Perverse Engineering – IOTW Report

Perverse Engineering

23 Comments on Perverse Engineering

  1. Redneck engineering!
    (It’s not perverse).
    Duck tape, coat hangers, crazy glue and old tin cans…
    While returning from a beach vacation our family truckster’s exhaust pipe broke. My Dad pulled into a rest stop. All he had was his small tool box and his pen knife. We jacked the car up and pulled one tire off and the spare out of the tire bay and used them to hold the car up as he slid underneath. He took an old soda can (they were still steel then) out of a trash can, and using the pen knife, cut the ends off and slit it up the middle. He then wrapped it around the exhaust pipe. He pulled two worm clamps off the plastic septic pipes of our travel trailer and used them to secure the tin can splice onto the exhaust pipe. We put everything together and were back on the road within a half an hour. That splice lasted two years before he finally replaced the entire exhaust!

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  2. Oh yeah a High School buddy had an old Dodge Dart that the windshield wiper motor crapped out, so he cut a big hole in the dash where the radio was and you could reach in and grab the wiper mechanism and operate it by hand. If you were riding shotgun when it rained you were expected to man the ramparts.

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  3. You use workarounds all the time with production machinery to keep lines running until you can get the correct part. This is getting more common as the government continues to wreck the supply chain and will become more common still as brownouts and blackouts damage increasingly rare electronic components as government continues to wreck the energy sector.

    Thanks, Democrats.

    Pro Tip; do not refer to it as “nigger rigging” if you want to keep your job.

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  4. “Pro Tip; do not refer to it as “nigger rigging” if you want to keep your job.”

    The correct term is: “Jury Rigging.”
    I can’t think of a single innovation that came out of Africa.

    mortem tyrannis
    izlamo delenda est …

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  5. My mother used her old support pantyhose for tie downs, and when she painted, she used old underwear to cover her head….. she was born and raised on a farm in Tennessee, I guess that made her a hillbilly redneck. I’m glad I inherited some of her traits.

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  6. My grandfather was the local king of creative engineering which, in order to maintain a supply of parts that seemed useless but were often exactly what was needed, meant frequent trips through alleys and to the area dump.

    The dump was a neverending source of enchantment for me, and since I was the grandchild most likely to succeed him as the next backyard Tesla, I got to tag along.

    I had some slouchy clothes – even a pair of holey overalls – but my grandfather, who was the COO of a manufacturing facility that counted the DoD among its leading customers, was very much a proper gentleman in spite of his backwoods Blue Ridge roots. So there he was in his crisp white shirt, hand-tied bowtie, and bespoke suit pants with razor-sharp creases digging through trash and cast-offs with an almost religious fervor.

    What was maybe the best part was his running commentary: “Why, this looks like a perfectly good fan,” “We’ll be able to recover 22 feet of wire from this floor lamp,” and of course my favorite, “Imagine what we’ll be able to make with this.”

    We returned from every trip with a truckload of treasures, although we were the only ones who seemed to recognize them as such. And no matter how hot and parched we were, my grandmother would never bring us glasses of sweet iced tea until we’d unloaded everything and hauled it all to the workshop at the foot of her rose garden.

    Among the things we built were shoes with roller skate wheels on the outside that came down and locked in place with a kick, pre-Clapper sound-activated power cords, and a bicycle that, instead of braking, went forwards and backwards (not one of our better ideas, I admitted after a fair assortment of injuries). And we repaired practically everything in the house, and even the house itself, all with duct tape and finds from the dump and the alleys around town.

    Sorry for the length of this post. This touches on my favorite childhood memories, and I do get to rambling when I get all up in mah feels. Thanks for your patience.

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