Yeah, but where's the macgyverism in that?

Of course, but I was too lazy to heave the heavy thing into the air and hold it up there for quite some time, since the laptop was laying at the table (yeah, I know, I could've put it onto the ground instead).

But what's with the motor? Somewhere in my laptop book it says not to have big magnetic fields around, isn't a vacuum motor a magnetic field? If it can clear video-tapes? Or is that only an urban legend?

My brother has one of those mini cleaners, that works with USB, but of course the computer has to be on for that.

During my trip to Colorado the weekend before this, I ended up having to MacGyver my way out of a wardrobe malfunction -- a real one.

I had just tucked myself, my bag, and my laptop case into a seat on the shuttle bus to get from the Denver airport to Boulder, when I felt something give way -- and discovered that part of the hardware in my bra, a small plastic ring, had snapped. That's one thing Mac never had to worry about . . . And I had to deal with it, while still wearing it, without leaving my seat, in a very bouncy shuttle bus.

I spent a moment staring at my luggage, trying to think through what I had on hand, and then fished out an elastic hair tie -- and my SAK, which I had dug out of the checked bag as soon as I was reunited with it. I used the screwdriver blade to poke the hair elastic through the loops where the plastic ring had been, and then tied the thing together. My dignity suffered slightly, but my modesty remained more or less intact.

Five minutes later, I had to repeat the process when the plastic ring on the other side broke in exactly the same way. Maybe Victorinox would consider making bras . . . they'd last longer!

I remember that I had been rolling my eyes at myself for taking the time to get my SAK out of my luggage right away and have it easily available -- I won't be so hard on myself next time!

*Salutes* You are most clever. Excellent job! I probably would've just hugged a piece of luggage over my chest til I got to the car...

Here's a stunt I pulled at work recently.

I work security at a shipping company distribution hub. Part of our job is to put what are called kingpin locks on incoming trailers during non-sort hours, to mark newly arrived loaded trailers. They have flags on them that hang down well beneath the trailers so you can tell at a glance whether the trailer is full. These locks are big and heavy... and they're usually covered in axle grease (ick!) so we wear latex gloves while we're handling them. (Axle grease is a nightmare to get off your skin, not to mention out of your clothes!) We keep a couple dispensers of gloves in the guard shack.

Last week, I was about to go out and put a lock on a newly arrived trailer, when I realized that I had just used the last of the gloves. That meant I had to go inside and find where they keep the gloves (the dispensers of gloves come about twenty or so to a box). Not a problem. What WAS a problem was that when I found the box of gloves, it was on a shelf well above my head... and there wasn't a ladder to be seen. (I stand about 5 feet, 3 inches tall, and this shelf was probably 7 to 8 feet off the ground. The hazards of being short... ...)

I was nearly stymied, but then I saw a shovel nearby. (It gets used mostly in the winter, to spread salt on the truck lot.) It looked long enough to reach the box of gloves up on the shelf. I used the business end of the shovel to nudge the box off the shelf. The box broke open on the floor, and I was in business. I picked up a couple dispensers of gloves, stacked the rest on a *low* shelf, and off I went!

Unfortunately, no one was around to witness my brainstorm!

My car was a thousand miles away, and the shuttle bus ride was going to be an hour! It would have been a very long hug with a very unresponsive and lumpy object.

I had a macgyverism last night a work.I was opening a can of root beer and the tab broke off.I do not owen a SAK yet.So I looked a around on my desk to see what I could use to open the rootbeer can with.I keep a P38 can opener on my name badge and I used it.I do highly recommand that eveyone should have one on there key ring.You can get them at any army/navy store.That's just in case you are without you SAK.

A couple of weeks ago I opened my hiking season again after a year and a half break, only these days I have a wee pest riding on my back while I'm hiking. Last weekend we were going out to a hike in Virginia and it was going to be a hot day. I was bringing a bottle of milk, but I had to keep it chilled somehow while I was out. Well, I didn't have one of those fancy bottle chillers, besides, weight is an issue when you are already lugging 20 pounds on your back, but I did have a couple of those gel-ice packs in the freezer and duct tape. I taped the ice packs around the bottle, stuck all that into a ziploc bag and went. The milk stayed perfectly cold and was enjoyed greatly in the end of the hike by my son.

Nice idea!

When I was a kid it usually was the other way round, though. My parents had to find a way to make the milk warm...

When I went out to Colorado for the wedding last month, I ended up re-using a MacGyverism that I picked up so long ago I don't even think about it any more. It's handy, though.

At one point, someone was trying to open a bottle of beer, and there was no bottle opener to be found. Way back when I was in grad school, a friend of mine taught me to use an ordinary house key to remove beer caps -- basically, you carefully use the teeth of the key to loosen the crimped metal, working your way around until the cap is loose enough to remove manually. With a little practice, it's not difficult and doesn't harm the key. And it makes you look amazingly facile to your friends.

The joke under this is that the old slang term for a bottle opener is a "churchkeys" -- and the guy who taught me this trick went into a Catholic seminary. So I had a future priest teach me how any key can be a churchkey.

