Your Best Emergency "jury-rig" job

[Jack]

A great thread is developing titled "shoelace saved me" or something like that. It is some great reading.

I wanted to capitalize on the creative mojo and do a formal thread on some of your best "jury-rig". (and drive the "that was unsafe" and "it would not have broken if you took care of it" crowd NUTS)

One of my favorite "rig" stories is in a museum at Hill Airforce Base in Utah. It was a small exhibit about the combat engineers, who basically jury-rigged stuff. They has examples of how they sealed fuel line holes on planes with aluminum from beer cans held in place with hose clamps. They also used empty coke bottles as insulators for high tension lines on ship, I can't remember what else they had.. I visited 15 years ago, but it was fun to see.

Interested in hearing your best rigs.

My best was probably with my brother, when his rear axle broke on his 4 wheel drive beater we got a hold of one of those tow dollys... disconected driveline to rear wheels, and used power to the front wheels to drag the thing home.. sort of towing the back wheels with the front.

Another time we were recovering a car with no brakes at all.. we hooked up a tow strap to the good car.. which was behind the no-brake vehicle. Both cars drove under their own power.. but when it came time to stop my brother in the in front would just coast, and I, being in the back, would brake for both cars. It was 2am, so we were just putting our own lives in danger, no one else.

[Warren Weber]

(snip) Twice helped out tourists. One was in a forest camp ground. With wife and 3 children and no money. 40 something Buick would not start. Starter motor bad. I removed starter and found broken spring that pushed motor brush tight to armature. Heated ( on Coleman stove flame) end of spring to remove temper. Reshaped spring and reheated and retempered (in motor oil) for tension. Reinstalled and tourist was on his way. Another time found a couple young men with a Jeep at the top of a steep 4 wheel road that had broke a front brake line. I ran a metal screw in the end of brake line. They happened to have a can of brake fluid so we added as needed and brakes were sufficant to get them down the mountain.

>

[David Starr]

Not mine, but in my house......

Our house was built in 1918, and the waste line from the toilet to the cast iron main line was lead. After 50+ years of use, the lead "elbow" just below the toilet wore through (probably all the corn :-)). Anyway, I opened up the ceiling below the bathroom in order to replace the lead with PVC, and discovered that all the sewer lines in the bathroom were lead. No big deal, sez I; I'll just replace them all.

Now for the good part........ Connecting the stub at the tub drain to the drain pipe running to the main line was a radiator hose. It still had the "Atlas" label on it from a Standard Oil gas station.

And the best part......... The previous owner, who bragged to us about how he had replaced all the old bathroom fixtures with new ones 2 years before we bought it was a licensed plumber!

I also found, while remodeling the dining room, that the original knob & tube wiring from the light switch to the light fixture was madfe up of a bunch of short pieces of wire soldered together & covered with tarred sleeving. The longest piece was about a foot long. Evidentally, they didn't waste nuthin' back in the day. I'm guessing that the light was the last thing they wired in the house & they just used all the short ends, rather than tossing them out.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Retired Shop Rat: 14,647 days in a GM plant. Now I can do what I enjoy: Large Format Photography

Web Site:

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

[Jeff Wisnia]

The "dumb luck" fix which comes to mind occurred with my 57 Chevy (Inline 6 cylinder engine.)

I was in grad school in Philly in '58 and one day when I went to drive off the car's engine flooded out shortly after it started.

Turned out that the vacuum choke pulloff piston operated in a cylinder whose counterbored open end was supposed to be blocked off by a Welsch plug (A convex metal disk which expands and wedges into a counterbore when it's struck in a direction which flattens it.)

That plug had fallen out and disappeared. So, the vacuum all "ran out" of the end of the cylinder and the piston couldn't open the choke against the thermostat spring's pull. The choke remained closed and the engine flooded.

Wouldja believe that a US dime was eggsackly the right size for a light push fit in that counterbore? It got me home where I smeared some Elmer's glue behind it and that dime stayed there as long as I had that car, and probably a lot longer.

Jeff

[C & M]

This isn't much but shortly after our first child was born I became disabled. Some gracious people gave us some chickens so that we could have eggs and meat - they roamed the field for food. Unfortunately, they had to be housed at night to deter predators and the broken down shed had only a semblance of a door. I was able cobble together a door with scraps but I couldn't afford hinges. Looking about I found an old tire and I fashioned hinges out of a coupleof pieces of the sidewall. It closed so forcefully I had to make a few shallow, parallel-to-the frame cuts to weaken the 'hinge'. That was 25 years ago and the current owners are still using the same hinges.

[Pope Secola VI]

They weren't webers, I think they were solexes.

