Today, finally, my MacGyver moment came. Katie’s car was puffing out smoke when she came home from work so I went out with a bottle of water to cool it down. She called her dad who said to block the hole up somehow and get the car over to his so he could look at it more. So as I walked back, with only the suggestion of bluetack and selotape, MacGyver struck me.
I had read some articles from Lifehacker about emergency kits, and stuff to keep with you. One of those was a strap like you get on backpacks, with the strap doubling through a plastic bit. I thought, with one of those, some bluetack and some plastic, I could fashion a band to go around the hole in the radiator pipe and hole it closed. So I set to work on my plan, cut up a bottle for the plastic sleeve, found the strap and bluetack, and then proceeded to spend ages fiddling with it in a very tight space, trying to get this to work. And it did. To some degree. I got the strap around, and it worked a bit, but water was still coming through. I didn’t really wanna drive in that so Katie called her dad who said just use bluetack in the hole and selotape or something like that. So I then spent about 20 mins putting this together to get the car about 7 miles to Katie’s dad’s.

Final outcome, I was proud of my MacGyver idea, and then proud that I managed to botch the car so it was running on selotape and bluetack.

I then spent the rest of the evening, helping to fix the pipe more temporarily, and then getting Katie’s dad’s new router and network all running with his new laptop too (running Vista. Looked good, fast, not bad really).

All in all, a very helpful evening on my part. Although I didn’t get a chance to do that ironing

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