hehe...love it MacGyverGrrrl! LOL. And good thinking Astra!

These are hardly genius, but...I had a couple of paperclip adventures this past week.

Monday, hubby and I borrowed a Ford Expedition (I think...it was humungous) to take 5 teens to a concert because our car wasn't big enough. So we're under way, and one of the teens thought to bring one of those tape adapter things to convert a tape player to play an iPod. No CD player. So we stick the tape part in, and nothing happens. None of the buttons do anything, including eject it. So, luckily, it had that little cord attaching it to the iPod to pull it out with. So we root around and find some cassettes in the console and put one in to be sure it's not the converter. It's not. The tape is stuck. And of course THAT one doesn't have a cord. So paperclip to the rescue...I bent it out and hooked one end in the reel hole of the tape and was able to get it out.

Next paperclip adventure...We're at church yesterday and Isaiah decides that it's a terrible emergency that he didn't put a belt on and even though he's sitting down his pants are in the process of falling down. *rolls eyes* EVERYTHING'S an emergency with a 7 year old. So anyway, I made him tough it out till church was over and before Sunday school I raided the office for a couple of paperclips. I looped each one through an adjacent beltloop and then hooked the clips together. It pulled in just enough of his waistband that he survived Sunday school AND a potluck without embarrassment... LOL.

My husband has one of those digital pen and pad devices. It looks like a regular clipboard with a regular paper notepad on it, except that everything that's written on the notepad with an ink pen gets digitally transferred into memory and then handwritten sheets can be transferred to the computer like that. The ink pen writes like a regular pen and also has a digital sensor (like a pen digitizer that most artists probably familiar with) It's a neat device and also greatly cuts the clutter as the hubby was liable to take notes on pieces of junk mail that I then would be unable to dispose of.

Well, he needed to buy ink refills for the pen. This was the first time him buying those and he brought the pen with to the store to check that the refills would fit. Now in order to remove the ink stick you need to use a special little grabber tool that grabs the nib and pulls the whole thing out through the front. We got to the mall parking lot and he realized he forgot the tool. It was also one of those rare occasions I didn't bring my SAK. The nib was too small to grab with fingernails. He tried a number of things to hook the cartridge with and nothing worked as there is hardly any clearance between the cartridge and the pen itself. Too tight for even a paperclip. Then my eyes fell on a sticky sock wrapper from a new pair of socks that I somehow missed and he managed to write on (making it indisposable. His excuse for using it was that it's so convenient, he can just stick it to the dashboard if he needs it handy. Right...). I took the sock wrapper, wrapped it around the nib, squeezed it with my nails and the cartridge came out stuck to the sock wrapper. Problem solved.

This is a prank I hope to use at summer camp this year. I have a battery-powered noisemaker that makes the most horrible buzz you can imagine, so I'm going to take a few batteries, duct tape wires to them with one going to the buzzer, and then to a small metal plate, the other placed over a piece of ice, so that when the ice melts, the circuit will be completed, and the buzzer will go off. This is somewhat like what Mac did in the Escape in season 1 with the PCP bomb. The whole thing will be placed in the vent of another cabin in the middle of the night (I'll make the whole thing on a piece of wood, so it won't fall apart. Ice will be easy to procure).

cruel and unusual punishment.

A premeditated MacGyverism? Isn't that an oxymoron?

I was planning on doing this in the middle of the night, and there's not too much to make a buzzer out of in those cabins...

Now THAT'S creative!! I'll have to file that one away for the next time I lose a button off my pants in the middle of the day.

A friend of mine and I did something similar to drive our literature teacher up the wall only with a mechanical noisemaker. I had this large plastic horse that 'sort of' neighed if you pulled the string. In reality it simply made a very obnoxious noise that maybe in a drug-induced coma would sound remotely like a neigh. One fine day we got really tired of listening to the teacher wax poetic about "War and Peace" (we don't patronize literature written by child molesters, that's true about Tolstoy by the way) and decided to drive her batty. We got the 'neigher' out of the horse, took some duct tape and fishing line and attached the 'neighing box' to the back of a bookcase in the classroom. We ran the fishing line from the pull string to our desk and waited for a moment to strike. We struck with great success again and again, yanking the fishing line and making this most obnoxious noise in the middle of the teacher's monologues, causing a general uproar in the classroom and indignation for the teacher who couldn't figure out where the noise was coming from. We carefully did not sit next to the bookcase. The coverage of material about Tolstoy was successfully ruined and she never figured out who did it.

My purse strap broke today, so I used a small keyring to connect the strap loop and the loop on the purse. It works really well!

I was making a pie yesterday. Well, it was going to be a blueberry pie, but I was short on blueberries, they somehow found their way on top of hubby's cereal. I did have a box of kiwi fruit though. Now the eternal problem with the kiwi is how to get the skin off quickly. I had a steak knife, but that was taking forever and it wasn't working very well. Then I decided to try a modification on how I normally eat a kiwi: cut it in half and scoop it out with a teaspoon. Well, I needed a whole kiwi though, so I cut the tip off of it and used the back side of a teaspoon to peel the whole kiwi the same way you'd peel a hardboiled egg by sliding the spoon underneath the peel. So it ended up a kiwi-blueberry pie. It's actually pretty good, next time I'll use a bit more sugar though.

Potato peelers do the job quick and easy.