This is kind of an ongoing MacGyverism for me, I'll keep using this trick I came up with most likely for the rest of the summer. The horse rescue that I volunteer at has recently moved to a new, MUCH larger (and much needed) location and I got talked into painting a mural on the office building. There are six panels that I came up with pictures for and I already finished three, so this is moving along nicely. It wouldn't be going anywhere without this image transfer trick. Now many have heard or played with enlarging pictures by using a grid. You draw a grid on the original image, then draw a big grid and draw in each square the little piece of picture that fits into it. Well, drawing a grid on a not very even cinder block wall wasn't going to work, besides, I would have to then cover the grid lines up with paint and keeping them straight over 5x5 feet of wall space wasn't going to happen, at least not easily. So here I was with my first panel printed out of Photoshop on a piece of paper and my work bucket. I did happen to have duct tape and a nice fat spool of sewing thread. So I came up with this idea. I marked just the grid spacing on the four sides of each panel and attached sewing thread with small pieces of duct tape at those points to create the grid. I then easily drew in the image with a permanent marker and was done before I knew it. Removing the grid took a total of like 10 seconds, I just ripped it off and threw it all away. I was left with a perfectly clean wall with just my picture on it. As I worked on my first panel, I found out just how useful making a removable grid turned out to be. Darned exterior paint is somewhat transparent (the light colors in particular) and I actually ended up needing to attach a sander to my drill and buff the little marks off the wall before painting the edges. They kept showing through. If I actually spent the time drawing in the grid and making sure it was even and everything, I would be in big trouble as I don't know how many coats of paint it would've taken to completely cover that up.

Hi everybody. It's been a long time since I've been around here.
Not sure if this counts as a MacGyverism to you, but it sure got me out of trouble.
I was working on checking the garden pipes to make sure there was no lleks, cause water ain't chhep these days in Spain, so everything had to be perfect.
So, I checked and fixed anything that leeked, and was very happy until I decided to make a test run. I had turned the water main on and you i went round looking very fast, because I had about 10 minutes to check everything and turn of the water main before the pipe exploded with the pressure( I had to install a presure regulator, but i didnt have one).
So i finished looking around and went to turn of the water main, and then SNAP!
The key had snapped leave the valve open and water flowing in a pipe with no water exits or hoses. I had about 6 minutes to find a way of closing it. I coulnt change it because water was flowing in, so I had to find a solution, and fast.
I found in the garage some wire used in fence walls and a torch. I uried back to the broken key and melted the wire so that the broken key wasnt broken any more, used a bit of water to cool it and closed the water main.
My handy work is still there, working perfectly.

I got a question: Does anyone know how to fis a playstation disc thats scrached?

Apparently car polish is good for fixing CD's.

It has to be a polish which is a cutting (or rubbing) compound. The kind you would use to remove small scratches from your car.

Thsnks, ill try as soon as i find car polish.

Is it still a MacGyverism if you have to go get the supplies you need, instead of finding them at hand?

I think so if you are using it in a new way.

Here's my latest Macism:

Its very hot right now where I live and the air conditioner in my car is working intemitently. Sometimes it blows cold air, sometimes it blows hot air. Not good when the temp is 100+ I haven't been able to get the AC fixed, so I have to rely on other means to avoid MacGrrl BBQ.

I have a lightweight denim shirt that I take with me. I run the shirt under cold water in a bathroom sink, getting it nice and wet. I then wear the shirt while I'm driving and I have the car windows rolled down. The wind blowing on the wet shirt=instant air conditioner.

I get some funny looks, but at least I'm not burned to a crisp or melted. It doesn't work for long distance drives, but its enough to get me from my work site to my home in the evenings.

The wet-shirt technique is a great one -- we used to use that when I was growing up, and we did use it for long trips! Family vacations usually meant four or five weeks driving through the country, tent camping . . . in a Greenbriar van with "6/60 air conditioning" (all six windows open at 60 miles per hour). We stopped and re-soaked the shirts at frequent intervals.

The real test of the wet-shirt technique was when we crossed the Mojave desert, in August, in the afternoon. Whew.

Not sure if I had told you about this one in here before, but the car story reminded me that one year ago I also was driving home with friends, sat in the back and of course at the side where the sun was coming from. I wore black jeans and it was blazing through the window, it really hurt actually on my thights!

So I wondered what to do, and then found a solution: I needed something white, which would not attract the sun so much. So, I lay a white cardigan over my knees, and it indeed got cooler.

It's above 40 where I live now. I have a mountain dog, and it's surprising that she hasn't melted yet. So I observed her and foud out how she did it. Soak grass or sand (whatever yopu happen to have) and sit on it, drink watter at regular intervals and think cool( I used this instead of panting).

In any case, thats not important here. I had the bad luck to be blocked by a snake on my door a few days ago. I didn't want to kill it if i had to, so i found this black rock, went to pick it up and I almost got burned ( ). praying that snakes liked heat and had thermal vision I tempted the snake with this rock, ehich hopefully was warmer the the door nob and it worked. lobbed the stone into a box, the snake followed in, closed the box and set the sanke loose agin in the country side. hope i never have to do that. Snakes, why did it have to be snakes.....

