I don't know if it's appropriate but I can tell you that a Land Rover Series II will go 40 miles with bananas stuffed in the gearbox instead of oil... ... banana mush smells funny when it gets hot... .... Diesel fuel works well to flush out the banana mush when you finally get some 90W.
WOW thats crazy! I had no idea you could weld with 24V battery system. Might be worth carrying around a few welding sticks in my truck... as long as I can hook up to another battery i'm golden! Never would have thought to mend a radiator with lead, but great idea! I went riding one time with a fella - we were 80 miles from home (trucked up there) and his bike wouldn't idle at all... ran fine, but if he let off the gas it would die... Strange... I took a closer look and sure enough the pilot needle was completely missing. Oops Made it back to the truck, and i managed to fashion a temporary pilot needle out of safety wire and shrink tubing... threaded it in there - it both stopped the fuel leak and partially filled the role of the needle. Didn't idle real well, but took a little longer to stall out which was enough to keep the bike rideable for another lap or two on the trails. Also, I got tired of laying my KTM on its side to clean the oil screens, so I found a better way... ok not really - I managed to drop something in the cylinder with the plug out... decided to flip it over and blow it out with air... worked like a charm. Not the intended use of a 10 TON overhead trolley system....
The only problem is the risk of modern stuff frying if you're still hooked up and kinda short battery life/weld time if you're not hooked up.
YOU WIN!!!! it's genius ok, back in the days of unsealed batteries, a friend lost a battery plug while on the road, I carved him a new plug out of a twig: debarked for the inside diameter and with bark to stop it from sliding in (it did hold for at least 300 miles to get us home)
A buddy of mine showed up and wanted to solder join two heavy wires together. With no proper connector,I discovered that two #10 stranded wires fit well inside a .22 casing. Shot the bullet out and carefully ground off the closed end and the solder flowed well to both wires by heating the casing. Slipped on the heat shrink and it was a pretty good repair.
I broke the pedal assembly off on my sandrail a few years ago. It turned out I had tack welded the pedals in place then never finished welding. I tied the throttle cable to a stick and used it for a hand throttle. Mind you the motor is behind you, so pushing foreward gives it gas. No luck on the clutch, just gave up and drove without one. Friend riding shotgun ran the cutter brakes, so we had one brake at a time. It made for some interesting downhill sections. Also, a 10" pipe wrench makes a perfect bottle opener.
The most inappropriate tool? I had no sensible way to get distilled water into the battery without making a mess every time or being overly tedious about it. One day I was walking through the supermarket and found the perfect tool for the job: A 50 cent baby medicine dropper. The end fits perfectly in the battery fill openings and holds the right amount of water for conveniently topping the battery off. The lady at the checkout counter said "aww sick baby?" I said "no, sick motorcycle battery." She looked something like this: :huh and is probably still trying to figure that one out.
^^^ Thanks, reminds me that one of those baby snot sucker things works great as a carburetor primer after a dog chews the bulb off a Lawn Boy lawn mower.
When I was a kid, my dad would buy these incredibly tough turkey legs for $0.19/lb. My mom would cook them for 45 minutes in a pressure cooker (which is a LOT). But she went through all kinds of conniptions getting them down to size to fit the pressure cooker, including one time cutting a frozen one with our radial-arm saw. Yeah, that was a mess!
Here are a few. A co-worker was 50 miles into the 4wd beaches on Padre Island, TX with an early 1970s International Travelall. It quit running due to a sunken carb float. He took the float out, took the tail light bulbs out, removed the glass bulbs from the base, slit the float and put two bulbs in it. Put the carb back together and drove it back bucking and jumping, but it did run. I use a hi lift bumper jack and my pickup bumper to break down my airplane tires. I use a large shop vise to break down motorcycle tires. I use a hammer and wood chisel along with a vise to open oil filters. I had a 79 lincoln continental with a broken off shift lever. Apparently they all broke as there were no junk yard parts available. I drove it 20k miles with a pair of vice grips clamped on for a shift lever. Fixed a flat boat trailer tire many miles down a terrible dirt road on the Mexican coast with band aid ends. Had a brand new patch kit from sears, but the glue tube and never been filled. Broke the tire down by driving the above travelall over it. Pumped it up with a spark plug tire compressor, remember those? I have a Honduran friend who at age 16 was captain of the family fishing boat. It had a GM 671 on one side and a V871 on the other side. He was hundreds of miles from home when one of the engines threw a rod right through the side of the case. Well, he was limping home on the other engine when the rudder on that side fell off. Called on the radio, but it was going to be many days before anyone could come and get him. Well, he drained the oil out of the blown engine, crawled under it and removed the pan. Removed the bad connecting rod from the crank, jammed the piston up high with a wedge, bound rags and wire around the naked crank journal to hold some oil pressure and put the pan back. Pinched off the injector line going to that cylinder, cut a fishing float to fit the hole in the block and jammed it in place with a 2/4 against the side of the engine room. A GM two stroke has a pressurized crankcase, so the hole had to be sealed. Well, he came home a couple of hundred miles at a bit above idle speed on that blown engine. I probably know more of these, but that is all that I can think of right now.
not sure anyone can top your Honduran friend's enginuity SWM TL320 blew the auto deco, permanently fixed it with a hair pin glad I had long curles back then rear ended a car with a Gilera RX200, looked like 3 grand damage to the car and a scratch on my fender, well it lost a few degrees in rake, was a very flickable little bike afterwards, a week later on a trip into Italian no-mans-land it developed a slow gas leak, gas had eaten it's way thu a hairline crack in the back bend of the tank, gas ran forward along the seam and tropped onto the hot headpipe, used 1/2 rubber glove, a #5 allen wrench and the broken right side off mirrior mount to seal it off good enouth for the remainder of the long weekend
a blow tourch to heat the cloths iron...stupid thing would not get hot and wife was gone on a similar note I tried using the kitchen oven to dry some pants once...hahahaha that didn't turn out very well
Them "three on the tree" Ford Pick-ups from the 70's were good for that also. No parts available at the junkyard, they all broke. So drove around for a while with the Vise Grips, until we could not get any more "grip", left us stranded at an intersection in neutral. Under the truck I go, shift into second and 50 miles back home first through Vancouver rush hour traffic.:eek1 Not too fast them 302s in second. We then welded a short rod on what was left inside the steering column. Had to remember about the totally opposed shift pattern,reverse down forward etc... other than that was just fine for weeks until we put a floor shifter in it. Of course that was a "used" part, no instructions so at first we still had an opposed pattern until we switched the rods.:huh A communal truck that one....had lots of fun teaching some about the "opposed shift pattern".