Your favorite Macgyver moments\tricks

#1 About 40 years ago a metallurgist told me to heat my bent aluminum brake lever to a dull red, straighten it with a couple pairs of pliers and it would be fine when it cooled. It worked.
#2 I always carry a length of gas line slipped inside my handlebars.
#3 Taped inside my headlight bucket in a sealed plastic bag I used to keep an emergency $5 bill, a spare ignition key. Now it's 2-$20 bills and a spare key.

Take an old inner tube and cut a large rectangle out of it. Wide enough to wrap around a nice straight portion of your MC's frame and how ever long you can make it to fit that straight section. Then use a bunch of hose clamps to hold it on the frame. Now you have spare hose clamps and spare emergency tube patches or patches for any other rubber...

The professionals call them banjos, and many will also coat the tape with a thin layer of compound too.

Aluminum doesn't change color when it is heated, even to a plastic or molten state. You were likely working with steel...

i once used lots of zip ties on my buddies back sprocket on his ktm 640 when his all backed out & chewed the shit out of his swingarm on the trans america trail somewhere around the colorado/utah border. it got us 15 miles to a ford dealership where we then used a few bolts & nuts to get us to a honda dealership to fix it right. special day right there.

length of gas line slipped inside my handlebars.

I did too...had it there for a real long time. Never wanted to pull off the throttle or destroy the end of my left grip to get to it.

That bike, last months ride...
I ran out of gas. It had been filled, but only got 67 miles. I grabbed the rear of my friend's XL as he passed and I was still rolling...
He pulled me and in tandem for 4 miles I rolled on in to the shell station.

Here she is...just for reference sake;




Yes I do have a bad shoulder (from a get off), getting dragged up some of those hills I thought I'd have to let go for fear of pulling it out of socket! :eek1

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Yes I do have a bad shoulder (from a get off), getting dragged up some of those hills I thought I'd have to let go for fear of pulling it out of socket! :eek1[/QUOTE]

if there is a next time , have the powered bike off to the side and behind you so that his right foot pushes onto your left foot peg rather than pulling you he can push you and let you coast down hills, still able to come back up from behind when you lose momentum . this is assuming you are not out in the woods or on bumpy trails

Exactly what I do, and have done. However this guy was as noob as it gets and getting him to go 25mph was pushing it.

With the "sister bike" to that, I pushed like you say with a foot, reaching 65mph for approx 15 miles of dirt. Funny, I was pushing another one of those "b50's".

I've gone for miles hanging on to door handles and open windows. :eek1

Speaking of fiber tape, once you have that stuff adhered on the joints,there are sometimes parts of the tape that come loose from the wall substrate and then bubble outward and show through the drywall mud. Use some stuff that is designed to adhere concrete patches to old concrete and the fiber tape will really stick to the wall and not telegraph through you joint compound. According to my sniff test,the stuff is pretty much carpenters wood glue and then they add some pink coloring to show you where it has been applied.
This fiber tape thing also works very well on old plaster cracks. The craftsmen who re-coat the old plaster with thin coat first have us repair the cracks with the tape and bonding agent,let it sit a day, and at the end of the day before they apply the thin coat, we coat the entire surface. Works very well on tight but cracked plaster even plaster over lath...

Not motorcycle related but had to share just the same.
2 days after I picked my new-to-me GMC pick up, my friends and I loaded our snowmobiles into my trailer and headed off on our annual adventure to our Moose Camp. Wanting to try out my new truck I pushed about 5 kilometers past where the snow plow had most recently plowed and parked the mess. Well we had a great weekend of breaking trail and having fun in the snow and came out around 3 in the afternoon on Sunday to find that my new truck wouldn't start, stone dead. Hmm, here we are about 30 km past the last house that had smoke coming out of the chimnney. So we looked around and noted that my trailer had steel winch cable on it and I had a roll of duct tape and a leatherman....so we cut two lengths of cable and covered one with duct tape and luckily the new guy we brought with us had a modern snowmobile with electric start, he was a little worried when we told him we were going to boost the truck with his fancy machine but we jammed the cables against the battery terminals and after about three hours and all of the beer we had left the truck rolled over once pathetically and then fired!

^^^^^^^^^^^^
THAT is simply awesome. Not a MacGyver moment though. You used a Leatherman. Had you used a Swiss Army Knife, you'd be safe.