Very nice!! I would never have thought of using a rock to lure the snake away. If it wasn't poisonous, I would have just picked it up and dropped it in some bushes.

Yeah, I know, but snakes don't bother me. Spiders and scorpions however, are a whole different story. I think I would have moved away from the house.

Nice!! That's actually a trick that comes straight out of the show. Remember in Final Approach, where Mac used a hot rock to lure a rattlesnake out of the kids' tent?

I have a recording/graphics studio as well, the whole thing was built MacGyver style with recycled and found materials.
I wanted to float the floor, to sonically decouple it from the rest of the house,
and used strips of rubber kitchen mats,
and sections of those swimming noodles.
then put down the subfloor made of recycled homasote and plywood.

Total Price: less than $20

then I had to address the cabling issues.
I got some vacuum cleaner tubes (like for a shopvac)
cut them down the side, cleaned them thoroughly
and put all my cable runs inside.

Total cost: NADA
The console is made out of old tabletops from a sandwich place, and scrap wood.
It's U shaped and holds a ridiculous amount of gear, including the computer arrays.

Total cost including the Kirk Seat (as DW calls it): around $30

I did have to give up my drum platform to set up a shooting area for my photo biz.

My first MacGyverism was when I was in elementary school, I needed a ruler but didn't have one, so I used the stragiht edge of my comb to draw the edge I needed.
Whlie working at an assisted living facility I had a elderly lady that fractured her arm. and nothing to splint it with. So I took a magazine, fitted her arm inside and secured it with kling and white tape. The hosptial told the family they had never seen anything like that before. But it kept her bone from becoming more out of place and they were able to set it.

Here's a simple yet effective MacGyverism I was forced to pull off the other day after my Jandal (flip flop) broke while walking home from school with my kids.

The button on the bottom of the toe strap had broken off so there was nothing holding the toe strap into the base of the jandal so it just fell off my foot. Grrr

SO to replace the button and hold the strap in place I poked a nail through the strap.

Is still working like a charm.

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While I was visiting my partner during the holidays, I rewired a couple of lamps for her -- the first time in years I'd done anything of the kind. It was something of a learning curve.

It didn't help that when I went to the store to get the parts I needed, it took me six sales associates to find one who could actually help me (competent, spoke in complete sentences, didn't gawk or vanish). And they still ended up selling me the wrong kind of cord: instead of lamp cord, I ended up with a slightly heavier cord. This wouldn't have been an issue, except that I had to thread it through a metal pipe about 6 inches long, and it was just a bit too fat for the pipe.

I wrassled with the damned thing until Melissa nudged me to remind me that we had to go pick up the sushi we'd ordered for dinner. As I was washing my hands, I was grumbling, "I need one of three things: an non-flammable lubricant, a slightly larger pipe, or a slightly smaller cord."

"Soap isn't flammable," she observed.

I looked at my hands, and grinned from ear to ear. "And metal expands when it's heated."

The soap turned out not to work very well, but heating the pipe did -- boiling water from the kettle expanded the pipe just enough that I could get the cord through it. And a chopstick from dinner worked very nicely for lifting the piece of pipe out of the boiling water.

So I was mowing the lawns a few evenings ago and had to lift the kids very old water pipe A-frame swing set up so I could get the mower in under it.

This is no big deal, but as I lifted it I noticed one corner was broken away, due to the bolt which held it together being rusted and busted.

So I'm standing there with the arm of the A-frame swinging around when suddenly "What would MacGyver do?" jumped into my head.

I looked around the yard and spotted an old bungy cord hanging on the clothes line.

So channeling MacGyver I walked over and grabbed the bungy cord and without even really thinking walked back and proceeded to tightly wrap the cord around the corner of the frame so it held the 3 bars together.

One day I'll remember to put a new bolt in it.. but in the mean time it serves as a reminder of this one time when I was mowing the lawns, and I channeled MacGyver, and fixed something.

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The bottom part of my mouse at work (the piece that holds the roller ball) was broken, and the ball kept falling out of the bottom, so I took (what else?) duct tape and taped the sides of the piece together so that the ball would no longer fall out, and it holds it together just fine. That isn't much, I realize, but it's mine.

I'm a nurse and I thought of a MacGyverism I did at the same assited living where the lady fell and broke her arm. I had a gentleman who had asthma (COPD). He needed an aerochamber (a long tube used to get the medicine of the inhaler into his lungs). He didn't have one, so I used a toilet paper holder. He had Alzheimers and knew what I was trying to do. Nurse use a lot of MacGyverisms.

I don't know what Listerine would do to contacts. It's a fairly noxious substance (at least to my taste buds)

Listerine would burn your natural lens you have. It is mainly alcohol. When I was in high school, I had a school secertary that would drink listerine like it was whiskey. She lost my transfer papers. When we moved.

Sounds like the commerical where the younger sister lost her contact lens and spit on it to put it back in. I would have rather used something like eye drops or even a saline nasal spray. Surprised you really didn't get a bad eye infection from it.

I've actually used two straws and tape to connect a PEG tube (tube that goes directly into the stomach) for a patient's feeding; it really didnt' work to well, but I tried.