THE REPAIR MEN

HERE—STAND ON THAT,” says Kyle Wiens, positioning himself opposite his visitor and reaching for the switch. Then comes the electric hum, followed by the soft jolt and the ground receding. It’s a car lift, mechanic’s grade, salvaged from a dealership, reinstalled on a concrete pad in Wiens’s backyard in Atascadero, California.

Wiens—who’s wearing jeans, a checkered shirt, steel-rimmed glasses, and the kind of haircut you might give yourself with a pair of dull scissors—has about two sloping acres on a rise overlooking U.S. Highway 101, midway between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The high hills beyond are green from this winter’s drenching rains. There’s a stucco main house, a prefab outbuilding, a chicken coop, a patio with a monster grill, and a work shed that houses motorcycles, dirt bikes, kayaks, wetsuits, a generator, a compressor, a welding torch, hammers, wrenches, and drills, as well as several small piles of disassembled equipment: his many works in progress. The lift is just outside the shed. Wiens uses it for jobs most people would delegate to a professional, like swapping out the transmission on a truck. And for cheap thrills: “It’s so cool!”

It’s also there because fixing stuff is his life’s work. Wiens, 33, is co-founder and CEO of iFixit, a company whose mission, he says, is to “teach everybody how to fix everything.” On iFixit’s website is a vast library of step-by-step instruction sets covering, well, let’s see: how to adjust your brakes, patch a leaky fuel tank on a motorcycle, situate the bumper sensor on a Roomba vacuum cleaner, unjam a paper shredder, reattach a sole on a shoe, start a fire without a match, fill a scratch in an eyeglass lens, install a new bread-lift shelf in a pop-up toaster, replace a heating coil