Band-aid/kludge/poor mans fixing it

[LexiaFira]

Band-aid/kludge/poor mans meaning temporarily fix it until it breaks again.
Band aid specifically meaning fixing it that just puts a band aid over the issue instead of doing it right the first time. Kludge being a term i got from one of the many icanhascheezburger.com sites where they fix it using the best resources they have and it kind of works but not really. There i fixed it dot com i think

And poor mans fix basically we had the funds to do it but dad in law did it his way saving money...yeah

Before i moved in where I am now katrina did floor and ceiling damage. The insurance rep gave dad in law enough funds to fix it. Ceiling is a different matter done and done right.
The floors were basically rotting and had to be completely redone if not all the way to the foundation. However dad in law just got tiles, and put them OVER the already rotting floor. Aka a bandaid fix. And whatever money was left over he sent BACK to the insurance. Yeah way to go they gave you what you needed because they knew how much it would cost, not enough so you could get the pricey tiles that do us no good.
Well this is louisiana, swamp area, damp muggy and humid. So moisture gets in everywhere and the old homes were just not prepared for such.
So all he did was a band aid fix. And the floor is still rotting.

I found this out today when I was cooking at the stove, stepped back to turn to get something and one tile gave way and snapped and I almost went down. I have now taken pictures of all the areas that have tiles visibly seperating, where I was, and where they are rising. Trying to figure out how to take pictures of where the floor sinks in some when you step over it because the tiles are just bending but not giving way. Kind of hard to capture what can be felt but not seen beyond shadowing effect.

[Ginger Tea]

Does he live at this address or did he do a cowboy number on your gaff.

Seriously, he sent the money back?

[LexiaFira]

he lives here. so thats what i don't get. I know why he did it and i don't want to post it here because it is debate worthy. But the whole, why do that to your own house that you have to live in? Or you didn't think your kids would get married as soon as they did and start a family or what....

yeah....not taking it personal but now i cannot let daughter play in the living room because thats the worst one. everything is against the wall as the middle is the worst area in that one room.

[protege]

Sounds like some of the 'repairs' that were done to my parents' cars over the years. Either repairs weren't done, or they were done as cheaply as possible. Other than oil changes, dad didn't believe in regular maintenance.

For example, the '79 Volvo he once had. That thing truly was a heap. After an indicated 165,000 miles (probably closer to 200,000+, but the odometer broke), it looked it. Rust had eaten into the floors, rear fenders; the windshield had a huge crack, and opening the driver's door from the outside...simply wasn't happening. Why the problem with the door? Well, someone rear-ended the car, and the doors didn't shut right. Rather than get the car fixed properly, he took it to the cheapest body shop in town. Same thing when the transmission started failing. More cheap repairs...which had to be done multiple times. According to my calculations, if he'd done it right the *first* time, it would have cost less!

That's one thing I never understood. How does having the same repair done multiple times...make sense? Why not spend a bit more, do it right, do it once, and get it over with? Guess that's why I'm an accountant

[blas87]

I can relate to this with the machinery at the factory, which I've bitched about several times.

Most machines at the factory are obselete, they were new in the 80s, possibly early 90s. Parts for them are usually refurbished, memory cards for them are usually just cleaned and they just hope and pray that they'll still work.

The machine I work on has had an issue with a gear going out on it for over 6 months. Instead of fixing it, which wouldn't be that expensive (and really, if you had a gear slipping in the transmission of your car, you would NEVER do this, I hope) they just put a giant piece of metal to push down on the gear so they'd stay in sync with one another. Then they decided to do away with it, because they figured it fixed itself. It didn't. That gear kept slipping and product was getting jammed in the machine and product was getting damaged. Scrapping parts for that kind of damage costs hundreds, if not thousands of dollars. We even keep a tally of all the scrap, and there is NO way replacing both gears (it makes more sense to replace both to make sure the slipping doesn't happen anymore) would have been more than the several thousands of dollars in scrap that have happened and all the blame that was put on the operators for it.

