Most unusual repair

Stan

Only mine was on my 30'sportfishing boat that I had taken some friends out fishing in one night. We were several miles off Palm Beach and I had shut down the single engine to drift fish. After about an hour I went up on the flybridge and turned the key and nothing happened. A quick check with a test light showed that current was getting to the top mounted starter so I pulled the back off and found that the brush springs had rusted in two. I used toilet paper balled up to exert enough tension for the brushes to make contact with the commutator and the engine started. Good thing too since the breeze was blowing us further offshore and it wouldn't be long until we would have been in the Gulf Stream. That would have taken us north and even if I had gotten the engine started I doubted that I had enough fuel to make it back to home port and would have had to go into a strange inlet at night.
Those guys laughed about that for days...I never did fix the starter and ran that boat for months after that till I sold it.

I have so many stories like this that I could type all night. Like cutting two F-100 pick-up trucks in half and welding the front from one to the rear of the other and then driving it from California to Alabama the next day. That was 1994 and I still have that truck and it still drives. And I have the pictures of the surgery.

CaptRon

When my brother-in-law and I were young and knew everything, we took on a good project in Connecticut making structural repairs to Revolutionary War era buildings on a small estate. Working on a building the size of a small barn we did something wrong and it started to collapse on us, going down sideways. After we got our hearts started again we managed to brace it so we were pretty sure it wouldn't go down unless the roof fell in. It was still making some sounds, so we suspected we might not have a long time to do something about it---like go get some house jacks, or find someone who had a plan. One thing we had was some heavy nylon tow rope. My BIL suggested that we make a tourniquet and try to pull it back into plumb. It meant going back into the building and putting a lot of stress on its unstable condition, and we knew it really might collapse on us, but at the time that seemed preferable to the embarassment and financial ruin of destroying a building that was on the historical register. Anyway, we looped the rope from the bottom of the wall on one side to the top of the wall on the other, stuck a 4x4 through it, and started winding it up like a rubber band. And it worked! We got the building straightened up, braced and repaired it in ways that maintained its Colonial era character, and managed to keep doing business until we went broke in the normal uninteresting way.

I'm self taught and OJT in everything I did until about 10 years ago, so nothing was ever unconventional to me. Whatever got the job done was the right way as far as I was concerned. At the finish it had to be safe, sound, attractive, up to code, quick, and cheap, or most of the above. I've poured concrete footings for posts under a house with a crawl space too low to get on my hands and knees by rolling the mud ahead of me in a 5 gallon bucket; I've pulled stumps with levers and car jacks. Once I sat on top of a house that was technically a couple of feet too tall to move the couple of miles we had to have it moved, and lifted phone and power drop lines over it with a forked tool made of 2x4.

It's all been interesting, but it makes it hard to remember doing anything unusual in an emergency because, to a large extent, there was never that much difference between an emergency and normal. I'm glad I wasn't born wealthy; money would have solved every problem with no more effort than making a phone call, and how dull life would be then. Rich people who can't do anything for themselves just don't understand.

Stan

Well I get to hot rodding my 4 banger and slid off the trail and got high centered over the edge of the road side. The only thing I had was a 3/8"x20ft chain. So I had the three of them climb out the back window taking the chain with them. The front and back tires are off the ground but with the weight of the women on the rear bumper the back tires touch the ground.

I have the buddy throw a loop around a stump then wrap the chain around the right rear tire then had him stand on the bumper. After a couple try's we got the chain to wind up on the rear tire and pull us back onto the road.

I never left home without a shovel, chain, come-a-long, blocks and wood saw again.

T_Bone

My grain truck had the fuel pump die on the scale at the grain elevator. Ugh. Got it running enough - mostly with the starter - to get off & out of the way. Came back later that evening with an outboard gas tank & some hose, put the tank on the hood with a bunch of bungie cords, hooked it up to the float bowl, & drove it home.

--->Paul

this isent mime--but it is unusual!

Back in the early 1980s, when "Raiders of the Lost Ark" was playing in movie theaters, I took my son, then about 12 years old, to see a showing that started about 10 PM on a Saturday night. We traveled about 18 miles to the north side of Indy, and as we pulled into a parking space at the theater, I hit a hole in the parking lot, and the car suddenly wouldn't steer. I got out and found that a tie rod had separated, allowing the left front wheel of the old '70 Chrysler to go its own way. I managed to back the car into another spot. We walked a block or so to a pharmacy that was open, and got an inexpensive made-in-Taiwan set of vice grips and a small can of WD40. There were supposed to be two bolts holding the adjusment sleeve on the tie rod. One was gone. The other was rusted badly. I managed to break the remaining bolt trying to loosen it. With a flashlight propped so I could sorta see what I was doing, I had my son start the engine and turn the steering wheel slowly to the right as I lined up the tie rod. I was able to guide the sleeve into the approximate position it had been in before it came off, and then locked it as tight as I could with the vice grips. After determining that I could steer it lock-to-lock without it coming off, we drove home on the back roads at about 10 mph. I squeezed the vice grips so hard with both hands when I locked them that I bent them slightly. I still have them. I took him to the movie another evening!

The quill-return spring broke on the drill press; no quick source of another one. I took the recoil-starter assembly off a junk Sears Eager One (Tecumseh) vertical-pull lawnmower engine, and fastened it with a muffler clamp to the side of the drill press column in front of the motor. Then I took the "pulley" from a Briggs recoil starter - the part the rope winds on that fits under the shroud - and fitted it over the down-feed shaft for the drill press quill. It lined up with the recoil assembly previously installed on the column. With the rope from the Sears unit threaded into the Briggs pulley, it worked better than the original spring, so I never ordered one.

One afternoon we was out in the woods in the railbuggy
and broke a breakline up near the front.
Took a pair of vice grips and crimped it off on
that side and clamped it real tight so it didn"t leak.
We had lost all the break fluid so I got an empty
coke bottle and rinsed it out real good and went
to a nearby creek and got a bottle of water.
Filled up the master cylinder with water and drove home.
Had to flush the system out and refill it with break fluid,
but it got us home anyway.

I"m a big fan of redneck engineering.

Pooh Bear