Changing the oil on my 76 Chevy plow truck. Getting her ready for winter. All is going well until I can’t find my oil filter wrench. Hmm. Often, I can just wrestle the filter off. I don’t put them on but hand tight after all. Not this time though. Won’t budge.
What to do. I don’t have to drive the truck, and I could leave the old filter on. To go buy a wrench is an hour and a half round trip drive to NAPA. I have heard of people driving a screw driver through a filter and turning it off that way. Sounds like a real mess.
I was in my shed trying to figure out how to fashion an oil filter wrench when I had an epiphany. What’s this? 28oz Rigging axe. My new one. Nah. That’s just crazy. Should I? Nah. But, then….
What to do. Hmmmm…… Pickle jar. It’s basically an upside down pickle jar. Butter knife works well on a stuck jar. Hmmm.
Worked like a charm. Just like you hit the top of a jar with a knife to bust it free, I used the axe to hit the filter on the corner and turn it, and break the seal. After about ten hits, I saw that it was moving, I was able to muscle it off.
Do try this at home. :). Or at least I would not recommend trying it on the road.
A long time ago, I drove an old Nissan Sentra that was sold to me from a friend for $400. It had a few problems that I eventually fixed, with one that had me stumped. It dribbled coolant from somewhere on the end of the engine, and I could not figure out where it was coming from. After much head scratching, my dad and I used a few mirrors to find a freeze plug in the block had rusted out.
A replacement freeze plug was maybe $1.00, but how to get the old one out and drive in the new one without pulling the engine? Easy enough. Put the car up on jack stands, remove the passenger side wheel, get a drill with a 2.5" hole saw and cut a hole right through the sheet metal inner fender. Dig out the old plug then carefully use a socket on an extension to hammer in the new plug. Fixed!
Ha, oil filters. I changed the oil for an ex girl friend once and couldn’t get the damn filter off. I hammered a big screw driver right through the side of the the filter to remove it. Fuck it.
Good jobs. Ya never really know what is really in your tool box until you start putting two and two together. Hole saw. Ha! Good idea. Love em. Any tool that can spin your ass around as well as cut material is a good tool.
Just Friday night I was working on my wife’s tri bike. She has an arrow water bottle that is supposed to fit in-between her arrow bars. But… it never did quite fit right - it kept falling over.
Herrumph. She saw the gleem in my eye and by gosh I can fix this. Frankly, I was tired of dicking around with it.
Hmmmm… The bottle is plastic… malleable. So, a bit of propane torch and some very hot fingers later it fits like a charm.
Some years ago, I had an old car and not much money. The fuel tank developed a small leak due to rust. At that moment, I didn’t have the money for a new tank, so I needed a temporary solution. I remembered a good friend’s tale of impromptu repairs made to submarines underway - layer of duct tape, paint, layer of duct tape, paint, etc. I figured “Hey, if it’s good enough for the US Navy, it’s good enough for my old car,” and besides, I had plenty of duct tape and paint, and nothing to lose… Sure enough, it worked! Later, I mentioned this to my mechanic (who was, at that time, a friend with benefits.) He laughed and laughed, until he figured out that By Golly, it WAS working. I never did put a new tank on that car - drove it another year or two, then sold it to a teenage neighbor who is still driving it with that “temporary” repair…
But my fix pales in comparison to another one made by my college roommate. She had an old Chevy Nova (early seventies, IIRC,) that developed a radiator leak. I’m still not sure what led her to the conclusion that bubble gum might work, but every few weeks, she’d just add another piece or two. I don’t remember specifically, but there was one particular brand that worked better than others. Seems like it was Hubba Bubba, or maybe Bubblicious. She got a lot of mileage out of her bubble gum, though!
About 5 years ago I completely rebuilt my computer, changing out everything but the case. The heatsink had these flimsy plastic pegs, that promptly broke the first time I tried to put them in. Replacements were $1 online, but shipping and handling was $6. Refusing to pay $6 to ship a $1 part, I said screw it and looked around for something else that would work.
