The fan on the back of my computer (I was told it’s the power supply?) has a hard time getting started. Two options: keep shutting down and restarting, or else I have to start it spinning manually, with a q-tip. I discovered that works while attempting to clean it. YOu just have to get it spinning, and then it’ll go.
Yes, I AM going to replace it in the next couple of weeks.
My first car was an old and decaying Renault 6; the locks for both of the rear doors rusted and fell out, so I kept them shut with bungee cords strung from the handle to the front seat belt anchors - If I took a corner too fast, the door would fly open.
The exhaust pipe snapped and I repaired it with two jubilee clips and a piece of metal cut from a baked bean tin.
The radio antenna got snapped off, so I did the wire coathanger thing, except I bent it into the outline of a mushroom.
I have a reputation among my friends and family for being able to solve nearly any mechanical problem within reason.
So there we were driving a long in my friend’s old 73 VW super beatle. The clutch plate absolutely explodes and we are left clutchless. For some reason, the gear shift linkage also stopped working at the same time (can’t remember why they were related). Anyway, we took off the access panel between the two back seats, which sits right above the transmission.
my friend would steer and control the throttle, and i would clunk the thing through the gears to get home. with no clutch we had to stall the engine at every stop, push start, jump in, and continue on our way.
another famous jury-rig was when the heater core went out in my truck. for those who don’t know, it seems as though most cars start with the heater core, then they build the rest of the car around it. they are very laborious to replace. so instead of replacing one, i bought another one, made a mounting bracket, and plumbed it in before the dead one. i lost air-temp control (now it’s always hot), but it worked and saved 8 hours of labor.
yes, rigging is a way of life.
Almost all of my heating pads for my snake cages are human heating pads (Why anyone would buy a reptile pad at 5x the cost with no temp control, I don’t know). For my big plywood cage, I use an old water bed heater.
Two of my snakes live in big Sterlite tubs. Not pretty, but they’re good for shy snakes, and they do wonders for keeping humidity in during a dry winter.
My computer desk is my big plywood snake cage. Good times. My computer chair is a collapsible poposan (sp?) chair.
The fabric on the inside roof of my car fell down about 4 years ago. Now it’s held up by buttons. Which people seem to love, heh. Gives them something to read while in my backseat.
I fixed a pair of sandals for years with superglue, since the straps that held them on my feet kept coming loose from the sole. Sadly, my step-mom’s dog ate them.
In HS, I would go through backpacks like crazy, due to the incredibly heavy books I had for class. I had 3 3" books just for English. Anyway, the straps on my bags would break. I got tired of it, and fixed it with duct tape and safety pins.
The pocket on one of my coats is held on with small safety pins. The strange loop button hole thing is held on by black nailpolish.
I can’t tell you how many pair of pants I’ve fixed with safety pins.
My sister’s skin rashs in response to any metal that’s not surgical stainless steel, gold, or silver. So, clear nail polish goes on all watches and jean buttons.
A punk friend of mine sews patches over the holes in his clothes with dental floss.
My old computer’s fan punked out on me. So, I had to remove the case and kick start the fan every time I turned it on with a penil eraser.
Sadly, no car engine stories.
Back in the 70’s, the TVs didn’t have remotes, and still had knobs to change the channel and the volume.
Well, first the channel knob broke off. From then on, the channel had to be changed using a pair of pliers. Then the volume went toes up, and you could only hear the TV if you had a pair of tweezers sticking into the headset jack. The darned thing looked like an impressionist toolbox with tools sticking out at all angles.
A few years back, on a Friday night, the rubber belt on mt record player (yes, record player) broke. No hope of getting a spare so I fixed it with a rubber band. In A Gadda Da Vida never sounded so bad- the speed was a mess.
Back when - 1991 or thereabouts - I had to fix a temporary solution to move EDIFACT (structured format for business communications, in this case, purchase orders) messages between Tesco supermarkets in the UK and a Danish dairy conglomerate - a big one.
The order was pretty simple: It has to work, you have no budget, now put it in production 30 seconds ago. In the end, I had to use a DOS batch file as the main progam loop(!), calling two different messaging systems with different macrolanguages and moving data back and forth between them by means of temporary files - plus, for timing, a little pascal program that did nothing but busy-wait until it was time to end program execution and fall back out to the DOS loop. All of it stuff I could pull of the shelf and modify.
It was seriously ugly, crufty, against my better judgment and it worked well enough that the project received the British EDI award - not that I saw any of it, bastards.
Waaaaaay back in the day, my father and I intended to replace the 512k of RAM in our Goldstar (really! Goldstar!) 286. It was a 12Mhz machine, and boy was it the hottest thing when we bought it. A few years later, well, it wouldn’t play the new Commander Keen game due to a lack of RAM. We decided to install One Whole MB of RAM!! Boy, was this going to be one mondo upgrade!! It was so momentous an occasion that friend of mine came to the house just to witness the installation.
Due to the fact that this was our first ever IBM-Compatible computer (which is what we called it, as was the style of the times. /Abe Simpson), and also because we had never seen the inside of a computer before, things went badly. Dad managed to break the clips that held the RAM sticks in place. This computer cost him big bucks, so he’d be darned if it wasn’t going to work again. He broke out some toothpicks, which he jammed into where the clips went, then taped them to the case with masking tape. Lo and behold, the RAM sticks stayed right were they were. And the Goldstar worked just fine. Commander Keen was a great game.
My friend never trusted that computer again, and dubbed it HAL 9000 on the spot. I imagine he expected malfunction at any moment everytime we used it after that.
But Dad never “rigs” anything. He calls it “engineering”. 