Doesn't have to be motorcycle related. This is the Garage. Good story. I give it an 8. Would have been a little lower but it was cold and late in the day. You guys might of died or had to hug each other for warmth which is almost as bad.

8 !@#!
Nice story, but no better than a 5, they actually had a battery to rig to. 8 would require creating a battery out of nested coffee and coke cans, lead shot and orange juice.

i had a 84 Bronco II way back in the day. It had some serious problems from one of the previous owners. First issue was that the internal oil delivery passages to the valves were all blocked with dirt and gunk. Since i was a broke kid at the time, the fast cheap fix was to Tee off of the oil pump line with flexible copper tubing and route it up outside of the engine and through a hole drilled in the valve covers. I had a 10" piece of copper tubing inside the valve cover that had several holes drilled to allow the oil to drip onto the tappets. I drove that way for over a year while saving up to have the engine replaced.

another fix we found was after driving an hour to the motorcycle track and riding my 97 cr250 for 15 minutes, my swing-arm nut had fallen off. I was ready to load up the bike and head home until my buddy said "those threads look just like the threads on my truck wheel studs" I got out my lug wrench and pulled off a lug nut and tested it on the swing-arm bolt. Damned if it didn't fit perfectly. I rode all day with it like that and put it back on the truck's wheel when it was time to go home.

More of a recent 'A-HA' moment when when i had a flat tire riding the Shenandoah 500 last October. I didn't have any luck finding a good stick to rig a bike lift to hold the front off the ground. Luckily i had used a cycle tie-down to hold my gear bag on the rear rack. I wrapped it once around a tree about 5' up and hooked the other end around my handlebars. I used the cinch to pull the bike up a couple feet and it was rock solid while i pulled the front wheel off and replaced the tube. I guess the weight of the bike was enough to pull the strap tight around the tree and kept it from sliding down. I'll never ride without a tie-down again...

Here's another one, not very creative but effective. My Girlfriend (now my wife) and I were headed to a corn roast at a friends farm about 1/2 an hour away and were told to bring our own steaks for the grill. So on the way up there we stopped at her family's farm produce stand and bought some nice T-Bones only problem was that they were frozen stiff...hmmm, at that time in my life I always drove around with the lid of my air breather flipped on my pick up, so I popped the hood and placed the steaks that were vacuum bagged in the air breather lid and closed the hood which sealed nicely to the air breather lid then proceeded to abuse the local dirt roads arriving at the corn roast in a cloud of dust to have all of my buddies watch me pop my hood and pull out 2 perfectly thawed out steaks...(any longer of a ride and things would have been messy....)

not me but my father... I was too young to remember.

Take boat out into the ocean with friends, far, far from shore. Drink much beer while listening to BATTERY powered radio. Drink more beer, way too much beer. Finish last beer, start engine... the only engine, not even any paddles (won't discuss absence of life jackets) - whirr, click, click, click. Father now, he says, instantly sober - friends still drunk having a good time. Ponders issue... no traffic, no radio (the transmitter kind), currents not favourable to survival. No beer left anyway.

Remove all spark plugs but one - don't know how many cylinders but probably at least 4. No, this will not work on a thumper. Turn engine by hand to find compression stroke on remaining plugged bore. Advance just past compression. Hit starter. Whirr... PAT..... PAT..... PAT..... PAT.... insert second plug, not easy on an cylinder that's compressing, spewing explosive air-fuel mixture. Attach spark plug wire ZAP... ZAP... ZAP.... Drunk friends starting to wonder why you're acting so funny. PAT, PAT... PAT, PAT... repeat for remaining bores. Go get more beer.

My Dad... Only a hard-core mechanic would think of that.

Of course, a modern computer controlled engine would freak... It'd be "I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."

David...

I've never heard this fix before. Your Dad had grease in his veins.

I needed to balance my KLX wheels because I had the local shop install rimlocks, but they don't balance dirt tires. They say you can't balance knobbies...yeah, sure, whatever.

I looked around my garage this morning for a good way to do it and WHAM! it hit me. I ran to the hardware store and picked up a 4' section of 1/4" section of steel pipe.

voila!

From the Department of Shameless Commerce:

That is pretty clever. It looks just like a giant balancing or truing stand.
But you could have poured two ounces of Dynabeads in the tube and you'd be done also. Actually you'd be better off because you'd have a dynamic balancing solution and not a fixed/static situation.