I noticed that the screws holding the fan in place on an old burned out power supply was just the right size for the holes on the heat sink and in the motherboard for the pegs. I wrapped the screws in a layer of electrical tape, screwed them in, and presto, the heat sink was in, with a tighter fit than those pegs would’ve gave. I ran that computer for 5 years without a bit of trouble. I’d still be running it now, but the video card’s fan failed, the wires to that fan melted, which somehow fried the video card and the power supply. Everything else in that computer still works.
Recently, my house had a major plumbing problem. Since I’m pretty handy, I don’t bug my landlord to do repairs I can do myself, if they’re going to cost <$20. I began snaking every drain in the house, and this didn’t fix the problem. I knew my snake wasn’t long enough to reach the problem, and called my landlord, who I knew had an industrial snake. He dropped it off, and I got back to snaking the pipes. I went to take off the clean out cap on the pipe that leads from the tub, and the pipe broke in 2 separate places. This was an old cast iron pipe, that was original to the house. Due to the nature of the break, there was no way to repair it with pvc piping without cutting the pipe back a bit. The landlord already had a plumber scheduled to come out the next week to replace all the pipes, so I wasn’t going to put that much work into repairing it.
Instead, I got a spare drain hose I had laying around, attached it with an adjustable steel clamp to the tub drain, ran the other end into the break on the cast iron pipe, and sealed the break around the drain pipe with duct tape and plumbers putty. It held without leaking a drop for almost a week before the plumbers arrived to replace all the piping.
I put a laminate wood floor (engineered wood) in my basement. The installation directions said the boards had to acclimate to the temperature and RH of my room for at least 72 hours before installation.
I needed a way to stack the wood so that air could circulate around all surfaces, so I figured I needed to put spacers between each board as I stacked them. The spacers must be small, very cheap (I would need a few thousand of them), and soft (so they would not scratch the wood). Solution? Q-Tips. I stacked the boards about 20-high, and placed a three or four Q-tips between each board. Worked like a champ.
One tool I find a million uses for: dental floss.
We do quite a bit of technical photography at work, and I use waxed dental floss to float specimens in the air. When there’s a white background, the dental floss can’t be seen in the photo.
I’ve also used waxed dental floss to run a line between two nails during construction projects. You don’t need to tie knots; because it’s waxed, it sticks to itself, and you simply wrap it a few turns around each nail. And because dental floss is so small and light, there’s very little droop.
A couple of months ago I was making two lasagnas and I ran out of cheese. I didn’t have time to go out and get more, because I had people coming over. But I did have a zucchini. So I got a peeler and started peeling thin little slices off the zucchini until I had shredded the whole thing. I mixed the thin little zucchini slices in with the cheese. And it worked! Now I had enough to finish the second lasagna. By substituting zucchini for cheese! It was a big hit.
I know what you’re thinking: “So you made vegetable lasagna? So what?” But the thing is I hadn’t planned on putting zucchini in it at all. I was proud because I know a lot of people would have panicked and done something stupid. But I improvised a solution and it worked out great.
Leak in the roof soaked the carpet just next to the backdoor. Dad and B-i-L peel back the carpet, sop up the extra water, but the carpet is soaked, and if it’s put back down, it’ll mold. The weather is still wet, and even with a fan on it, it’ll take forever to dry out.
I suggest a desiccant, but no one’s listening to me. So, I go out to the garage, find the crystal kitty litter and a pair of pantyhose. Fill the hose 3/4’s full of kitty litter and tie it off. Bingo, an arrangeable, permeable bag of desiccant that fits perfectly against the doorframe and under the carpet, plus, it doesn’t have to be swept up later.
Decades ago I was commuting about an hour to school in a VW bug. It had a loose distributor wire. Once in a while the wire would detach itself (probably because of all the vibration as the vehicle tried to maintain 55 mph uphill and against the wind) and I’d have to stop and reconnect it, so that the car would fire on all four cylinders and stop doing the cha-cha. I’d tried various things to keep it stuck in place but nothing worked until the day I slapped a big ol’ gob of chewing gum on it. A week later I checked on it and the gum had vulcanized into a solid gray-green mass.
