Let's light a fire on this forum.
I would like to see a post from anyone who has a way to "do almost anything, with absolutely nothing".
Catastrophic failures should be relegated to a Darwin Award thread.
As an example, I was in the 25th ID in Hawaii during a pretty bad hurricane. It took a couple of days to clear enough streets to get to post 10 miles from my house.
When I got in, lots of people were milling around the motor pool unable to operate their vehicles due to a lack of fuel. Most had run out, the deadlined vehicles had already been siphoned dry.
We had almost 20,000 gallons in the ground in tanks, but the power was out.
I took a quick look around the motor pool, found a 1.5KW generator, a Light Set, a pair of lineman pliers, and a 5 gallon can of waste fuel.
I set up the generator as far from the pumps as the extension cords from the Light Set would reach, cut off the plug end of the cord, pulled the pump breaker, took the cover off the pump, and hot wired the drop cord directly to the pump motor, taping everything up well.
I fueled up the gen set with the waste fuel strained through a screen, and it started. I plugged in the cord, and five minutes later, we were operating the only operational fuel point on Schofield Barracks for the next three days.
Second story. Old one. Inherently dangerous, do not attempt at home. OTOH, if your vehicle is dead in Afghanistan and you are being being shot at, you have to make your decision and live with the consequences.
I saw a guy with a dead battery in a 7-11 parking lot. No one had any jumper cables.
One of his buddies pulled up in front of him till the front bumpers touched.
He then took the tire tools out of both vehicles. This appeared to be an unconventional approach, so I had to see what happened next.
He placed the socket ends of the tire tools on the positive terminals of the batteries, and slapped the other ends together with a little sparking.
The owner of the dead car was able to crank it right up.
Adaptive thinking. THAT is what we are looking for.
Anyone else?
TR