This all began with guitars. I play the guitar, but beyond knowing how to change a string and tune one, I had never given much thought to how it worked, how it was put together. Then one day, I gave it some thought, and began watching videos posted by luthiers on YouTube, which led me inexorably from guitar making to guitar repair, which, in turn, led the algorithm to show me videos of all sorts of other things being repaired. Such is free association in the age of late capitalism.
But once I saw Awesome Restoration’s rehabilitation of a furry little bear riding a wind-up scooter — which included building a little wooden chair for the bear to sit on while the scooter was being taken apart, repaired, repainted and reassembled — there was no going back.
I was late to this party. “Restoration video” turns out to be a well-established genre with, I would guess, hundreds of dedicated channels, each with thousands, even hundreds of thousands of subscribers. You may be familiar with “The Repair Shop” (BritBox, but with many episodes available on YouTube), a U.K. series in production since 2017 in which guests bring wounded family heirlooms and sentimental keepsakes to a hut in the woods to be rejuvenated by expert craftspersons. Judi Dench brought a pocket watch, King Charles a vase. These channels, which come from all over the world, are like that, but without the sentimental backstories.
It isn’t why I got interested in restorations, but as a bonus, they provide a marvelous distraction in this season of uncertainty. That they have calming properties is not lost on the producers; many clips come with ASMR in the title, referring to that brand of audiovisual content meant to relax the listener/viewer. And in a time when you can apparently fool some of the people all of the time, these videos offer solid documentary evidence of expertise, of competence and of fine motor skills.
They follow a three-act narrative, bending toward a happy ending. Something begins in disrepair, disarray, poor shape. A hero arrives, armed with knowledge and skill, to get to the root of the problem. Finally, the item is restored to health, to its former self or, perhaps, something better. There is drama, there may be comedy. It’s even a kind of love story, if you care to personalize a toy car or a guitar or a pocket watch. If it’s more or less the same plot over and over, the details are always different — the devil is in the details, it’s said, but so (said Mies van der Rohe) is God.
Items for repair include old toys and games, mechanical coin banks, hand-cranked coffee grinders — most restorers seem to have done one of those — locks, furniture, pinball machines, gumball machines, espresso makers, typewriters, pencil sharpeners, cash registers, leather goods, artworks, knives, guns, shoes and all sorts of gizmos and gadgets from the predigital age. Some of the restorers are professionals, but many more appear to be hobbyists, in it for the challenge, the fun and the satisfaction. They have come out of their basements and sheds and garages to achieve a kind of stardom. Many have Patreons; some sell merch.
But unlike the more common self-celebrating social media celebrity, most are relatively anonymous — their identity is their work. We see their hands, like those of a magician doing close-up magic, but rarely more. Sometimes, as in the entrancing microscopic world of watch repair, it’s just fingertips.
Their channels have names like Restomaniac, Restorology, Restoration Station, Rusty Shades Restoration, Rescue and Restore, Old Things Never Die, Cool Again Restoration and Not Terrible Restorations (by “Dr. Beer,” who rates a different beer in every episode). Some clips involve narration. (Here is Nekkid Watchmaker, who sounds a little like Werner Herzog, describing a part he is attempting to clean: “The stains were like the teeth of a tobacco-chewing villain in a western.”) But most are satisfied with the sounds of scraping, sawing, sanding, drilling and hammering. Some provide captions, while others let the pictures speak for themselves.
Even if you were not that child who took his toys apart to see how they were made — and there is much ingenuity just in the construction of a plastic “Star Wars” X-wing fighter — there is a vicarious delight in watching it done, especially if you weren’t the sort who could ever put things back together. (I do mean me.) I wouldn’t have expected to become so interested in screws being unscrewed, tabs unbent, machines reduced to component parts, cleaned and painted, with missing parts newly fabricated. And yet it’s not that surprising: We are, after all, the animal that loves a before-and-after photo — though in restoration videos, there is also a good before that comes before the bad before; the point is to get back to that original state and, by doing so, move ahead.
It’s true that the genre’s success means that there are fake restoration videos, whose makers dirty up an object in order to clean it, and thereby snag a chunk of whatever money there is to be made from the YouTube economy. Indeed, there are enough of these that they’ve inspired a subgenre of videos dedicated to calling them out. Still, a little common sense will separate the genuine articles from the disingenuous. (Any video that begins with someone finding a dirty old camera or Game Boy console in a pile of garbage is not to be trusted.)
On the day of what is without exaggeration being called the most consequential election of our time, ignoring political news in favor of watching an antique cheese slicer being restored may seem frivolous. But broken things will need to be fixed. (Please see the Oscar-winning “The Last Repair Shop,” co-produced by the L.A. Times, about the people who repair instruments for LAUSD students, and the students whose instruments are repaired.) Some of us will need to fix things, whether or not they are of any practical use. And that is a beautiful thing.
