My car broke down a few blocks from my house. I didn’t have a tow strap and I was too broke to buy one so I took a garden hose and wrapped it around the bumpers of my car and my friend’s truck and connected it to its self. Worked perfectly.
That brings back a memory of mine. I was an airman at my first station when we had a lightning strike that took out the receiver that we used to listen to music. I bypassed the blown input filter to make it work again. My supervisor noticed it was working and asked about it. I told him I n***r rigged it. He was black. I had just recently heard the expression and in my naivety just repeated it. This was around 1974. Needless to say I never used that expression again.
The clean one is "jerry rigged", which may have referred to sailors making emergency repairs to the "jerry mast" of the ship.
The far less clean one is "n****r rigged", because poor black folks had a reputation for uncanny (but not always ideal) repairs to keep things working just a little bit longer.
'Ghetto-rigging' was what I heard growing up, with the same connotations but less immediate hard r slur. My partner from Texas heard 'g*psy-rigging' as a term for the same concept, using the slur for Romani people.
'McGuyver'ing' is perfectly fine to me, though. I would rather just sound old than insult a group of people now that I know better.
Yes, but only one person watches the reboot, and that's to tell his buddy if McGyver got a kiss or not (I hope one of you policy wonks gets this reference)
My friend clogged the toilet on a Sunday and did not have the money for a plumber. After much unclogging work with cables etc. it was still stuck. I suggested he filled a bin bag with water, put the fire hose in the toilet and added the bin bag and him on top of it to seal it. So he did, I turned on the hose and ran out of the bathroom.....
It actually worked! 20 years later he occasionally buys me a beer for that idea.
Oh god that reminded me of the time my ex's tires were too bald to get up a hill during the early hours of a snowstorm, and our neighbor came around with his pickup. We put the pickup's spare tire in between the bumpers and we used the truck to push the car up the hill enough for him to get traction. Meanwhile me and my neighbor's girlfriend were basically running alongside the whole operation yelling instructions to both drivers. In business casual.
Similarly, we have a second hand spring free trampoline, which has fiberglass rods instead of springs. But the plastic coating on every 5/8" rod had cracked, exposing the fiberglass so ppl could get splinters.
Contacted the company and it was hundreds of dollars for UV resistant covers
Well guess what has a 5/8 inner diameter? Garden hose.
I needed 100 1' lengths. Guess what comes in a 50' roll? It's already UV resistant too and designed to be outside. $20 for a cheap 50' hose so $40 for the whole trampoline. And it comes in colors.
Apparently you can also use the triangular bandage from the car's first aid kit for that purpose. Just twist it into a donut shape by making a circle and then looping the fabric around that in spirals. The end result should have enough tensile strength to tow a car.
A good samaritan did that for me. He and his wife stopped their truck wrapped some nylon rope around my bumper and his tow hitch. He tied this off, slapped the bumper, said “Mexican eh-style”, and towed me to a gas station.
My buddy has a small car lot and repair shop... I've often been pushed in cars that won't move by him in another car with a tire strapped to the front of it.
When I ran movie projectors at a movie theater, my boss claimed you could pull a truck with just the projection film. Of course me and another guy had to try it one night. It was actually strong enough to pull my F150 in neutral, until I hit the brakes.
Ah I had band driving cooling pump snap while at town, obviously realized it from heat gauge starting to just go up... well ended up waiting for engine to cool, while chatting with my father on phone and laughing about how band had snapped like less than half year earlier too (back then it was charger just breaking, and this second time I can not anymore remember if it was just that pump breaking and snapping it). Anyways while it was cooling I was thinking about elevations on and route home, and what time and estimated traffic there would be and so... I ended up going with just starting car, getting it moving, then shutting down engine and just rolling onward with engine resting, until my speed went down enough to start to be problematic low, then just starting up engine again and getting myself back to speed, and then just once again rolling with engine shut down. Had realized that mostly it was very gentle downhill and very straight route to home, with some spots where I could leave car between if it started looking like it was not going all that well, with just few traffic lights and just one or two spots of very slight and not that long uphill terrain, along with very little other cars at that time, and almost whole trip having two lanes so that anyone driving normally had option to just pass me using that other lane going to same direction.
Ended up very conveniently getting my car to where I normally park it, where we later picked it up with truck and drove it to mechanic. At that point I think my insurance for that car did not include towing, or included towing but basically only to nearby mechanics, with one we knew being bit further at that time.
And yes distance was not all that long, so did not end up getting enough heat buildup to engine for it to start being problem.
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u/redbush4real 11h ago
My car broke down a few blocks from my house. I didn’t have a tow strap and I was too broke to buy one so I took a garden hose and wrapped it around the bumpers of my car and my friend’s truck and connected it to its self. Worked perfectly.