I recently boasted in a comment that I was good at Heath Robinson solutions to problems. (In fact, I should show the one I was referring to, some time soon.)
I thought I would regale you with my latest. In South Africa a good security system to discourage the ungodly is imperative, and the locking and unlocking of gates is taken as a matter of course. It had been becoming increasingly difficult to lock our only entrance due to the bolt no longer meeting the hole in the opposite wall.
The reason was that the kids loved swinging on the gate, causing the recurrence of an earlier fault where the pillar holding the hinges had pulled away from the wall and tilted. This had been fixed by refastening the wall and pillar with a metal joiner, but the metal had succumbed to kids and rust.
Replacing this reinforcement was going to be a chore, and I wondered if I could come up with a better idea. Instead of joining the pillar which was holding the hinges to the wall again, why not use a lateral beam, with wedges, as a brace to tilt it back? Don’t pull, but push, in other words? And, I had a handy bit of timber over from the deck …
Five minutes later and I had a bolt which could slide into the hole using a pinky finger. I’ll neaten the job up at my leisure.
Colonialist's Blog 
Bravo on the DIY. My brother tried fixing his toilet flush tonight and caused a massive leak into the flat below him so Dads warned us off DIY when the emergency plumber had to be called! 😳
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Water and electricity are best left to the professionals unless one knows exactly what one is doing!
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Not bad, but nowhere near complicated enough
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No, I should have added a cord tied to a stick bridging the gap, so that if the gap should widen again it would be the trigger for the beam to be lifted with a counterweight and replaced with a wider one from a pile to one side. Then the old one would swing across and be released, and the weight used to activate a hammer for the new wedge which would have been placed in position by the swinging of the old beam. Then, of course, one could add further refinements for self-resetting.
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Ah. That’s more like it
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Of course, logic suggests that at some stage the wall would be pushed over, so one would need further refinements for it to be righted again.
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The wonder is it took you so long to work that out, thought it would have been the obvious way to go. But then I;m a lazy sod.
If ever you have something needs doing that might have some degree of difficulty always get the lazy person who works for you or that you know to come up with the solution. Always works
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The natural tendency, you must admit, is that when something has come apart to stick it together again. The glue-less solution does need some lateral thought!
The lazy people I know are geniuses at getting someone else to do the thinking and fixing for them.
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Nobody has ever called/referred to me as a genius before. Thank you Lesley 😀
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Like it, lateral in thought and literally
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Must admit that I was pleased with both those aspects of it!
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Ingenious! The Heath Robinson approach reminds me of the time soon after my husband’s death. A young man, a cocky fellow who worked for the farmer who rents my land accompanied the farmer when he called in to renew the yearly rental.
They were about to inspect the fences when the young man spotted a gate to our utility area, oil tank, log store etc. The young man pointed at the gate and laughed mockingly “ OMG look at this gate!”
I pointed out that my husband had constructed the gate and twenty five years on, it was still going strong, unlike a number of their metal fences!
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That would have turned his crowing into an embarrassed squawk!
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Too right it did!
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