Nice stories. I’ve done my share of side-of-the-road car fixes, but the best was when my car (Mitusbishi Starion, woot!) died on I-285. I coasted to the shoulder and tried to restart the car, but no love. Popped the hood and looked around until I found a vaccuum housing not attached. The bracket had broken. This housing attached to the side of the engine, so I needed something to hold it there tight enough to at least mostly seal. Looking around, I spotted a ubiquitous chunk of tread from a truck tire (interstate alligator, we call 'em). I grabbed it, stripped a long piece of steel belt out and used that to tie the housing to the side of the engine. It sealed just enough to drive the car the last 20 miles home where we could properly rig a new bracket.
fixed a windshield wiper with a hamburger wrapper once.
It was snowing heavily and a coworker needed to get home from work. I pulled the wiper arm off and saw that the receiver splines were stripped out. Found a Wendy’s hamburger wrapper (the metalized ones) and jammed it over the drive splines and it created enough of a grip for the wiper to work.
Years ago I was trying to service a carburetor in place on a vehicle. Took the top off and then took out the metering jets to clean. one was larger than the other and as luck would have it I dropped the smaller jet into the larger hole. To get it out I cut up a 7 up can and rolled the aluminum around a pencil. I flared one end slightly and ran it down the hole. The rolled up tube slipped over the jet but had enough spring action to grab it.
Years ago, back in the 80’s when MacGyver was prime time television, is when I had my most memorable. What made it even more-so was I did not own a TV at the time and I hadn’t ever watched a single episode. I had heard the name, but having never seen an episode, I really didn’t understand what it was all about.
I had bought a sailboat a year or two before and one summer day a buddy and I were going to go out on it. I kept the boat at a storage area located on a local lake, one of those places that has a bunch of covered stalls that you lock yourself. Well the whole yard also has a padlocked gate. Anyway, me, my buddy, and a cooler of beer made the hour trip to the lake and I discovered I left my keys to the stall at home. Going back home would take 2 hours off the day trip, making that solution impractical. Well, a few minutes went by with us thinking of what to do and someone else opened the gate, so we drove into the yard to my stall. Then, wondering what to do, I decided to pick the lock.
Now, I had never picked a lock in my life. I had a roommate in college who “apprenticed with a locksmith” (his words) in high school and described the procedure to me once several years ago. I didn’t have any tools, but I found a small screwdriver and a hammer in the truck and I had a split ring on my keychain, so I beat the split ring straight into a “pick” and had my buddy use the screwdriver as a tensioner. In less than 5 minutes of picking (with my buddy saying “this ain’t gonna work” the whole time), the cylinder turned and the lock opened. We got the boat out, stepped the mast, and spent 3 or 4 hours on the lake, drinking beer.
The whole time, my buddy was calling me “MacGyver”, which, of course, I had no idea what he meant since I had never seen the show.
When we got off the lake, as the sun was going down, there wasn’t anyone coming by to open the gate to put the boat back in. We waited a bit, folding the sails and bringing the mast down, but it was obvious nobody was coming by. So my buddy said, “that shouldn’t be a problem for MacGyver”. Now, I had admitted faking it the first time, since I hardly believed it myself, but I said we could give it a try. Well, apparently, the front gate lock was very worn (I guess from having so many different keys opening it) that it took us less than 30 seconds. Of course, we didn’t lock the stall and we had the boat back in and were on the road before it got dark.
I have since become a homebrewer and just about every homebrewer I’ve met has done some MacGyvering in practicing his hobby. That’s what homebrewing is about, however, so I don’t think that really counts.
excavating (for a mind)
The first one that comes to mind is my glasses. About five or six years ago, one of the screws in my glasses went spoing, never to be seen again. So I stuck one end of a paperclip in the screw hole, wrapped it around five or six times, and cut off the extra. I’m continually having problems with the screw on the other side, but that paper clip has held up just fine, and nobody ever notices it until I point it out.
One time I need some really big washers with really small holes. I searched and search hardware stores far and wide trying to find some. Then I finally went “well duh” and drilled some small holes in some quarters.
One of my father’s favorite repairs when I was a kid.
I did this with scrap aluminum. Had the same “well duh” moment. Hell I was 30 or 40 before I realized that if I turned the jelly jar upside down the jelly would come out easier. Gravity, who knew?
My Dad was an aerospace engineer and along with those skills come a ton of ME skills especially if one is into cars. He owned a handful of Audi’s in the early 80’s and it got to a point where the service shops would not touch his car because of the various mods he made to his cars.
While the mods to the cars were the point of that anecdote, I found it funny that he ever took a car to a shop. My whole life he fixed anything any everything as far as car repairs go, with the exception of body work and large scale fabrication. Tranny needs to be replaced, no problem. He had one case that was a particular pain and ended up entirely replacing it three times in a weekend. He was an electrician in the Navy and did aeronautical engineering, so maybe he was forgiven for taking three tries to fix a bitch of a tranny issue by feel in a weekend.
He taught me many cool things, among those was that starters can sometimes be revived temporarily by striking them with a hammer. Not sure if this was just loosening rust on the coils, freeing the motion, or what, but it worked.
The one opportunity I had to try this when a neighbor I didn’t know had a starter issue, they looked at me as if I was a sorcerer of some sort. The exchange was pretty funny.
Me: Your starter isn’t turning over. Do you have a hammer?