[Jack]

As a kid I worked at a place with delivery vans.. we had a supercold winter, and place was too cheap to have good batteries, so a couple of mornings nothing would start. Finally figured out to go to air-cooled VW bus first, open engine comparment and put a couple of Sterno (canned fuel) in and lit them. After a while the engine compartment was warm enough that it started fine. We then used it to jump all the rest. That darn VW had no heater at all.. we would often pre-heat the passenger compartment with 3 or 4 sternos.. then jump in, put them out and drive off. and it was warm for the first few minutes of the trip at least.. after that it was all downhill.

[Pope Secola VI]

How about going into a sand bar on Khoueng Hongsa river in Laos and dinging the three bladed prop on the old DeHavilland DHC3 Otter on an obstruction. One of the blades had a 8 inch curl back 90 degrees from the plain of rotation. Well get out a hack saw and cut the offending blade back to where it is straight. Then use a string to measure the distance from the center of the prop hub to the end of the cut blade and duplicate the cut back on the other two blades. Plug up the bullet holes in the fuel tank with bamboo, leather and duct tape. Load some more fuel into the tanks and fire the beast up before bad guys showed up.

[TDKozan]

Does cleaning, rebuilding and syncing the carbs on a '67 Spitfire by the side of the road in the middle of AZ with a roll of duct tape, a pair of slip-joint pliers, a pair of empty Slurpee (c) cups with straws, a liter of water, a nail-file and a Leatherman qualify?

TK

[DanG]

We were up in the high country on a deer hunting trip. We had gone over 20 miles into and up some really wild country. Broke the end off the rear leaf spring. With the help of an axe and tie wire, a healthy Aspen trunk got us back down to civilization.

(top posted for your convenience) ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ Keep the whole world singing . . . . DanG (remove the sevens) [e-mail]

[Jeff McCann]

Isn't that a weekly task with those old Webers?

Jeff

[Antipodean Bucket Farmer]

While I don't wish to make a firm judgement of your honesty...

It seems logical that, people who have actually engaged in the type of "business ventures" that you have described on this NG...

....Would already know better than to boast about it.

....And, those who didn't learn such discretion, wouldn't still be alive.

(???)

[Mark]

water main to a house was broke and shut off at the street

turned off the main valve inside the house and backfed the house through a garden house hooked between the garden bibs of both houses.

Mark

[Jeff McCann]

Many years ago, I was a supervisor of the final test department for a company that did testing and validation of ICs. We had a set of chips for a DoD contract and we were under a deadline. The building's AC crashed and the heat buildup killed the computers, which were old models that we actually programmed with punched paper tape spools. However, we noticed it was a very breezy day, so we rigged up a wind tunnel of sorts to keep the computers cool enough to run. We propped open the doors on the windward side of the building, and used scrap cardboard, plywood and duct tape to seal off open areas and channel a cooling breeze through the final test area. It worked well enough to get the production run finished.

Jeff on M.S.

[Jeff McCann]

My old '69 Bug heated the passenger compartment like a friggin' blowtorch, but then I never drove it anywhere REALLY cold. I wish I still had it, although the Jaguar my wife got me is some comfort for the loss many years ago . . .

Jeff

[Norminn]

clipped

As young newlyweds, we had two junkers - a VW bug and a Simca. Simca died, then came the bug. Had to push it in order to start it, and since I was clutch-impaired, he drove and I pushed. If we had just driven it and wanted to restart it, had to pour water over the engine. I was pregnant when we got a new car - a lemon Datsun - and we made a pact to push it to start it, as well. Just to make the neighbors think we did it just for fun. I think it took me about two years to learn to drive stick.

My dad taught me to drive. Not a patient person. Lesson #1 was in the parking lot of the forest preserve. Lesson #2 was on the expressway, Chicago, rush hour. I HAD to drive, and NOBODY would wreck a car that my dad was riding in :o)

[Stormin Mormon]

Fellow with a broken throttle cable on his car. The sleeve had rotted out. The cable was fine, but the cable was limp. I took some nylon line, and tied to the place the throttle cable atached. Loop it around something else, and ended up with a loop he could pull with his left hand. Pull the rope, and the engine goes faster.

I'll think of a few more.

[Stormin Mormon]

Calling on the members of misc.Survivalism. We've got the best fixer uppers, lets prove it to the home repair guys.

Be sure to mention which group you read.

[Steve Stone]

Fuel filter in my 88 Chrysler is underneath the body near a rear wheel well. One of the hose clamps rusted and broke off the hose during an extended trip last summer. Had no tools of parts in the car, only a pocket knife. I "borrowed" a clamp from under the hood from a vaccuum hose that could get away without a clamp but this clamp was too big and would not tighten down enough to seal the fuel line. I un wrapped some black plastic ecetrical tape from a dressed wire under the hood and wrapped it around the fuel hose, put the clamp over the taped hose, tightened down and now had a good seal, good enough to drive 85 miles back home. All work performed with my 26 year old pocket knife.

[DesignGuy]

Uhhh... yeah. Most definately :)