Tales from "Mr. Fix-It"

[89AKurt]

Who gets asked to fix something, just because you're known for building models? ?

Wife said her laptop sound wasn't working, and couldn't plug in the cord for the speakers used for her job.  I tried to plug in my cord, obvious that it wouldn't.  Looked in the hole, looked in my laptop's hole, then I could see a tip had come off.  Eyeballed the size of the stub, went to the workbench.  Used a sprue, drilled a hole in the end.  Came back, dabbed some superglue in the sprue hole, stuck it in the hole.  At that point, wife said we better find a YouTube video about how to pull that out, found a dude who used a soldering iron and copper wire, said "it should be a variable voltage type" (yea everyone has one of those), "just get a little solder on the end, then carefully" ..... I'm sitting, giving her a funny look .... "oh yea be sure it's not under warrantee and turned off" .... I have one of those grins, she's looking worried ....... "and if it is, just have them do it" ........ she's looking at me, worried about the glue ......... "and if it doesn't work the first time, just add more solder on the end" ........ I start giving her $#i* and laughing ......... "but here is one that worked!"  Figured that was enough time for the glue to have set.  I rise from the Lazyboy, stroll over to her laptop, carefully grab the sprue with both hands, gently pull out (I couldn't cross my fingers, so had an exaggerated grimace ?), and what do you know!  ? 

You have a story?

[Snake45]

Improvise! Adapt! Overcome! GITTER DONE! 

[Tom Geiger]

When my girls were growing up,  I'd often find a broken toy sitting on my model bench.  Dad could fix anything!  Still I glue together things for my wife.  Most recently a mug she owns had a ceramic butterfly on the handle. Super glued it back on!

Back in the day when I worked for big corporation number one,  the VP we reported into was using the image of a sculling boat for teamwork. Some senior guys ordered him a large, possibly 1/24 scale boat from England, from a company that made awards for sculling teams. The boat was painted our company colors, came mounted on a wood base that was lettered for us and in a glass case that was made just for this. It was shipped with the boat on the base inside the case, with no protections around it.  En route it came off the two pegs that held it to the base and they received a big box of parts.  

I get the call from my boss....  I'm presented with the box of parts. Can I fix it?  I call the company in England who is very happy to help.  They give me the Humbrel paint codes and send me all the broken parts.  This is a very heavy cast pewter or lead boat. And all those outriggers that hold the oars were busted off.  The ones they sent me for replacement were cast pretty sloppy and had a lot of cleanup. They were brittle and some broke as I tried to sand and file them down.  It became evident that I was better off scratch building them from wire.  Next step was drilling out where they broke off the body. I busted a dozen drill bits doing this!

The body was all scratched up so I sanded things flush and was able to spot airbrush the Humbrel paint without going near any of the hand painted lettering.  This was an intense project under a deadline of when they wanted to present it to the VP.  I broke my tail getting it done and towards the end I even stayed home from work a day to complete it.  All ended well. It looked new, everyone was pleased and my brownie point account was full!  

The VP personally thanked me and just about all of his reports each gave me a company "On The Spot" Award which was a $100 AMEX gift card.  I recently was going through the contents of my 50 drawer parts cabinets and realized one drawer still had extra parts for this boat!

[Edward Gore]

Very resourceful problem solving.