Her: looking quite leery Yeah… Here.
I hit the starter a few times and asked her to start it. It started.
Her: “What did you do?”
Me: I hit it a few times with the hammer.
Her: “Why?”
Me: “I’m not sure, but it works sometimes”
She gave me a look that said “You were gonna kill me and leave my body in the woods, but something stopped you. I’m gonna haul ass out of here now.”
You’re welcome lady, you’re welcome.
Drilling small holes at the base of my kitchen trash can to keep a vacuum from forming when I pull the bag out, seem less cool by comparison, and actually neither of these may be MacGuyver-esque.
Oh hey, my homebrewing gear saved my basement last week.
Chicago had a fuckload of rain all at once, and we had some major flooding around here. It was bad enough that usually my basement gets a tiny leak during the worst times, but for some reason (later discovered to be a tree root getting into a pipe) this time, we weren’t so lucky. I woke up at 5 am that morning, took a quick shower, and wandered into the kitchen to hear the sound of running water in the basement.
A quick dash downstairs revealed some old pipe coming in through the outer wall, pouring in water from outside, and the nearby drain was clogging. I stuffed a 6-gallon brewing bucket under the pipe and learned that it would fill in 10 minutes. Fortunately I had two so I could swap them out quickly.
Husband and I confirmed that the water was not coming in under pressure (like a water pipe break), so he put a plastic baggie around the end of the pipe and secured it with Gorilla tape, then into some kind of vertically-positioned opening (overflow valve?) in that pipe, I put a rubber stopper with a hole in it, inserted one end of a racking cane, then attached a siphon hose onto the other end and ran that into the nearby utility sink. We had to mouth-start the siphon to get it running against gravity but fortunately it all looked like groundwater, and we haven’t contracted anything nasty from it.
Oh, I remembered a good MacGyver story.
Lets face it. Ole MacGyver’s tricks ran the gambit from thats pretty damn clever to that will work to that will work once in awhile to that might work once in a thousand times with practice to that will probably never work to physics actually doesn’t work that way and its actually impossible.
I like the show myself. Had a coworker that HATED it.
Now, the back story. In college he made some stuff known for going boom. A prank went wrong and he almost got in deep shit. I was peripherally involved.
So, watching a Mac Episode. Well, at one point Mac needed to make a big boom so he’s gathering the chemicals to make the same stuff my friend did. Well, they changed the ingredients a bit but Mac ended up with giant bowl of wet purple crystals so I knew what the fuck that was supposed to be. A big assed batch of it. And this stuff makes nitroglycerin look stable.
So, Macs got it made, rigs a boobby trap or timer or some such. Timer or boobby trap or whatever goes off. The shit DOES NOT explode. Total fail. Mac has to come up with yet another trick now.
I LOVED going to work the next morning and going “Bob, remember when you made X?”. And he HATED that ever being brought up (probably understandably). “MacGyver made it last night too! And even he couldn’t get it blow up. You’re better than MacGyver!!!”
Back in the pre-www message board days, (holy crap, thirty years ago next year,) I wrote a simple BBS program. One problem I had was that my modem did not feature any fancy “auto-answer.”
I overcame this limitation by taking an old rotary phone, insulating the clapper and one of the bells of the ringer mechanism from the chassis, then wiring them up to a cable cut off a worn-out joystick, using the leads for the fire button. My program’s “wait for call” subroutine just looped until the “fire button” was pressed: “Bbbbbbbbbrinnng - screeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee…”
Edit: Also around the same time, a magneto and a long length of telephone cord with a bulb from a disposable flash: Remote detonator for home-made explosives. Maybe a bit more “MacGyver.”
Back in my high school PreCal class, we had to do a project each semester involving writing and solving a problem, and creating a visual display of the problem and presenting it to the class. Most kids just made posters, but I was the type to go above and beyond. The problem I wrote involved a car driving. I made a 3D landscape on some foamboard, with trees and buildings surrounding a circular road/track in the middle. At the center of the circle I put a small electric motor (pulled out of a Tonka 4x4 toy truck) and ran a piece of baling wire from the motor’s axle to the road, where I attached a cardboard cutout car to the other end of the baling wire. So when the motor was running it would spin the wire around and around and the car would “drive” around and around the circle very fast. It worked great and I was proud of it.
On the day the projects were due, I arrived at class and began to prepare and… the piece of baling wire was missing! I know I had it just minutes earlier, but now it was gone. (I suspected foul play at the time.) I didn’t bring any extra wire, and there was no time to try to find something elsewhere. Then it hit me–I pulled about half of the wire out of the spine of my spiral notebook, bent it back and forth to break it off, straightened it out, and attached it to the motor and cardboard car. It was just barely strong enough to support the weight of the car. But it worked!
Those Diff-Safes are also the perfect size to replace the pins in a Coulter Multi-Timer. A blob of paint on top for color coding and there you go.
Forceps are also very useful for leaky hoses and such. I used a pair once on my old clunker of a car. Worked great until I could get to the mechanic. But he didn’t give them back to me, the rat.
They’re now a roach clip.
“Only in a Jeep” LOL
Coincidentally, someone posted a collection of pics on ImgUR recently.
I hear it in my mind in the voice of Morbo and that cracks me up.
My life is pretty much held together with baling twine and duct tape.
Another collection (not played for humor) with some really cool ideas.
Dayum. Some really good ideas in that one standingwave