**Giveaway closed, winner announcement here**

What’s the most MacGyverish thing you ever did, in real life?

Giving away 2 Steam codes for Secret Files Tunguska as punishment for relapsing in my game purchasing addiction, details here (irrelevant to giveaway though).

Tunguska is a most fabulous point & click adventure game with tons of puzzles where you improvise with all kinds of objects in order to get in and out of a multitude of situations, in true Mac Gyver fashion. If you want to know more I posted a full review of the game here.

Please state if you’re in for the giveaway or just participating in the topic.

Winning criteria: Most MacGyverish entries win because the more MacGyverish you are, the less you’re likely to complain about contrived puzzles of which there are quite many in Tunguska

Rep requirements: nada dudu none at all

Deadline: in about a week

Not in.

Most MacGyverish thing was using a paperclip and aluminium foil to run a laptop I didn't have a battery or a proper charger for it, by using a different charger on it. Cut a piece of the paper clip, put it in the middle, roll a piece of aluminium foil on the outside, then touch them to the proper parts in the laptop.
Weirdly enough, it worked, even without the gum.

not in, but thanks for the GA :)

hmm, i'm not too handy, so the most MacGyver thing i've probably ever done is put tinfoil on the rabbit ears of my TV.

and not that i have ever used or needed one, i have turned numerous household items and fruit into smoking apparatuses

no in

the most macguyverish thing i did was putting together a imac G4 from spar parts
i got a working imac G4 with out anything else no hd no ram no optical drive

and no fucking internal carrige either
i had to jury rig the whole machine by balancing the dvd on the ram using double sides tape to tape the hd and the drive together and securing it all to the top with more double sided tape

and it worked it still worked when i sold it 2 years later

Thank you for your giveaway and the chance, please count me in, I do not know these games yet. :)

My entry...

I think I once, or twice wiped my arse clean, ingeniously using tree leaves...

Can we give more than one entry? I just need to know if I should wait until I remember something something really cool or if I should put in my "inventions" as I think of them.

I'm in!

Not the most technical, and I'm not sure this was the most MacGyver thing I've done, but this is the only one that comes to mind now:

I had a mini-refrigerator at work that had the freezer bit in the top-left corner of the unit which was the main loop for the coolant. Thus, anything hanging in the small rectangular freezer at the top was, well, frozen. Anything else was too far from the small rectangular loop to freeze.

So, I noticed one day that it wasn't very cool and ice had enveloped the entire loop of the freezer. In fact, this thing probably had never been defrosted in its life. The block of ice was so huge, you couldn't fit anything into the freezer!

So, I started to defrost, but then realized that the amount of melted water would overflow the bottom lip and pour out all over the floor, and it was dripping at several points, and I couldn't watch it all day…

So, I made a makeshift siphon using a disposable plastic cup, some twisted c-fold paper towels tied together to make a long wick-like rope. Wetted the "rope" and fixed it from the block of ice and down to the cup on the floor.

Then, I only needed to check every hour or longer to empty out the cup. It worked! At one point, the bulk of the block of ice melted off the metal loop, so i was able to pull out the rest and chuck it.

Edit: I wasn't going to be in, but why not. I love P&C games, and it's one I don't have, so I'm in. Thanks for the giveaway.

A few years ago, my wife and I were driving home from a vacation when a steering hose on the car blew. We were in northern BC, and the nearest major town was over 100km away. It was a Sunday. I crawled under the car, and found the leak. There was a small section of rubber hose in the return line just downstream of the rack and pinion that had split. I called AMA, and talked to the operator for a bit. The nearest two truck was coming from 120km away. They said a three to four hour wait. I told him to bring power steering fluid, and I'd see about fixing the hose.

I remembered seeing some junk on the side of the road a little ways back. I walked for 20 minutes, and sure enough, there were three old trucks rusting in a clearing a couple hundred metres off the road. This is where it gets MacGyver'ish - the only tool I had available was my trusty swiss army knife. I scavanged several different diameters of hard line, as well as a bunch of hose clamps off the old trucks. The wood saw on my knife was surprisingly efficient at cutting the hard line. I got back to our car, spliced in a chunk of hard line where the rubber hose at split, put a couple of hose clamps on either end, and waited for the tow truck.

We filled the power steering fluid, fired it up, and it worked. It worked so well, I forgot about it, until about a year later when it finally split again.

I carried that swiss army knife with me everyday for almost 18 years, and then I just recently lost it. I think I know where it is, but it's not really recoverable.

