Improvising, Where Necessity is the Mother of Invention

It is sometimes better to hit the “mechanic” with the shovel before he damage the equipment beyond repair with a hammer, pliers, chicken wire , shifting spanner etc.

Then put your damn tool down and back away slowly... because if you need to use a hammer, thats only when the mechanic doesn’t know what’s he’s doing.

In that case, it won’t be the mechanic doing the hitting.

A technician was called in to repair a stopped production line.The intermittent stopping had nearly driven him crazy.

He looked the machine over,went to a spot and tapped it with his small hammer.

The machine started up and ran fine.

He presented a bill for $500 to the owner.

500 dollars!!And you were here only 5 minutes..I want an itemized bill for this.

So the Technician gave him this bill :Tapping on machine with hammer $5.

Knowing where to tap:$495.00

Anyone who had performed maintenance for any period of time know the value of a well placed tap to check intermittent switch contacts,loose wires,broken or cold solder joints,broken traces on circuit boards.Many intermittent problems can be made evident by tapping.

(Of course,taking a ten pound sledgehammer to a radio is not tapping,that's hitting.)

To dislodge a stuck rock,I guess you would send an engineer to Mars to fix it?

In the nuclear navy we referred to this as high energy rate mechanical acceleration. In one instance we designed and provided a high energy rate acceleration device (20 0z hammer) with attached accelerometer for process qualification, operator training and recording of QA records for the process. The instance where this was used was peining a crack closed in a primary system component using a specified nose radius punch and the hammer to allow the ship to proceed to a shipyard for more permanent repairs.

I was wondering when the Navy was going to speak up. There’s plenty of material there.

A tool is only as good as the man who knows how to use it. Whether it’s a paper clip, a foil chewing gum wrapper or a 20oz Ball Peen hammer.

You will know when the country boys are running NASA,they will pack duct tape,baling wire and vise grips on every rover.

the responses so far has lost my original intent, and that’s fine.

Actually at 143,430,000 million miles from earth. They wouldn't be packing anything because they wouldn’t be going.

My intent was, They wouldn’t be making house calls, and instead as a last resort to salvage, they’ll use what’s available in a improvised or inventive way to salvage what was lost. Hence “McGyver it.

It’s not taught in schools, and on the farm and one time it was common learned knowledge from practical experience, working with a variety of equipment, animals and nature. Unfortunately the farms have since dwindled and replaced with the larger farmers, which is fast becoming out of touch.

and yes, as Hendricks pointed out, a mechanic is only as good as how he knows how to use a tool.

Of course.

I agree with the farm boy's approach. When you are faced with losing the crop, you need to improvise asap. Also, I have tapped on a few bad solder joints a few times and was able to find some pretty difficult problems. One further comment. We have become a nation that doesn't farm or manufacture anything. Now, we are facing the rewards for our short sitedness. Now that we cant get what we need overseas. Just sayin.

I've had exactly that experience ~45 years ago at our farm in upstate NY. Had lots of stories I used to tell my sheltered younger co-workers 20-30 years ago. Anyone who has grown up on a farm survives some near misses. Before I left Fortune500co, I even wrote up an anthology of them, "Top Ten Reasons Why I Should Be Blind, Dead, or Paralyzed." In one of them, it's a MacGuyver move to operate the machinery, rather than fix it. Here it is, from back when I was about 16:

After harvesting wheat, straw is baled up for livestock bedding. Balers (at least back then) often had tying problems, sometimes leading to a series of broken bales. At one point there was a problem with the baler, and a half dozen bales were mis-tied and broke when they were spat out of the baler. It wasn't worth the bother to rebale them. After I finished the baling of the last load, I hooked up the disc behind our 7-ton Ford to disc up the whole field of wheat stubble. I started on the perimeter, doing laps around the field, working in toward the center. Meanwhile my uncle hauled the loads out of the field. He came back and set the aborted bales on fire, since they wouldn't disc up and disperse in the soil. In the area where the half dozen bales were together, he kicked them into a big pile and set them on fire. About a half hour later, I came to that spot. The pile of ash looked pretty spent. It wasn't. Under the ash was a lot of very light weight burning embers. Consider now that a big diesel tractor running at wide open throttle moves a S__LOAD of air through its radiator to keep cool. The air is ducted downward. When all of that air hit that pile of embers, it kicked up what was unburned, and a big fireball started up towards me. I baled off the deck of the Ford, hit the ground, and rolled to be sure to get out of the way of the disc. So now the tractor and disc are charging through the field, unmanned, in 6th gear, wide open, running about 12mph, with a few hundred yards to go before they would crash into a creekbed. Boy I thought, is my uncle going to be pissed at me. The only thing missing was background music - Jethro Tull's “Locomotive Breath” would have been appropriate. So I had to figure out how to shut this thing down. One choice was to climb onto the disc from behind and then along the disc, and onto the tractor. Too slow. The other was to get the throttle off and make it stall. Worth a try - I knew that the foot throttle pedal and hand throttle were linked. If I could get in and push up under the foot pedal, it would throttle the tractor back and it would stall. To do so, I had to run alongside, slip in just in front of the rear wheel, and hit the pedal up. It worked. If I had stumbled and fallen during the attempt, I would have been run over by the rear wheel of a seven ton tractor, and then run over by a disc. At that point, it would have been most effective to just plow me under and mark the site. I never told my dad or uncle about that one.

I guess I could have also called my anthology, "My Unsuccessful Attempts to Win a Darwin Award."

We invented the technique...

those guys the term, better off being lucky then good. �� << thumbs up

Growing up, I enjoy those guys,... Laurel and Hardy also.

Anywhere but in the big cities the spirit of use what you have, fix what you can, improvise to get things moving. Working in a mine when the bean counters have scrapped the spares because of the "cost to house them" you have to get things going especially when it is $50,000 and hour for loss of production.

There are nails which are hit with a hammer. Screws are threaded nails in need of a bigger hammer. Coach bolts are bigger threaded nails needing a sledge hammer to install. Fencing wire is just an endless nail to be used as a taper or straight pin.

Exactly... you got my intent.

when you don’t have it,... and start looking for something you don’t know what your looking for to get things going...everything you see or find is a possibility. It’s funny how the mid works.

Lathe on board? That's a pretty good story.

I could probably produce 1 inferior pin an hour with a grinder and sander.

nice job. unless you're a lobster.

Crab is some very good meat, but around here King Crab can be 25.99 a pound with the shell still on?!

I feel like I'd have to eat it on the edge of a chopper flying over a pool full of hungry models in a rap video to justify it's consumption.

About 12-14 years ago, I received a cold call, from a placement agency for a on board engineer for a fish processing facility on a ship. He got my name because I had put my resume out and had food processing experience.

The recruiter mentioned the pay, which was above average (canceled out because of the hours) yet I was considering it... it wasn’t an offer, just a opportunity.

but a funny thing happened, and it happened more then once for me to ignore.

that very same week, what seemed out of the blue, a documentary came on a out Fish Processing out it sea. (probably because I was channel surfing,... I can’t remember).

there it was a documentary about fish processing ships... the facilities equipment was put in with a shoe horn,... barely walkways... I was thinking, $#it that’s dangerous...

And the ships engineer, came on, and they were interviewing him... and the interviewer said,... looking at your arm, this is also a dangerous place to work. He lifted his arm up, and from up to about half his forearm was gone. And his reply was, “yes, it’s dangerous.”

that made my mind up right then and there,... nope, not going to do it.

maybe, another thread one can post about intuition experiences, About ones you avoided and where others didn’t and then maybe happened to others, and especially ones you didn’t avoid your ‘gut feeling’ and did came true.

Excellent example. And your ‘rabbit out of the hat’ analogy, I used that.

when you have a problem,... and your looking for a solution, everything is a possibility.

And what I experienced and I’m sure you did also. after the ‘rabbit/hat trick’, as you walk past the people on the floor,... the people, you helped out, will stop what they're doing, look at you and nod their head with acknowledgement... later you hear whispers that you just walked on water...

and then again,... sometimes not, with them not even knowing you just saved their wages so to speak.

I always use this tried and true technique.

and I'm not surprised NASA hasn't given credit where credit is due.

this method of fixing things is called the "Fonzie fix"