OT Weirdest customer repair attempt

Lately I've been getting a lot of repair jobs - patio furniture, lawn mower decks, aluminum boats . . . I've seen plenty of goofball attempts, most involving JB weld in completely inappropriate applications, but I just got a dandy; a dinette chair made of 22ga steel-tube and angle that had been put back together with Gorilla Glue. There were trails of the stuff running down the leg where a 3/8" square spreader had pulled out.

If I've ever seen a better one it's escaped my feeble mind. Can anyone top that?

Which begs the question of why it's worthwhile to repair patio furniture in the first place...

An aluminium casting welded with a stick welder and a regular 6011 rod...

bryan_machine said:

Which begs the question of why it's worthwhile to repair patio furniture in the first place...

Click to expand...

In some cases it is. There is good old stuff that has fatigue cracked from years of use, and there 's not-too-bad newer stuff damaged by accident. Even the cheap new crap is so expensive that better stuff is worth repairing. I frequently fix a chair for $50 and get years more use out of a patio set that would otherwise be replaced with pure junk for $500 or more.

But last spring I told a lady that her aluminum tube patio table was so poorly made that she should take it back to Wal Mart and get her money back. The welds between the legs had fatigue cracked after only two months.

Worst i had was when i was a kid. I use to repair model trains for a uncle. He decided for some reason to glue something to the bottom of one of his engines with super glue. In the process some how unknown to him he succeed in emptying the best part of a tube of super glue into the gearbox. Took me 3 hours to remove all the glue. It was only due to the grease on the gears i could get the stuff off. Complete and utter mess to say the least.

My other favourite is one of my still current customers. The son still occasionally runs the old litho press. Problem is he never bothers to wash it up. Hence about once a qtr i get called in to soak it in the nastiest ink stripper going and clean it all up. Last time though he decided to just turn it on, ripped grate chunks out of the rollers! Hence its going to need a new set if they want it to run again!

Here is a lawn mower repair i got in 3 or so years ago. The ladys neighbor kid got a "mig welder" for Christmas and now he is a welder
The 2nd pic is a driveshaft a guy brought in and said it had some vibration issues. So i cut it apart since it was junk anyways. The guy shold have used some more duct tape before final welding...Bob

Basic rate:
$60/hour

If you took it apart first:
$90/hour

If you tried to repair it yourself:
$150+/hour

I usually start with "$20 for glue removal"...

speaking of JB Weld I had a customer many years ago that brought me a cast iron exhaust manifold to repair a crack. He tried JB weld first. I think people take the word "weld" literally

Yeah, I've seen a lot of crazy stuff related to JB weld. Aluminum castings glued back together with the stuff is a nightmare. I don't try to clean it off any more, I just take the grinder to it.