CREATIVE EMERGENGY ZIP TIES!
First of all I am a 79 year old female, who finds herself, living with two boarders, on a house painter, and one 68 year old retired Vintage Store Owner, bookworm and very much a D-Yourself-er, creative person, so they both fit in with my husband's and mine Lifestyles. My husband is now in the VA, oxygen 24/7 and I have to take care of many of the happenstance things around the house and often things he just always took care of, God love him. I use zip ties for lots of things, but I have never taken pictures of any of then. I always carry a package of three more or less common sizes in my two vehicles and have been very creative in "need to do" in a pinch--
The picture here is of my husband and best buddy, I miss so, in situations as I describe below but we've invented solutions "such as" before together.
1. Tie up the spare tire under a pk-up truck. --- I have a 1980 Chevy Pk-up and the Spare tire holder had broken,dragging the stupid spare tire down the road. When I stopped on a gravel road out in the hills, by myself, to see what I was dragging. In shock I realized, I needed a welder or something. A tow truck was hours away if I could call one, but my cell phone WAS NOT picking up a signal. Darn! What to do.
Not many tools in the truck of much help. No rope, a handy-man jack (no help), a bottle jack, a couple of 6 x 8 blocks usually kept in the truck bed, a gallon of water, 2 gal of gas, some anti-freeze, a quart of oil, the jack handle, (no wire but a rusty pair of pliers), a tool box with all the wrong things needed for this. . . . and an abundance of heavy duty zip ties. Plus my creativity!
It took a while for me to figure it out, well I,m not exactly this sort of Hanny-Man! Crawling under the truck it took me about an hour to place the blocks, jack the hanging tire mount up. Kept hoping someone would come down the road and stop. No such luck.
There wasn't anything to tie the darn thing up with and the zip ties were too short and while they have strength probably not that much. Then I remembered synergism. Wasn't sure this was going to work --but I started making a rope of the zip ties. This was taking for ever, the temp was about 95, I was hot, and tired.
The rope was close to 4 feet long when I ran out of ties. I was thinking this was a dumb idea. It was, however the only one I had. I couldn't remove the tire and put it in the back of the truck the nut was rusted and my hands aren't that strong any more. The hammer didn't help. So tying it up was the only solution.
Jack in place, I could see the frame member where the original bracket had broken and started stringing the zip tie rope around and around the rounded part of the broken mount and the frame member that I prayed would not cut the tie-rope. I was almost done when a guy in a Camery stopped, dressed in anything but work clothes. His phone couldn't pick up a signal either. He didn't have any better suggestions but stated he didn't think it would work and offered to drive me to about the nearest place for help, about 12-15 miles.
So i got the pliers to at least work well enough to put ub the tie as tight as I could get it and he followed me in.driving slowly. The nearest help wasn't that helpful and when I reached a main road my escort drove off.
I continued to drive into Fresno, CA about 60 miles to my favorite Mechanic with his amazed expression, on his friendly face who properly fixed the whole mess.
2. I use Zip-ties in metal basket type cube shelving units to create an extra shelf making 2 compartments out of one cube.