My potato peeler checked out a few years ago. We got it from my mother in law and I could never really use it as in the task of peeling a vegetable I am left-handed (I am neither left nor right-handed, but rather task-handed). As handedness and tools don't seem to align for me most of the time, I improvise.

you need a bi-peeler like this one... goes both ways

My husband's latest MacGyverism involved making a tumbler polisher operate properly. The polisher is old, but it is very useful for polishing chain maille jewelry and this is what I use it for. The problem is when I load the tumbler drum and place it on the machine it causes the free spinning spindle to bend slightly so the tumbling drum doesn't rotate freely. I tried taking it apart and cleaning it and gave it a generous lube job with WD40, but it still wouldn't support a load. My husband started fooling around with it and tipped it at a 20 degree angle. The drum started spinning perfectly, just like new. So now when I want to polish chain, I just slide a small block (a Lego works great) under the frame to tip the weight off the free spinning rod and the whole thing runs great.

Good job!

Hey, I once did something very similar!!

It just goes to show--watching MacGyver makes you smart!

Mac

I'm surprised this thread has been gathering dust -- with a crowd as inventive as this lot, hasn't anyone done anything clever in the last three months?

Well, I was MacGyvering last week in the office – my boss’ office to be precise, where the geniuses who installed his Shiny New Workstation had given the usual complete absence of thought to such trivialities as, say, leaving enough room to get cables and power cords between the back of the desk and the wall so that I could actually hook up his computer, his phone, peripherals, etc. The desk did have cable ports (the round openings you feed the cords through), but actually getting anything through them looked like requiring telekinesis, which is not on my resume.

Not really a problem, although I must have looked pretty silly getting the cabling done – I used a couple of rulers, paper clips (of course), a extra-long spare USB cable and yes, some duct tape. I contrived myself a “fishing pole” and got the spare cable threaded through the ports and along the wall to the corner with the outlets, pulled it round into a loop and taped the cable to itself so it wouldn’t pull all the way through. I had no string or yarn or twine, so the USB cable was my best bet.

I made a kind of “cable car” setup – attach a phone line or power cord, pull it one way till it reached the port and I could drag it through; then pull the “cable car” back and reload. I ended up with everything nice and pretty and tidied away out of sight behind the Immovable Heavy Desk.

The funniest part is that, not that long ago, I wouldn’t have called it “MacGyvering”, having long since forgotten the term – no-one’s called me that for several years, although it did used to happen! I would just have called it contriving as usual . . .

Someone else's turn now!

I haven't done anything clever in the last three years!

While in a bar, I used a some latex rubber from a beer bottle holder and a coaster to patch a hole in the sole of my shoe (actually remember hawkeye doing the same thing with frank burns' birthday card in an episode of M.A.S.H.)

We were in Moab this weekend and went for a short hike. When we got back our friends discovered they had locked their keys in their truck. They didn't have a spare key so we had to break into the truck.

I gave them my handy SAK and they tried to pry open the little tab in the back window of the truck. They weren't able to get it open. My husband suggested we use a piece of wire to try to open the lock. I got a heavy gauge wire hot dog cooking stick. We slid it throught the crack in the window and tried to push the door latch open. No luck. We bent the end of the hot dog cooker into a hook, slid it through the window, hooked the door latch, rotatyed the hook 90 degrees and pulled the handle. Unfortunately, Toyota truck locks donb't pop open when you pull open the door handle.

We tried pulling up on the lock mechanism, but it was too straight.

Back to the back window. My husband used my SAK and a screwdriver and was finally able to pop the locking tab off the back window, slide the window open and reach in and unlock the door.

So one hot dog cooker + one screwdriver + one SAK + lots of ingenuity = one unlocked truck and a round of cold beers for breaqking and entering crew.

I'll post the pictures of us trying to break into the truck sometime later this week.

Ahem . . . we're still waiting for the pictures!

Check out the gallery section........Adventuring MacGyver Style. I posted both the MacGyvering of the truck and our general Moab pics. Hope you enjoy them.

Let's see...I know I've got a couple here.

The cats have this bad habit of chasing each other up and down the basement stairs, and they have to rocket through the cat door to do it. And they go pretty fast! Well, they broke the door one day. I tried supergluing it, but they broke it again. So, I had a wooden dowel about the right size to fit in the hinge notches and I cut a clear window out of one of the many packages for GI Joe's I've got lying around (hey, you never know, right?), glued it on the dowel and now we have a new door.

Straining my brain here, cuz I can't remember the other one. I'm not very clever most of the time...and then when I am, I can't even remember it! lol.

During the weekend, I was doing a volunteer shift for one of the non-profits I'm involved with; we were processing membership renewals and creating new memberships cards, which involved printing out the cards on an inkjet printer, cutting them out, and then running them through a laminator.

Like most non-profits, this one doesn't have much money and has to make do with what equipment it can afford. The laminator's pretty decent quality, the inkjet printer . . . well . . .

When the printer choked up violently on an outgoing sheet of paper, I caught myself having a "MacGyver moment" -- I just looked at the problem and then looked around the immediate vicinity to see what I had to work with.

Then I picked up the card I had just finished laminating and used the edge of it to free the jammed paper and ease it out without damaging the printer mechanism.

The whole thing was fixed before my working partner had had time to swear properly at any of the equipment (which she considers an essential first step prior to problem-solving).

Thanks, Mac . . .

Good job! Oh, and swearing is the first step to solving any problem, along with crying. Didn't you know that?

I must have missed that lesson . . . I was probably too busy fixing problems to pay proper attention to the swearing mandate. Actually, some of the problem items in my life have historically responded poorly to swearing (sewing machines, children, volunteers) while others are much better for it (computers, traffic, actors).

You know I was being sarcastic, right?

But, it is true that sometimes I lose patience and swear at something first...then I try to figure out how to fix it once I've properly vented my frustrations.

Of course; and I was being silly.