn iPhone repair into a business—he suggests you “get the screw tray, the 54-bit driver kit and the lit-up table magnifier, take your time, [and] always have the guide in front of you.” You can see his full story here, including a few more tips for new iPhone repair businesses, send him an email, or call him at (570) 702-4991.

We love to hear about people starting businesses with iFixit tools—after all, while we believe everyone can fix their stuff themselves, we know not everyone will. And small repair operations like Jonathan’s keep devices working longer and raise the profile of repair. If you’ve started a repair business, tell me about it.

Today, we gave our first ever 10 out of 10 repairability score — to HP’s new Z1 all-in-one workstation!  It is the most repairable PC we’ve ever had the pleasure to take apart. Opening the machine is as easy as opening a briefcase, and all the major components — RAM, hard drive, optical drive, etc. — snap in and out. There’s even a diagram inside the device that shows the location of the most easily replaceable components.  You could probably replace the hard drive in 5 minutes and have time left over to sip a coffee.

A few of the non-major components require a little more effort to pull out, but never so much as to be dangerous or painful. Removing the glass and LCD, for example, requires taking out “a few” T15 Torx screws (18, to be exact). However, there are no crazy glues or breakable tabs hindering your repair process.

Our final determinant for a perfect repairability score was the existence of actual repair manuals for the machine. To our delight, HP has provided these materials directly on their site. They’re not as good as iFixit’s manuals, but they’re definitely solid enough to repair/upgrade the machine.

Here is the teardown.

Highlights:

• The stand folds flat beneath the workstation, which makes for easy repair access. It raises back up with the push of a green button, which we mistook originally for a power button (which is located on the top-right side).
• The hard drive, optical drive, power supply, main fan, RAM, and graphics card are attached without screws, and are simply disconnected and removed.
• The Intel processor can be detached from the motherboard with a flip of a lever.
• Non-modular components inside (speakers, motherboard, daughterboards, etc.) are held intact by T15 or T6 Torx screws, or by plastic fasteners. No glue or other funny business is used inside, aside from a taped-down thermal sensor.
• The glass and LCD are the hardest to replace, and still not supremely difficult — just a bit bulky to move around. They’re not fused together, and are instead held in place by those wonderful T15 Torx screws. The most difficult repair in this machine — replacing the LCD or glass — should take under an hour to complete.
• One small detriment to all this repairability? The price. The cheapest Z1 is just short of $2,000, which is a lot of dough to spend on a machine of this capability. HP’s other, less-easy-to-fix “all-in-one” offerings retail in the $1200 neighborhood for a similarly outfitted machine.

We told HP that we were hosting a party, so they brought the chips:

• Intel Core i3-2120 Processor with Intel HD Graphics 2000
• Intel BD82C206 Platform Controller Hub
• ON NCP6151 CPU & GPU Controller
• Texas Instruments TUSB7320 SuperSpeed USB xHCI Host Controller
• IDT 92HD91B Audio Codec
• Texas Instruments DRV604 Line Driver & Headphone Amp
• MPS MP3399 LED Drivers
• Parade PS8321 DisplayPort Source 2:1 Multiplexers
• Alpha & Omega AOZ5006Q1 Synchronous Buck Power Stage Modules
• Infineon SLB9635TT1.2 TPM Embedded Security Controller
• NXP 74LVC14AD Hex Inverting Schmitt Trigger