kind of like MacGyver, but not really

April 27, 2009 4:11 PM

New-fangled uses for everyday items?

I'm writing a novel with a female MacGyver type, but much less tech-oriented (I've seen the other posts). She has a knack for making everyday items unexpectedly useful. Not just paper clips and coffee filters, but also items you'd usually discard -- plastic soda rings, broken toys, empty film canisters, shards of... whatever, and so on. I'm looking for websites, books and examples from your own life that fit the bill. I already know about Lifehacker.

If it helps, pretend you're a hoarder. What's your excuse for keeping that wine glass stem, or picking up that busted baby stroller (or abandoned cane, or plastic shoebox lid) in the alley?

posted by changeling to grab bag (24 comments total)

Check out some of Orange Swan's posts.
posted by kuujjuarapik at 4:15 PM on April 27 [2 favorites has favorites]

Wow: Orange Swan is amazing. But I think I should add that I'm not seeking crafty stuff so much as speculative, survivor-ish uses for things -- the book is set in a dystopian near-future.
posted by changeling at 4:20 PM on April 27

ReadyMade has their quarterly MacGyver Challenge. Their archives do seem a bit broken right now, but a little googling brings up all kinds of good stuff.
posted by annaramma at 4:32 PM on April 27

Used chopsticks are handy for fixing up stripped out screw holes in wood - you pound the chopstick in with a bit of glue smeared on it, snap it off and then drive the screw back in. I have used this trick on doors with loose hinges.
posted by davey_darling at 4:34 PM on April 27 [7 favorites has favorites]

Check out the New Uses for Old Things feature at Real Simple... some of them are a little crafty or just household common sense (lemon juice cleans stuff! who knew?), but others might provide some MacGyver-ish inspiration. For example, this little tidbit about aluminum foil or this suggestion for old plastic bags might come in handy for your heroine at some point.
posted by scody at 4:40 PM on April 27 [1 favorite has favorites]

Check out the homesteading section at Alpha Disaster Contengencies.

If your character needs a steady food source from basically nothing, check out:

Protein from Thin Air: Breeding Maggots for Chicken Feed

If she lives in the city, have her feed maggots to a captured flock of pigeons.
Pigeon recipes here.
posted by aquafortis at 4:44 PM on April 27 [1 favorite has favorites]

wine glass stem= improvised weapon
busted baby stroller= cannibalize wheels and make a platform to help move furniture, groceries, or large boxes (actually did this)
abandoned cane = plant it in the ground as a central support for a tent made from a folded tennis court tarp
plastic shoebox lid = dinner plate for my home-grown roasted pigeons

Which somehow reminds me...
Pallet Sheds
posted by aquafortis at 4:57 PM on April 27

We used to keep a can of Coca Cola and a toothbrush in an old car. Their powers combined helped get corrosion off the battery.

I have no idea if this is safe for a car battery in the long-term but here's the idea.
posted by juliplease at 5:14 PM on April 27

juliplease you can actually use Coke to clean just about anything - if you don't mind it being sticky and slightly brown after the fact. I've used it to even clean the soles of boots (very nasty stuff on them that I didn't want in my drain or to use a cloth on). Combine with cigar ash, and it becomes one of the best all purpose surface cleaners I know of, particularly for removing grease.

Film canisters are the plastics industry's gift to water resistant storage. I've used them to store anything from medicine to bandages - they work great for keeping out humidity and dampness from mild soakings.

Sharp plastic shards can easily be sharpened into short term use blades (take a look at some of the galleries of prison shivs if you want to see some interesting uses), and I know from experience it takes very little time with a cinder block to make a serviceable edge on any hard plastic of decent thickness.

Cinder blocks are actually fantastic coarse grain sanding surfaces - if you need to take rust off anything and dont really care what the metal looks like after the fact - its great!

You can use 2lt soda bottles to make fish traps. Ditto for milk jugs or any other jug shaped container. I've even seen them made from the big water cooler jugs for larger fish.

You can also use such jugs for making insect traps - great for catching bait or keeping bugs off your garden.

Milk crates (plastic or metal) can be very easily converted into crab traps with the use of a bit of wire and screen mesh or chicken wire. Also useful for crayfish or fish traps with some modification.

Wire and string are two of the most useful things ever. Particularly for making animal snares and mending kit of any sort. Your character should get very knowledgeable about how to find, strip, and coil wire, assuming there is any left to be salvaged by this point. Ditto for how to unstring things.

I'm sure I can think of more, but my brain is pretty fried atm. I used to be very surviorish as a youngster, and was very good at learning to make my own gear out of discarded stuff.
posted by strixus at 5:53 PM on April 27 [1 favorite has favorites]

instructables.com might be a worth a look.
posted by BoscosMom at 5:54 PM on April 27

Oh! Crochet hooks and knitting needles are two of the most USEFUL things to have.

If you learn how to use either, you have ways to make any number of things, from fish nets to clothing. You can also use them as easy metal dowels for any such use (finger splints for long term casts are one use I can think of).

