Let’s hear some of your best quick fixes or improvised products.

Saw this thread on Reddit on improvised stoves and got me thinking about how amusing the topic is;

http://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/7c3rj/pyro_petes_improvised_camp_stoves/

i see 125 views but no response..is that good or bad?? maybe all our posters have it so worked out that they never have to fall back on a quick fix or they don't want to talk about the screw up they had to patch together..

Began raining at tailgate party.
Attached umbrella to my chair using alligator clips of my jumper cables.
Continued partying.

Out trick-or-treating.
Plastic bail of DD's candy bucket broke.
Repaired it with bandaids from EDC kit.

-Blast

When the aluminum external frame of my backpack broke, I slipped a couple of green tree branches in the tubes to join them and voilà!

While camping, I use a cheap sleeping pad. I can cut parts of it for many emergency uses.

Cut the tongue off my leather belt and used with chewing gum as gasket material for leaking water pump housing.

I have a folding Kayak from Folbot, basically a drysuit with a rigid pole frame you sit in. One of the poles broke I went down to the hardware store and found a dowl rod that fit into the pole for strength and a self threading coupler to hold the pole together.

My French Canadian Father-in-law snapped his fishing rod in half on a remote lake (#@%*&!%$#@). He used a pencil and the black electric tape from around my PSK to join the 2 pieces back together; then he outfished me 3:1!

Mike

Did you know the drive shaft of a Maytag washing machine is just the right size to fit inside the base post of a microphone stand ?
Fixed two that way. Had to build a Video Camera View finder mount (that's for a 5 inch studio finder) on site out of a peice of wood and lots of gaffer's tape.

Fixing stuff is so common and normal for me that it's like you're asking what I had for lunch last Monday. It's just part of the flow of life.

I did notice that I needed my soldering iron for something 4 weekends in a row. (car wiring harness, washing machine wiring harness ground, radio diode replacement, < something else>) It was unusual in that I hadn't needed the iron for a year or more before.

The only "survival" thing that comes to mind is that the pump on my Coleman Feather 400 backpacking stove was squeaking while on a trip so I used a little fly floatant to lube it.......

Holding one of the lenses in my glasses w/ a piece of wire to replace a stripped screw until December 15th.

In college, had a lab partner accidentally break a PCB. (He dropped his pack, forgetting it was in the front pocket- crunch.) No time to replace it it, so taped the two parts together as I could from the sides, stripped some wire from the spool in my pack. Licked a gummy bear, rubbed the bits of wire on it so they would be a little sticky so that they wouldn't run away for a minutes or two, put them on the traces. Wrapped the entire thing in electricians tape.

It worked long enough for us to show the prof. Then the professor picked it. Didn't work any more.

LOL on a business trip to Oklahoma city, pre 9/11, my glasses leg broke the night before my flight out eary the next morning. So I took off the other side and then pulled the core out of some parachute cored and used one of the strans to lash the outter sheath around the screw post and then tied a slip knot to keep on my head, Looked like one of those fancy eye glass straps. So inpressive some guy on the plane ask where he could get one.
Cheers

To quote John Prine "Put a penny in a burnt out fuse", but that was along time ago.
Buddy broke an ax handle at camp one year. Used a chunk of 2X4, whittled down by 3 of us, fit great...still hangs in the wood shed for kindling. Whittled with draw knife, folder, and sandpaper. Took us a dozen pops and only 2 band-aids.
And that was a long time ago too.

Good to hear from you Smash....flowers are natures organic anti-irritant, post-disaster, pre-hunting trip fixer...and they make the ladies smile..good for you!

Friends car blew a radiator hose one day, and of course he had no tools, let alone a spare hose. I walked the shoulder of the really deserted road for a while and found an old V-8 can that looked to be 'bout the right size. Used my Leatherman to remove both ends of the can, and to cut the hose at the break. Slid the can into the ends of the hose, used some wire found in the dirt as a "clamp" on both sides of the cut, poured in some water from our five gallon can (we were on a camping trip, otherwise he would have had no spare water either), and off we went. The patch worked so well he dillydallyed 'bout a month before replacing the hose...

There used to be a story going around about a guy who used a live .22 round as a replacement fuse in his car. Story also said that the round cooked off, the slug (or maybe the case) hitting him where no guy wants to be hit. I don't know if that actually happened or not...

Like everyone else, had to fix my glasses on a fishing trip. Screw popped out, and fishing line passed through the screw hole, several times, worked great the rest of the week.

Similar story as JeffD,

The house I live in now as built by an electrician, he and his family lived in the house for 17 years, then I (should say the Bank, DW and I) bought it. In our first winter I had the gas furnace inspected/serviced and the techniciam found the tin-foil wrapper from a cigarette pack wrapped around a blown fuse in the furnace! The heat exchanger also had a crack in it and I had to replace the entire furnace.

Along the same topic, we could often smell exhaust fumes within the house (we were blaming the new furnace) but could never find the actual source. After a couple of months I discovered that the gas water heater's plastic exhaust pipes were never glue together at the joints, only held together by friction and the fumes were leaking from there.

Two dangerous defects about 4 feet apart in a "new to me" house!

Mike

I can think of 2-

Night diving about a 1/2 mile off the Oahu coast, the strap for my mask broke, so used my buddy's velcro dive watch band to improvise a strap, and finished the dive. About 10 minutes later, flashlight quit, but had a teenie spare, enough to kick back to shore. I have kept a pass through velcro watch band on my dive watch since.

Driving home from Tombstone, the fan belt broke, we used 6 shoelaces all woven together to replace it. A state highway patrolman stopped, looked at it, said "stranger things have worked", and drove off.

I think I can top the house repair story. I went to replace an in the wall gas heater that didn't work in our "new to us" built in 1928 house. When tearing out the wall to remove the flue, I discovered that the installer had used newspaper wrapped around the flue pipe to I insulate it I guess. The paper was all charred and burned to a dark brown. This was inside the wall, between the nice, dry, wooden stud frame with a nice vent to the roof...Heavens knows what would have happened if the heater had still been working. Just one of many so-called "repairs" that the previous owner did around the place that I still find occasionally.

John E.