The college I used to work for used a pair matching lecterns at commencement. The lecterns had a bronze college seal on the front. The Friday before commencement, we discovered that someone had stolen one of the seals. Everyone was in a panic, because the defaced lectern looked really crappy.
I had a hi-res version of the seal on my computer, so I printed out a copy, sized to match the seal on the other lectern, on an overhead transparency. I found some gold wrapping paper in our office stash of Christmas stuff. I used spray adhesive to affix the transparency to the wrapping paper and trimmed everything out. When we put the fake seal on the lectern, from a distance of 20 feet or so, you absolutely couldn’t tell the difference between the real and the fake seal.
I once literally used a sword as a plowshare. The garden plots had just opened up, and I was eager to get vegetables planted, but the ground was still too hard. So I got my sword and made a bunch of stabs into the dirt to break it up.
And others have mentioned paper clips, so this probably won’t be too impressive, but my glasses have been held together with a bent paper clip for a few years now. One of the little screws on the side that holds the frame around the lens popped out somewhere outside, where there’d be no chance of finding it. I stuck the end of a paper clip in the screw hole, and wrapped the rest of the clip tightly around the bits of metal the screw would connect. Nobody ever notices the difference until I show them.
Oh, and I also replaced a broken zipper pull on my coat with a paper clip the other day, but that’s hardly esoteric.
Well, once, when I was a kid, my mother threw a cable box remote at a couple of dogs to break up a fight—as we have taken care of a number of cantankerous dogs over the years, several other remotes have since gone to glory in similar incidents—shattering the remote in half (Mom’s got a good arm). The circuit board had cracked pretty cleanly, just about the the level where the battery case and connections were.
Obviously, there was no way to piece the thing back together…but I did have a 9v battery connector hooked to two loose wires, from a “learn about electricity” science kit. I think the original purpose was to hook up to a little light bulb and/or a fan motor, or some such.
So, with a fresh 9v, some scotch tape, and a bit of trial and error, I was able to hook up a crude replacement power supply for the remote. And it worked—lasted at least a couple of days, I think. Long enough to get a replacement. Not bad for a nine year old with no prior experience, I thought.
Then there was the time I improvised a speedometer out of Botts Dots and my own brain. But that might not count as a proper Macgyver job, although it WAS to buy me enough time to get a flashlight to replace my dash lights.
I really like a little sugar in my morning coffee. Was camping. Had no sugar. Did have a can of Sprite or 7 Up? Hey, thats mostly just carbonated sugar water with a hint of lemon right? I can get ride of the carbonation. I like lemon in my tea, some in the coffee wouldnt be that bad. So, I made my coffee with the soda.
It was vile. Undrinkable. And I am not a picky food person by any stretch of the imagination.
Oh yeah, and making tomato soup outa ketchup packets is worse.
I had a similar one: one Christmas, my wife and I were staying at another family member’s house, as were a lot of other relatives. At least four couples, including us, had to sleep on air mattresses. Well, we had the cap, but the rubber plug that actually held the air in was missing; the cap basically just holds that plug in place, and without the plug, it loses air very rapidly.
I noticed that the hole was about the size of a quarter. So, I got a stack of about six quarters (for thickness, because I figured one might slip sideways), bound them up with packing tape, and plugged the hole with them. Wasn’t perfect, but it managed to hold the air in.
-A turkey vulture was on the road head of me and took flight too slowly. It hit the wiper blade on my car, breaking it off. Of course it was raining at the time. I used an eyeglass strap to tie it back on temporarily.
-Same car, the rubber hangar for my driver’s side muffler tore/broke. Drilled holes in a rubber fingerprint roller to use as a substitute hangar, it’s still on the car years later AFAIK.
-Didn’t have room in my mini-tower computer case for two old hand-me-down full-height hard drives. So I ran the cables out the back of the computer and let the hard drives sit on the table.
I stripped the threads on the frame that hold the lens in a pair of glasses once. Money was short and these glasses needed to last another few months before I could replace them. I got out my sewing basket, nylon beading thread and a beading needle (the only one skinny enough to pass through) and connected the frame tightly enough to last until they could be replaced. The thread being clear, no one even noticed.
Once my boss left a critical folder in her locked office and left early for the day. All attempts to reach her by e-mail or phone were in vain. Since her office was merely a very tall cubicle with a lockable door, the top was open. One of my coworkers’ desk backed up to a common wall with the boss’ office. She stood up on her desk top and spotted the folder on the file cabinet immediately on the other side of the wall. Alas, the wall was too tall and flimsy to climb over. The lightbulb in my head suddenly went off. We had handled dustpans for tidying up around our cube farm. Would the handle be long enough to scoop the folder up from the top of the desk? Yes! It was rescued and our project was completed on time that day.
I am not going to go into too much detail. It would bore ya all. but.
Had a feedback resistor pot go bad on a control for a chiller. Saturday night around 6PM. No parts store open. went to radio shack ond picked up a 1k pot, to replace a 2k pot. I lashed it in until Monday. It was a real MacGyver lash up.
I wanted to keep it short. Chiller for air conditioning. feedback resistor, an electrical device to ket the control panel know how faar a valve is open. a 1K POT. A 1000 OHM potentionometer. cost $5.00.
Well, I can tell you that the front of a 1984 Honda Accord looks exactly like the front end of a 1985 Honda Accord. But it mounds up completely differently. So when changing out a 1984 front with a 1985 front, you will also need a pop rivet gun, toliet hardware from a 50s model toilet, one tow strap, and a little black spray paint.
In an engineering class my freshman year we had to do that “make a square peg fit in a round hole” thing from the Apollo 13 mission. Basically we had to connect a filter to a hose using only the stuff they had to the space craft.
