The people I know and my own family are notorious for rigging things to work.
My brother-in-law had a car, that wouldn’t go in reverse, (nothing you could do about that) and the doors wouldn’t stay shut.
He had ropes around the interior door handle that wrapped around the seat. When you got in the car, you had to climb over them through the window to get into the front seat (it was a coupe).
If you got into a car accident, you, the rope and the seat would all go flying out with the door. We got in anyway. We were young.
An old boyfriend continiously put the drive shaft of his car back on with a coat hanger. It broke almost every day. Hangers are cheap apparently.
My sister had a car with a standard transmission and a very dead battery.
Every time she wanted to drive somewhere, my mother and I had to go out and push the car down the street while she popped the clutch to get it started.
I’ve fixed a million things with coat hangers, duct tape, super glue, etc. etc…
Whats your best rigging?
I do a lot of basic patching on electronics, but most people don’t “get it”. E.g., I have done wire wraps on CPU pins in order to get certain settings that weren’t available normally. I slam together various parts from nonworking electronics/computers to get working stuff. A lot of that.
But generally, for electronics, it’s really important to Do It Right. The consquences of bodging something up can be quite serious.
Not too much car stuff, I learned “how not to do it” from my cousin Leon.
He had a vintage Dodge “farm truck” as a teen. Dead battery and all that. In freezing weather, he would park the truck on an incline and drain the radiator (no antifreeze of course). The next morning, he’d roll start the truck, drive to the nearest tap, add water (hoping to the truck won’t stall or overheat in the meantime).
Once, going down the road, oil started spewing out from under the hood. A metal line had broken. He takes off a boot and starts bashing the line to crimp it off. That’s taking too long (he’s getting oil all over himself) so he finds a rock and starts bashing with that until the oil shuts off. That was his official fix.
He’s driven Jeeps with broken pistons on freeways, etc.
So when I have a car problem I ask: “What would Leon do?” and then I do the opposite.
I just rigged up a little do-hickey to dongle device that cured a humming noise in my stereo caused by a grounding loop when I tried to connect my computer to it. I wish I could take credit for it but I looked it up here. It’s the one near the bottom.I found the two parts in my junk drawer
Probably doesn’t count but, as a high schooler, my friends and I were out drinking beer one Saturday afternoon and we stopped in our local pizza place for a slice.
We were buzzing pretty good and someone tells me that my Mother was walking down the street and headed this way. (Probably to pick up dinner for that night)
Well, MY mother, as all mother probably can, can see through me like tissue paper. She’ll surely know that I was drinking.
However, being the intelligent person that I am, I was about to throw her off the track. So, just before she got to the pizza place, I “rigged” a “mouth wash” of sorts by pooring a fist full of garlic powder in my hand and just inhaling it.
My mother pops in, says “Hi guys”, I bellow, “Hi Mom” with garlic breath and she was on her way.
My PC is water cooled, and when I broke a fitting on the plastic coolant tank, I reamed out a bigger hole, and fixed it with a copper hose barb fitting from Home Depot. It’s been running for a month like this.
I have a fishtank with plants in it, and I have CO2 injection via a 6.5 gallon fermenter full of sugar and champaigne yeast. Through a nice selection of old hombrewing equipment, some airline tubing, and a powerhead, I have a CO2 injection system for my plants for under $50.
I have a wall-mounted bottle opener, and in order to save myself picking up the caps, I have a rare-earth magnet held onto the wall with a thumbtack. All of the caps stick to the magnet after they fall 2/3 of the way to the floor. I’m always amused by that “Clickthwack!”.
My windshield wipers on my first car worked for at least 2 years because of a small elastic hair tie. I’m not sure what it was, but something was missing and the motor worked, but the wipers wouldn’t move. My dad took the hair tie, hooked it to the parts it needed to be hooked to, and they worked again.
right now my garage is running off of an extension cord from the house, actually its two cords joined together and right now that junction is laying on the ground and it is raining, I’m gonna go out there and work in a little bit.
At what point does fabricating become rigging, and vice versa?
I don’t think that I’ve owned a vehicle that didn’t have at least some parts made from scrap hardware. My first “car” was a Jeep postal van; Dad put in a Ford 289 to replace the cracked four cylinder, fabbing together whatever was need for the job. My current truck’s radiator mounts are a couple of chunks of aluminum billet that I hacked out on a table saw (the stock radiator cost $200 but the radiator shop found a $50 part that almost fit.) I’ve owned two motorcycles: a chopper that I built from scratch and another bike that was in milk crates when I bought it. Both had plenty of handmade parts, but I consider all of the above to be fabricating, even if the quality wasn’t always the best.
I’ve also Bondoed sheetrock, glued shoes back together, poured epoxy down a bathroom window sill to waterproof it*, welded tools out of bolts and junk parts, fixed half-million dollar equipment with tape; made ladders out of lumber and turned myself into a chair when my wife was in labor, and these are things that I have to call ‘rigged’, not ‘fabricated.’
*In my defense, this was the rough sill. The finished job looks ok.
In the 50s, my grandfather made a “remote” for the volume on his TV by wrapping some string around the knob and running both ends through eye hooks screwed into the cabinet. When a commercial came on he’d pull on one end to turn down the volume and when it was over he’d pull on the other end to turn it back up.
Back in the day when VW bugs had the engines in the back and cost less than $1,000, one of the distributor wires kept coming loose on mine. The first time, I had no idea what was happening. The poor thing was doing a cha-cha for the whole 45 minutes it took me to get home as the 4 cylinders went, “fire, fire, fire, CLUNK.” My husband showed me how to re-attach the loose wire, and all was well for a while, but inevitably it happened again. And again. And again. I got tired of stopping, re-attaching the wire and getting grease on my hands. I tried various temporary measures, none of which worked, until one day in desperation I smooshed a glob of chewing gum on it. Never came loose again, and when I looked at it one day, the gum had hardened into a weird green rock-like substance. We sold the thing a year or so later, and I often wondered what the next person to work on it thought.
Ah, rigging. One of the hallmarks of the working class.
Soup cans can be employed in the repair of automobile exhaust systems
We had a riding lawnmower with a dead battery. Lawnmower batteries are expensive ($50), so we used to drive the old Chevy out back and jump-start the lawnmower every week.
I had a Camaro with a very weak battery. On those cold Ohio nights, I would take the battery out and store it in a heated garage, then reinstall it the next morning. Warm battery puts out a lot more energy.
We had a tube of “liquid rubber” with which to extend the life of tennis shoes
Not as good as some of these, but I have a pair of Doc Martens loafers in which the heel leather keeps wearing and getting all chewed up in the area just below my Achilles tendon (I limp a bit and my shoes wear out oddly). I have some leather scraps I save from old wallets etc., and once a year or so I epoxy a small rectangle of leather over the top rear of the shoe; a year later it wears through and I replace it. I think I’ve had the shoes for 12 or 13 years.
