I have spent most of my life making, repairing, restoring, and understanding things—vehicles, boats, machine tools, houses, computers, organizations, and whatever else seemed worth making work better.
I started working at General Motors the day after I graduated from high school. The career that followed took me through manufacturing, product development, consulting, and technology, and into companies and programs large enough that no one person could see the whole system. My most useful role was often the same one I play in a shop: understand how the pieces affect one another, find the real constraint, and help people make the whole thing work.
Outside work, I have always built things. I bought my first car at fourteen. Since then there have been cars, motorcycles, airplanes, boats, tractors, houses, workshops, computers, machine tools, collections, and more restoration projects than any sensible person would undertake. I am interested in the object, but even more interested in how it works, why it failed, and whether it can be made useful again.
Why this archive exists
This site is a working archive of that life, but it is not meant to stop in the past. It gathers material from the original EricRedifer.com, writing from my WordPress site, current videos from Fixing My World, and the machines, places, collections, ideas, and projects that are still taking shape.
The point is not to present a tidy collection of finished objects. It is to preserve the reasoning, mistakes, methods, and useful details that disappear when only the final photograph survives.
Some pages are complete stories. Others are places being prepared for material I have accumulated over decades. The archive will remain unfinished because the work is unfinished. I would rather publish an honest record that continues to grow than polish a small selection until the rest disappears.
What you will find here
The Rooms are the main way into the archive. They connect related stories across transportation, tools, homes, travel, health, work, collections, projects, and video without pretending that a life fits neatly into one filing system.
There is practical material here, but this is not only a how-to site. A repair can also be a family story. A car can mark a stage of life. A work problem can explain an idea that still matters decades later. Those connections are part of what I am trying to preserve.
Fixing My World
My YouTube channel shows the work in motion: practical repairs, tool systems, shop projects, and direct explanations of what worked—and what did not. The videos and this archive serve different purposes, but over time they will increasingly point to one another.
Visit Fixing My World on YouTube →
A note on voice
Unless a page says otherwise, the experiences and opinions here are mine. Older pages retain some of the wording, assumptions, and rough edges of the time when I wrote them. I may add context or corrections, but I do not want to rewrite the past until it sounds as though I always knew what I know now.