MacGyvering: Difference between revisions

** In [[The War on Terror|the Iraq War]], American soldiers, lacking suitable armor for their Humvees and trucks, created what came to be called "hillbilly armor" made from scrap metal, kevlar, bulletproof glass and even plywood. [http://www.lostiniraq.com/images/hillbilly-armor-315_640x480.jpg The result] looks like something out of ''[[Mad Max]]''.

* In the wake of the major oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010, basically everyone and their uncle came up with an idea to either A) get the oil from the water, B) fix the gushing oil pipe or C) clean the oil off the poor helpless animals. Almost all these ideas (well, maybe not the "stop the gushing pipe" one) usually involved simple materials that could be found in either the average home, the average High School, or the average supermarket. And most of them either ''worked'' or ''would have worked'', although not on a Gulf-wide scale.

** Often called Number 8 Wire here in New Zealand (after the amount of jury-rigging done with the stuff).

* Nuclear physicist Ted Taylor, while waiting out a delay during a nuclear weapons test, found a parabolic mirror. He placed this outside the observation bunker and used wire to fix a Pall Mall at the mirror's focal point. When the bomb went off, the mirror focused the heat flash on the cigarette, and Ted Taylor became [[Badass|the first person to light a cigarette with an atomic bomb]].