Well if you need the number of a good proctologist let me know.

I don't think that will help. I'm pretty sure I left it at a dead guys house. Can't really ask him for it.

impressive
most impressive
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLeOSOe4GmQ

Not in, but +1 for your generosity! :-)


I love this TV show!  <span class="bold">Angus MacGyver</span> is a genius who can solve almost any problem with his swiss army knife, duct tape, chewing gums, chocolate bars and paper clips! :-)

▪  <span class="bold">List of problems solved by MacGyver</span>

Wonderful giveaway, awalterj!

Not in, but thank you as always for the interesting topic. I will have a think about something to add here later.

- That poor little rabbit, having its ears cut of just so you can decorate them with tinfoil and put them on top of your television. I thought that after you brutally murdered the Easter bunny and cut off her pink ears (the ones on Crew's avatar, where did you think she got them from?) that your bunny torturing was at an end?

Well I just had to rescue that poor earless bunny. So while I was in your house taking naked pictures of you while you slept (they are for snowkatt, not sure what they are for, but I was given a good price for taking them. By the way, that is a cool tattoo, but that piercing looks really scary. :-) ). Anyway, I managed to rescue the poor bunny and give him some new ears. But I don't know why you did not just use the new ears to begin with, rather than cutting off real bunny ears. :-)

Ha, thanks for the tip! I most likely wouldn't have thought of that at all, I thought you can only use a paperclip to disarm missiles I'm not at all MacGyverish either so no worries :) In fact, my solutions to problems are hilariously low tech, if I manage to solve the problem at all. Sort of how a chimpanzee gets to the banana in the research lab or how ravens & crows use rocks to raise water levels and get their treats. Most often, my philosophy is: If I can't fix it with duct tape, I'll just let it lie around, maybe it will magically fix itself.
I did do some MacGyver stuff in the army but that doesn't count because it wasn't improvisation, just instructed drills (monkey see, monkey do). Ironically, my army issued pocket knife has less tools than my civilian Swiss Army knife and most of the time it was used for nothing more than opening canned food.

I'm well experienced in the kitchen but I nevertheless manage to create minor disasters from time to time, usually when I'm reading the forums instead of watching what I'm cooking. I'm more careful now, especially since I'm running low on pans I haven't yet managed to destroy. You're like a tech savvy gnome form Arcanum, making me look like an orc in comparison. I don't know what makes computers work, I just like to play games and when computers stop working, I'm like "oh well.. looks like the Universe wanted it that way, guess I'll put it on the pile of non-wokring computers I already have and do something else for the day"
I used to be very interested in the newest computers and things but nowadays I'm more like a druid who finds technology suspicious and likes looking at trees. Thanks for making me laugh, and for making me feel like I'm perhaps not the least tech savvy person around here :D

Btw, when I'm on the road or out in the boondocks for more than a day, I always have my trusty roll of toilet paper with me, and my trusty toothbrush as well. You can share whatever story comes to your mind first but it's fine if you edit your entry later to a different story if you remember something better. Whichever you post last will count. Naturally, I can only allow one entry per person but I don't have any "no editing or you're doomed to hell" rules. Excellent indeed, and thanks for reminding me that I haven't defrosted my freezer for several years. Haven't observed any large ice blocks forming but I'll keep an eye on it. It's not that I'm too dumb to know that I should defrost the thing at least once a year, I just have something in there that really needs to stay frozen. No human parts though. That's the spirit, there's nothing to lose and if you're able to pull off that kinda stuff, the game shouldn't be too much of a problem for you. Regarding your car mechanic story and you carrying around a Swiss Army knife all the time, that might just make you more Swiss than me! I have two Swiss Army knives but I only take one of them with me for camping or barbecuing in the woods (to shave and sharpen a hazelnut branch with), so not very often at all.



Thanks for the link, ah crap now I really want to go on an epic MacGyver series binge. It's just so entertaining, plus the nostalgia of having watched this stuff as a kid.



You're most welcome to do so, I'm sure you're quite handy, that is your job after all (building bear traps around the farm etc).


Wait a minute...didn't -you-create crew's new avatar? Aren't -you- the mastermind behind all this? I sense historical revisionism!

Not in but ...

... I met this gut once, Mayor Killian Darkwater, who had issues with some kind of casino ringleader, in that rusty watering hole of a town. Gizmo was the name, I could have use spy warfare, stealth, and electronnic devices, but I fixed criminal activities in the area with a cattle prod.

(/tribute to the McGiverish voice of Mayor Darkwater)