My friends would call my little inventions MacGyverisms so I thought I would share a few.
If you’ve read my earlier About Men Radio blog, then you already know that I had an early start building radios out of broken components and older radio parts. (“Radio Shack: Real Family Fun.”)
As a kid we had Tonka toys that were utterly indestructible.
I’ll attest to that as we lived on the 9th floor in the housing projects and upon seeing that commercial of an elephant standing on a Tonka toy and it didn’t budge, I’d figure that to be thrown from the 9th floor would surely cause some damage.
So I opened the back window — making sure no one was sitting on the benches — and hurled my dump truck outside.
Then it was a race downstairs to look for the wreckage.
I got downstairs and to my surprise the truck was totally intact.
Not even a scratch or busted plastic glass windshield. I was very impressed.
As I looked at the fire trucks and ambulances in the neighborhood, I noticed that they had lights. So I took a drill that I made and proceeded to cut some holes into my ambulance.
There was a plastic piece where lights would go, so I removed it and created a housing underneath. I also punched some holes through the top of the cab and used white Christmas lights as my ambulance lights.
I had spliced the wires and added it to a battery pack and finally had running lights. Except they didn’t blink, so I had my handy Radio Shack kit, which had a flasher attachment, so I modified that to make it work
My dad was pretty inventive as well.
He could make pretty much anything out of metal. As a young boy, I wanted some kind of plastic toy but on Christmas I opened up the present and found this derrick.
I didn’t play with it very much. It wasn’t until I had a friend over and he asked and then I showed him how it worked.
It had a structurally sound crane boom. For example, my dad wore 5-pound steel-tipped shoes to work every day and the crane picked them up and didn’t tip. It might have not been the most attractive vehicle in my fleet, but it actually worked the best.
MacGyver: You can do anything you want to do if you put your mind to it.
It wasn’t until high school and Pedro broke his glasses, that I thought about melting my pen to fix his them. It was a quick fix but it seemed to work.
MacGyver: A paperclip can be a wondrous thing. More times than I can remember, one of these has gotten me out of a tight spot.
I began a job and they didn’t give me keys to the desk, but with my trusty old paperclip, I got into my desk. It took about a month before they finally gave me a key.
MacGyver: If I had some duct tape, I could fix that.
My ex broke a draw and I used duct tape to get it working again. She couldn’t understand how I fixed it so quickly. She did want me to fix it properly, so I had to run to the lumber yard and get a matching piece.
I glued it together and that chore was fixed that day.
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