When I was young I was always trying to build and repair stuff and had to make whatever I could find work...  Remember those cheap bike wrenches that looked like a little barbell and had a few hexagonal cutouts in each end?  I found one on the side of the road one day and it felt like I found a whole tool kit compared to a few old wrenches (two of them were Whitworth sizes) and this strange old socket set (hex drive instead of square drive) with several missing sockets plus an old Ford adjustable wrench (kind of looks like a pipe wrench) I would try to use.  (I think I still have that old Ford wrench someplace.)

We didn't have an electric drill but in my grandfathers old stuff (which is where the Ford wrench came from) I found a hand drill....  The crank was a wooden knob on a large bevel gear and I can't tell you how many times I managed to pinch my hand in the gears...  or how long it took to drill a hole in metal...  literally hours.  I used to try to sharpen drill bits by rubbing them on the sidewalk or a carborundum stone.

So I learned to "improvise"...  all my friends used to call me "Macgyver" after the TV show came out in the 80's because for years already I was always trying to fix stuff without the "right" tools or parts.  I really hated that.  Especially when they gave me a Swiss Army Knife for my birthday. 

Which is just a long way of saying I've had a lot of practice finding different ways to do things without the "right" tool or parts.  So it sort of comes naturally for me.  If I had a vise and an electric drill back then it probably wouldn't be so easy to think up alternative methods.  (which don't always work that well by the way)

The ironic part is that I became a "gadget junkie" and love to get new tools for a job...  even if I might only need to use it once. 

MarkT, getting more done with less.. That sir, is what makes a mind so creative.. a lesson of life that is waning very fast.
Sneezles61

When I was young I had to improvise a lot. I got spoiled in my later years as I could buy what I needed to a certain limit. I hate to buy any more expensive tool as it seemed like as soon as I bought it I didn't need it anymore. I had an old mechanic teach me a lot of things when I was young. Unfortunately I forgot what I learned when I was younger. If I don't use it I lose it.