That is a cool web site, he does nice work.
Don’t know that I’m a tinker, I’m a fixer, a repairer of broken, rusted, or discarded objects that are useful when repaired. I also spend a lot of time and effort in fixing up and renovating our home and the grounds around it.
I’m always amazed at people that buy homes and live in them for years until everything is broken and worn out from lack of maintenance, then they want to sell it without fixing it up. They are usually disappointed because they can’t command top price for their home.
I know what you mean, I have the same washer and dryer I bought in 1976, I just keep fixing it. Fixing things is a lot more fun than sitting on the couch watching tv.
I would disagree that the tinkerers are gone. Maker culture as listed above, and websites such as www.instructables.com are alive and well. It’s simply that some of the technology has changed and in some ways become more user friendly. As to pulling apart, it is a matter of scaling. I may not be able to pull the cpu of a Raspberry Pi apart, but what I can do with it is magnitudes above what I could accomplish with discrete components. They have their place too, but the toolbox available to me now is much broader than 20 years ago.
One of my pet projects for the winter is a carbon fiber, dual suspension recumbent bike. I have had access to engineering and materials that would have required a secret clearance not long ago and now I can get it all online. Simply amazing!
I think the world is different. To paraphrase, all the good things have been invented.
In the old Popular Mechanics, it seemed some of the DIY projects were useful. They were projects to make things you couldn’t get - you could turn two things that don’t normally go together into one new useful thing you couldn’t buy.
Now a lot of those kinds of things are available, and as noted above, not modifiable. You can’t make a new useful thing by modifying it.
There is a magazine and a website called “Make” that seems to fill the niche of PM for the modern age. We subscribed for a year, but the projects all seem to be things that are clever for clever’s sake, rather than useful things you can’t get otherwise. Very complicated projects for doing things you probably don’t need to do, such as:
Crypto Currency Tracker - A real-time tracker that routinely refreshes with the current values of your favorite digital currencies. Currently supported are Bitcoin, Dogecoin, and Litecoin.
Dirty Dish Detector - A tidy sink is a happy sink. Combine a webcam with real-time computer vision software OpenCV to automate messages to your makerspace whenever dishes pile up.
Seriously??
I think a lot of people who would have been tinkerers in the past now work on computer programs or apps; there are a lot of the same skills involved like using logic to solve problems, but the work isn’t mechanical.