Punisher Bass
He who drives a Buick
I don't think there's been a thread like this before, so here it goes. I want to see what sort of crazy/inventive/genius/insane/dangerous repairs you've come up with over the years for something that broke. Maybe it was using a piece of 20 year old bubble gum to repair the sole of your shoe, or hanging a heavy picture without the help of screws and nails, you get the idea. I've always had a mind for coming up with crazy solutions to various problems, and while my repairs might not always look the best they do work.
Here's two of my latest in a long line of MacGyvering up a quick and cheap fix.
I bought this nice all steel tube frame chair from Goodwill for the high price of $5 several months ago. Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a rather large fellow, so I wasn't sure if this was going to hold me in the long term, I figured if it broke within a week I was out next to nothing so it wouldn't be a huge loss. But as the months went by my ass got used to the chair and its ability to swivel, recline, and glide back and forth. But then last night as I was leaning back I heard a loud SNAP and suddenly was listing to one side. One of the bolts had snapped off the side of the frame.
I really didn't want to toss the chair out, so my mind got to work prototyping fixes in my head, I even did it while I was sleeping. By morning I had two plans, A: get some JB Weld and try to epoxy the bolt back on, having a tensile strength of 3000psi I figured it was worth a shot. And plan B: Get a longer bolt, some washers, and nuts from the hardware store (easier said than done on Black Friday) and rig it up so it'll never break again.
I wound up drilling another hole on the outside of the frame, using my dremel to hog the hole out even bigger since my drill bits only go up to 1/2in, so I could thread the new bolt through, put a couple washer on each side of the hole, a nut, and then everything else that came off the broken bolt.
It's not pretty, but the chair reclines smoother than it ever did before, and the only downside is that I'd can't lock it in place like before, but that feature never really worked in the first place anyway.
Total cost for the repair - $8 for the hardware and JB Weld
Total cost to date - $13
And a few weeks ago, my sister was using my lawnmower and told me that the handle on it broke off. It's 23 years old, but it still works like a charm and I'm too cheap to buy a new mower or spend $50 on a new handle.
A quick trip to Home Depot and $10 later for 20 gauge steel and pipe clamps, I had created this as a temporary fix.
Note that the C clamps are just there to hold things in place to see if works in theory, sometime in the spring I'll drill some more holes and run some bolts through there to sandwich all the parts together.
So what kind of stuff like that have you done over the years?