Redneck Fixes

[prometheus578]

Ok, there rest is not bike related, but.... the thing about "red-neck fixes"/ field expedients, etc, is.... sure, they're great to make fun of, but should one ever find themselves in a similar situation, it's nice to have stored in the back of your mind just how other people managed to fix their immediate problems.

Story #1: Long ago... back when Christ was a bunker guard... I was stationed at Ft. Benning, Ga. On weekends, several buddies and I would hop in my old Camaro and go tear-assing through the training areas, zooming down the "tank trails". Ran over a stump one day and ripped my gas tank open. Luckily, I had a empty plastic gas can in the trunk in which to catch the gas as it came streaming out of the ruptured tank.
Using the windshield washer fluid hoses, I spliced into the rubber fuel line at the "in-line filter. (outer dia. of the wiper hose fit into inner dia. of the fuel line) With the gas can held in place by strapping it to a wiper blade with boot laces, I got a siphon going, gravity-fed the carb and managed to crawl back to the barracks.

Story #2: I had just finished moving my soon to be ex-wife into an apartment. As I was pulling out of the parking lot, the drive shaft on my old 4x4 Blazer snapped in half. Thought about it for a few minutes... then walked into her apt. and started rummaging through her boxes of kitchen stuff.
Went back out to my truck, removed the broken drive shaft, duct taped one of her plastic drinking cups over the output shaft housing of the transfer case (so that tranny fluid wouldn't pour everywhere) and drove home after engaging the front axle.

Story #3: Am currently doing some re-landscaping and last week needed to move the hot tub from one side of the back yard to the other. Filled 10 2-liter soda bottles with water, froze them and used them as rollers. (just like the Egyptians did building the pyramids, I think)





My brother, Sluggo, demonstrating the safe, "no-splash" way to deep fry a turkey. (He also has, in his kitchen, a pepper grinder attached to a cordless drill)





Ya know... there's a site for stuff like this called, "There, I fixed it".

http://thereifixedit.com/

[Ken Talbot]

Good to see Sluggo has a grip on Archimedes' principle. It would be a shame to see such a nice ladder go up in a big hot oil fireball!

[LoHo]

Here in the Golden State, destination for countless Dust Bowlers a couple of generations ago (including my folks), we refer to that as "Okie Rigged" (no offense, Xsive Okie, in fact, quite the opposite... my dad, born in Lookeba, OK, always said that the Dust Bowl raised the average IQ of both Oklahoma and California).

And who hasn't had to JB Weld or epoxy their turn signals back together? I did it for the third time just last week, after a year of one being almost right and the other suffering from severe ED.

I patched a holed muffler with a piece of sheet metal riveted on when I first bought Effing Bee. I've since added a big hose clamp to keep the patch tight.

And my Pickup Coil wire replacement looks like a metallic bird's nest. But inept doesn't equal ingenuity, and "it works!" is the measure of most of my repairs. On the other hand, my going-on-eight-year ZX750 project bike...she don't work so well....

[b.walker5]

A few years back, when I had my XS750, a buddy and me decided on a round trip of the South Island (approx 2500K's over 4 days). On day 3 we were travelling down the West Coast when I lost it on a corner at about 45km/h. The bike went down hard and ground the bottom out of the ignition cover. I bounced off a clay bank on the side of the road and landed back on top of the bike as it was sliding down the road, leaving a trail of alloy fragments behind it. It ripped the whole cover off before it was finished but fortunatelty didnt damage anything on the inside. But, there I was, middle of nowhere, where it doesnt just rain, the sky literally bleeds water, with nothing to cover my POINTS ignition system, and I was about 1000k's from home .

Hamish, my riding buddy, started searching the roadside for the broken bits, while I was searching me for broken bits, and managed to find most of the cover, and one bent allen bolt. I always wondered why he bothered carrying all of this, but in his tank bag was a vertible treasure chest of glues, screws, tape and tools. He had a huge array of bits and peices in that bag and by the time he was finished he had fashioned a working cover that we glued and taped to the engine, and rode home with. I've never questioned his reasoning since.








Superglue, silicon and a flattened 35mm film canister was all it took and that cover now hangs on my garage wall.