fantastic mechanics

there is a man in our village who now sadly owns a nice old 230e, i say sadly because he is a diy mechanic of dubious distinction. years ago he had an old ford with the valve recesses in the pistons. he took his engine apart and mistakenly put the pistons in the wrong way round,ie the recesses not in line with the valves. solution- clearly it would take far to long to do the job properly, so he chiselled new recesses in the tops of the pistons!!! i kid you not, and yes it did run.

[ymsin]

Originally posted by lhdaisy
... he is a diy mechanic of dubious distinction.

A colourful description nevertheless ...

[Billybob]

Obviously the mind and hand of a genius artist!, if the goal was to taking the shortest and most direct route possible in order to turn an inanimate nonfunctioning mass of parts into a functioning system? Elegant engineering! If you value how much of that goal was accomplished by so little resource used!

An intellect of that clear and concise nature would be a valuable asset if you are, say, up in the International Space Station or on "MB Survivor" island (and a monkey just ran off with your "only 14 MM WEM socket, the exact one you need to remove the piston rod crank bearing cap bolts or the engine block crank bearing cap bolts, so now you will never be able to R&R the pistons that have been foolishly installed backwards by the very last tribe member voted off the island! Therefore your venerably "MB 617 diesel" powered boat will never get you off the island, oh damn! Or onboard the first couple of hundred hours of slow motion seconds after a 5,00 km/h micro meteorite field makes of a couple of dozen impacts, striking and passing through the networks of vital systems, cosmic buckshot-like! I wonder how the rich guys, who can now pay-to-go up, would fare?

I once saw a boat of locals who had been out in an” abandoned" 22' North American/302 Ford powered, who had improvised a fuel system that use a hand powered bilge pump pushing gas through a piece of hose into a section of tire tube (a left-over from a previous water proofing repair) that had been pierced with a dozen needle holes. One guy pumped the fuel and the other two took turns aiming and holding the gasoline jets into the throat of the carb to keep their boat moving and steering a course that would bring them out of the Gulf Stream and down current the northern most island in the chain, after that? maybe Bermuda, if you’re lucky!, or there is the very real possibility, you could end up circling the Atlantic, even a couple of times!

Those guys where pretty happy when as they told there story on dry land! Everyone had a good drink to that and they told the story, and all had a drink, and they told the story….

Sometimes the solution doesn’t look so pretty! But is sure is amazing and interesting to consider the extremes to which some limits can be pushed! Intriguing story!