Knitting needles are also very easy to sharpen into spear points for non fishing spear uses. For fishing spears you need something with barbs.
posted by strixus at 5:56 PM on April 27

The Mythbusters like these kinds of unintuitive multi-use things. Here are a few:

Cola
Vodka I
Vodka II
Vodka III
posted by cowbellemoo at 5:58 PM on April 27

strixus's post reminds me of another good possible source: Survivorman. (I recall one episode where he used a rock to fashion a fish hook out of a shard of glass, and about half of the episodes feature some ridiculously inventive way of getting fresh water.)
posted by scody at 5:59 PM on April 27

If you have Netflix you should get ahold of the Rough Science DVDs, or watch it on Netflix's streaming service. Sadly only season 3&4 seem to be available in the US. But it's a reality show where they put a bunch of scientists in the wilderness with minimal supplies and give them amazing challenges that they pull off.

Like making their own 'Mars Rover' type robot out of bits of a bicycle and a cannibalized radio.

Or making chemical handwarmers by making their own quicklime and mixing it with water in plastic baggies.

Or making activated charcoal to purify water.

Or my favorite where they cooked a lump of cinnabar to get mercury, mixed the mercury with powdered rock that had a lot of gold content to make a gold amalgam, putting that in a potato and baking off the mercury and getting a lump of pure gold in the end.
posted by Caravantea at 6:06 PM on April 27

You guys are AMAZING. This stuff is gold.
aquafortis, your answers made me laugh out loud.
posted by changeling at 6:16 PM on April 27

Real Simple often has articles about repurposing things.

I'm an anti-hoarder, but I'm currently using an old dresser as a pantry, and to keep the cans from rolling around, I put cut pieces of poster board to fit the drawers and then glued parallel chopsticks to them.

As soon as my kitchen is done, I'm going to start a food blog and I'm already collecting things for a light diffuser for photographs - a bent bicycle rim (hubs and spokes removed), a leftover sheer white curtain (because they come two to a package and I needed 3), and a clip on light that I can clip to the new track light rails.

(Sorry, these are all kind of home-decorating related, but maybe that works for your character?)

((Also, I love stuff like this! In a previous life my husband and I owned a bicycle shop and I once fixed the bottom bracket of someone's beloved beach cruiser by shimming it with strips cut from a snapple can (diet grape flavor). It was either that or they had to warranty the frame at Walmart.))
posted by zinfandel at 8:00 PM on April 27

The other day I had to drain the rank water out of the bottom of a refrigerator. Rather than clean all the stuff out of the fridge so that I could get to the bottom to reach the fluid, I decided to "siphon" the fluid out even though it was too shallow to use a tube. I used a square of paper towel, rolled it and flattened it to make a ribbon of paper, and laid the ribon on the fridge floor, down out under the door into a bowl. Wicking action got the water moving along the ribbon, gravity then took over and pulled the water into the bowl, wherein the syphon effect joined the party and pulled more water into the top of the ribbon, and so the ribbon drained the fridge and filled the bowl - while the fridge door was (mostly) shut.

For post-apocalyptic survival, use same trick to obtain drinking water or fuel from through a crack in a wall or some similar barrier designed to block a siphoning tube.
posted by -harlequin- at 8:05 PM on April 27

Seconding Caravantea's Rough Science suggestion. I'll add that my favourite was when they needed to build an underwater microphone, and to do that, the electronics guy got an amplifier out of an old radio but still needed something that could turn sound into electricity. So the chemist guy got the necessary minerals, did his magic, and grew a piezoelectric crystal!
posted by -harlequin- at 8:11 PM on April 27

It helps to have a good understanding of physics. For example, if she wanted to make ice cream in a plastic bag instead of using an ice cream machine.
posted by bigmusic at 9:58 PM on April 27

If lost at sea, you can make your own fresh water distiller with 2 plastic bottles:

You'd need a 2L plastic pop bottle and a 500mL water bottle.
Obviously you'd first want to drink all the beverages that came in those bottles.

Cut the 2L - turn it into a deep cup + a funnel (leave the cap on)
Cut the small bottle into a deep cup.
Fill the big cup half full of seawater. Place the little cup in the middle, empty. Maybe pop in a clean rock to weigh it down.
Wedge the 2L funnel firmly into the top of the deep cup (upside down), so the pointy part of the funnel leads into the small cup.
Put the whole thing in the sun.
Fresh water should condense on the inner surface of the funnel, then be guided down into the small cup.
posted by pseudostrabismus at 10:57 PM on April 27

Oh, and once when I was camping we forgot flashlights and it was too dark to eat dinner. I wedged half a stick of butter into an empty tin can, made a tinfoil reflector, then stuck a cotton tampon into the butter like a wick. I made a tampon-butter-lantern. That thing burned for like 8 hours, it was a hanukah miracle.
posted by pseudostrabismus at 10:59 PM on April 27 [3 favorites has favorites]

Plastic bottles as floodlights.
posted by iviken at 4:42 AM on April 28 [1 favorite has favorites]

That stiff plastic strapping tape you'll always find a piece of near the supermarket dumpster or blowing around behind the newsagent's is good for getting into my car when I've locked the keys inside. I fold it in half, push the folded end into the car between the B pillar and the door seal, and work the outside ends until the folded end forms a loop that drops around the lock button; gently pull it tight, haul it upwards and I'm in.
posted by flabdablet at 5:25 AM on April 28

Plastic bottles as floodlights.

That's as cool as can be. I saw a similar quick hack (from a Japanese TV show) that uses a white plastic shopping bag to diffuse a flashlight throughout an entire tent.

Another good source for ideas might be the Army's Survival, Evasion and Recovery manual.
posted by jquinby at 6:33 AM on April 28