Around The Web - You Fixed It Wrong

Most people who've built or maintained anything for any length of time have at least one of these stories. The redneck engineering fix. It's either something they did, or something they discovered that a previous owner did. When I was a teen, my dad was working on restoring an old Porsche 911 he'd bought for cheap at a police auction. At one point he found that part of the body was being held together by C clamps!

That restoration didn't work out.

Here, on the other hand, we have a story of a small motorcycle rescue, and a pair of truly jaw-dropping engine "fixes" by a previous owner. Check it out. I'll wait.

Rideapart - 1974 Honda CB200 Restoration Engine Trouble

So far, I've never done anything quite that bad to anything. On the other hand, I haven't bought a motorcycle from Facebook, Craigslist, Ebay, or a local auction with the intention of restoring it. Yet.

My crowning moment of redneck engineering to date was shoehorning PC motherboard into a case of entirely the wrong form factor. Fortunately, that particular mistake isn't around any...

Hang on again, I'll be right back...

*Imagine noise and crashing sounds as the author moves stuff on the shelves in his garage*

I'm not sure why I've allowed this to follow me around for twenty years. But what you see here is the top of the line in cutting edge 1997 PC technology - a Pentium 200 with MMX, 16mb of RAM, and some other components. See those black brackets in the corners? The one in the upper left is really obvious. Those are actually mounting rails for the optical media drives that my stupid teenage self repurposed to make the motherboard fit in the case.

I ran out of brackets, and hard-mounted the CD drive in the case. When a disc would spin up, it would sound like a weed whacker.

I said the motherboard fit in the case. Well, mostly. The ports on the back weren't quite accessible. Pliers and duck tape to the rescue!

Teenage me was an idiot sometimes. But it worked! That rig ran reliably throughout four years of college and beyond until I finally had enough money from my first pair of post college career jobs to buy a shiny new gaming PC!