Ah, VW bugs require a lot of mechanical skill and imagination.
I had an old bug converted to a Baja that I used to play around in the forest hills where I live. I was way up in the moutains once when the throttle cable broke off right behind the gas pedal. It’s a wire cable with a little nub on the end that fits in a hole on the gas pedal apparatus. Well the nub had broken off and all that was left was about 1/2 inch of straight cable sticking out. I would need to pull it to get the carb to work.
So I got my little pair of vice grips on the end of the cable, folded the gas pedel back, took off my shoes and with the vice grip between my toes I pulled on the cable and drove home.
Always kept a spare cable in the glove be after that.
The kid’s '93 Tracer ignition switch broke. It still would unlock the steering column, but wouldn’t work the electric parts of it. A little time with a multi-meter and one trip to Radio Shack later, the car had a small box with an on-off switch and a push-to-start button mounted on the dash next to the steering column. The kid tends to be a little rough when flipping switches, however. The third on-off switch I installed was a 50 amp ceramic and brass knife switch. She never wore that one out.
Speedometer cables on old VW bugs run off of the left front wheel hub. When the old cable bound up and snapped, it tore up the fitting that secured it to the hub. I made a new one out of ball-point pen barrel.
A readily available replacement for an MG Midget throttle cable is a rear brake cable from a bicycle.
I can’t remember all the times I used wire coat hangers to fix cars. They (or pieces cut from them) make great cotter pins and exhaust hangers.
I didn’t want to remove the gas tank from my totally salt-rusted, hail-dinged, deer-dented S10 pickup in order to fix the fuel pump, so I cut a hole in the bed instead. Patched the hole with a piece of cookie sheet and some sheet metal screws.
Crazy? These ideas would be considered run-of-the-mill for the crowd I hung with in high school.
The top AA battery got stuck in a mini Mag-lite. There’s no way to apply pressure from the top, at all. Rummaging through the useless stuff in my fix-it kit, I spotted superglue and a metal rod (a disposable hex key). Glue rod to battery, pull battery out.
This one wasn’t so much crazy as very old-fashioned.
I had brought some kimono to my grandparents’ at my mom’s insistence. I was going to put one on when I discovered I didn’t have the correct bra (normal bras are bad for kimono because they, uh, make ya perky, which is the exact opposite of what you want. I usually use a sports bra). I did however have some strips of fabric which I usually use as extra tying things and had been meaning to sew up properly. Fortunately, in this case, they weren’t. So I went old-school and wrapped around the offending anatomy until it was flat-ish.
Kimono lends itself to kludges, because so much of its history is about home-made clothes. Latest make-do I did was when, for the first time ever, I needed to pad out something to get that appropriate cylinder shape (or at least keep the top of the obi from disappearing into the crevasse between my stomach and boobs. Hello dieting.). Pair of socks, the velcro belt designed for that that I never had to use, and bingo, bango, bongo, I’m all good.
I’ve also enlisted paper clips, binder clips, and rubber bands into holding parts of the obi bow together.
To got to other end of the spectrum of geekdom, I made my computer into an alarm clock during school using iTunes, the Task Scheduler, and a script that basically just hit spacebar (to start the music). I know there’s itunes alarm clocks out there but the one I was using wasn’t reliable. The sad thing, is I know a true geek could’ve put in a snooze function and stuff using the same script writer I was. What can I say, I’m not a programmer (unless you count HTML, which I don’t, because, sheesh).
My wife was just telling me the other day about the time she fixed her glasses with dental floss. She was driving back to KC from Las Vegas with her sister. They were out in the middle of nowhere when the screw from her glasses popped out and she didn’t have an eyeglass repair kit. So she looped some floss through the screw holes and tied it up and that got her home!
I did that once. Ended up with half a shredded oil filter still stuck on. :rolleyes: Finally knocked it loose with a cold chisel and hammer, tapping at the edge of the base in the “loosen” direction.
