Share your own feats of mangineering.

The urban dictionary definition is up!

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=mangineering

You are correct, def #2 is so bitchy. My one question: who the F are those women married to? Obviously they picked slobs and are now projecting their faults onto the entire male population.

Now I don’t want to bias the voting, so I would ask each of you to not let Badger Nation’s wise and well thought out opinion influence you.  If you follow the link and look at both definitions, make sure you read each carefully and vote for the one you prefer (and thanks to those of you who already have!).

Gorbachev also had a comment on the Mangineering with PVC thread which I thought succinctly captured something I’ve seen referenced by others in multiple threads:

Men are so damned useful.

We should appreciate ourselves more.

With this humble thought in mind, I’d love to hear of reader’s feats of mangineering.  I’ve already shared some examples of creating things using the materials at hand, so to kick this off I thought I’d share a few examples of my own of fixing things using the materials at hand.

Example 1:

In my early twenties my hunting/fishing buddy and I decided to go trout fishing on a stream up in the foothills of the Colorado Rockies.  At the very end of what was probably an hour on various grades of unpaved roads, we started smelling hot coolant.  We got to the place we were going to park and popped the hood.  One of the coolant hoses that ran back to the firewall for the heater core had bounced repeatedly onto the alternator, and had sprung a small leak.  My buddy and I didn’t say much to each other, but decided to go ahead and go fishing first before worrying about the truck.  No point in getting scalded by coolant and missing prime fishing time.  We got our fishing time in and as I recall did fairly well that day.  When we got back the truck had cooled off so I cut the good heater core hose down to a manageable length and ran it back to the radiator (taking the heater out of the coolant loop entirely).  We used a little duct tape to keep the hose from bouncing on the fan or any other moving parts and drove home.  It wasn’t pretty, but it sure beat walking.

Example 2:

About 7 years ago when my wife and I moved to Texas we bought a 25 year old bass boat.  Then we backed up the money truck to have it tuned up, etc.  After a day of fun on the water my wife and I found that the tilt/trim wouldn’t raise the motor for trailering.  We got it on the trailer and pulled it out of the water slowly, and it only had an inch or maybe two of clearance.  We wouldn’t even have made it past the speedbumps to get out of the park.  My wife saw a cop patrolling the area and went to go flag him down to let him know we might have to leave the boat there overnight if we couldn’t fix the problem.

I had never worked on a boat and was feeling pretty intimidated.  I checked the fuses in the panel and none were blown.  I then followed the wires for the hydraulic system to see if I could spot/bypass any potential problems.  Otherwise I was going to disconnect the power tilt/trim from the outboard and jack the motor up with my floorjack to get it on the transom saver.   My wife and the cop returned just as I finished stripping the ends of two pieces of wire I had cut from a roll in my toolbox.  I bypassed the switch/relay, and ran current straight from the battery to the power lead for the hydraulic motor.  It raised the motor enough for them to put the transom saver underneath it, and then I switched the positive and negative leads and it lowered the motor firmly in place.  My wife and the cop both looked at me like I was Dr. Frankenstein when I first hooked those wires up and made the motor go up.  The cop also said it was a good thing we were going to be able to take it, because boats left overnight were usually vandalized.

When I had more time to work on it later I realized the only problem was it had blown a fuse.  The tilt/trim was after-market and they ran an in-line fuse instead of the ones I had been checking in the fuse box…

Example 3:

Actually this is one from my father.  He has too many feats of mangineering to pick any one out, but one in particular has always made me chuckle so I thought I would share it.  He and his copilot were sub hunting in their Navy helicopter many miles away from the carrier in the middle of the night when the transmission warning light went on.  His copilot did something with the light and it went off, much to my dad’s relief.  When my dad asked what he had done the copilot explained that he had removed the bulb, because if there really was a problem with the transmission they would never have made it back to the carrier.  After thinking about it for a little bit my father decided he agreed with him.  When they got back the mechanics took the transmission apart and found a small sliver of metal which had completed the circuit for the sensor.  This mimicked what would happen if the transmission were coming apart and chunks of metal were floating around.

Your turn.  Share your best stories of mangineering, either by you or someone you know.

See Also:  Mangineering with PVC.