[KnitShoni]

That's one thing I never understood. How does having the same repair done multiple times...make sense? Why not spend a bit more, do it right, do it once, and get it over with? Guess that's why I'm an accountant

For the people who do this, all they see is that it's cheaper right then. They don't think about what it will cost them in the long run to have it done the "cheap" way multiple times. I see this a lot with several of our customers. They've paid and paid and paid for "cheap" repairs, bypassing us because we cost a little more, then come to us to have it done right.

[Ginger Tea]

I was thinking "why in gods name are they blambing the operators for damaged good's, when they know the machine has a long standing fault?" then I remembered, the're managers

[LexiaFira]

after talking to the family, I still don't like dad's reasoning but he didn't really expect his kids to go the way they did. The time this was done, hubs and his sister were still going back and forth from one house to the other. He didn't think hubs would move in to stay (not a bad thing) and was thinking if the house sank in thee would be the other house to stay in. He had no idea hubs would meet me and get married and have a kid so yeah....

Plus his sight and hearing is going so...kind of too late to do it himself...we'd have to pay for health...its a mess. not just the house the situation with the house.
It was built outside the city lines long before the city line existed so we don't have city water but thats not really been a problem just means i have to add stuff to the wash to make sure the water doesn't go nuts on the clothes.
Something happened when hubs was very young and they ended up having to remortgage the house and it should have been paid off by now if that had not happened. Not blaming anyone for that but thats why. He can't do much because there is still a mortgage to pay....it sucks....

again if people want to know dad's main reason for why he did the cheap way out and what happened for the mortgage i can tell you in PM. its somewhat personal and upsetting or at least very saddening

[protege]

I can understand the "get you home" type of repair. Things such as using duct tape to temporarily hold a car's radiator hose together, or tying a rear hatch shut I can understand. Such things are only temporary. However, when such "repairs" become *permanent,* I tend to get annoyed. There's no reason for that, other than someone is being cheap and/or lazy.

Right now, one of the basement doors at my parents' house is a bitch to close. You have to turn the knob to close the door. Slamming it doesn't work. Why? Well, the 30-year-old spring, which retracts the striker...has finally gone. It's been like that for about 6 months now....and yes, they did get a new lock set for Christmas. Still hasn't been fixed though, and there's no excuse for it being "expensive" either

Of course, I've been guilty of kludging things. Look at the collection of Radio-Flyers in my workshop. They're in working order, but some interesting repairs have been done over the years. At the time, my parents controlled the checkbook (since I was a minor), and very little money was coming in from the paper route. It was either fix it with what I could scrounge up, or go out of business. 25 years on, the yellow one still has a U-bolt holding part of the chassis together, and the blue one has a re-bent pipe clamp used as a stake pocket.

[Ginger Tea]

One end of my bed is propped up with boxes and has been for almost a year, I toyed with fixing it whist I was off, but as I go back in a few days, I just dont see that happening. Plus I'm toying with getting a smaller but risen bed so I can reclaim floor space.

[LexiaFira]

i can understand fixes like that if they work even in the long run. It looks weird but it works and its not really bothering anyone.
But for stuff thats used every day or takes alot of wear and tear over a short amount of time not so much.
Calling a friend who knows some contractors to do this. He has yet to ever steer us wrong as the few people he has recommended have been very stand up business people. Hope this turns out well.

[smileyeagle1021]

I'd be a hypocrite if I were to complain about kludge fixes... my bed is right now having a corner held up by an empty paint can... why, because to buy a replacement leg I have to buy a set of four, and I can't afford to buy a set of four right now.
Do I like having it that way, no I don't, but when I have to worry about keeping the furnace running, the water heater running, and my car running, a bed leg is the last thing I want to worry about.

[Skunkle]

I have friends who do this. One of them KNOWS it'll cost more in the long run, but usually can't afford the big fix now (he gambles a lot) so he goes for multiple small patch fixes, never really ending the problem but staying cheap.

Here's a little (not really, it's long) tale of how this sort of thing can go very, very badly. For those tl;dr people, just skip. This is gonna be long.
My hobby is water shows; musical or performing fountains. One of the late greats in the biz was Otto Przystawik of Germany, inventor of the so-called "dancing waters" shows, still in business under the name Waltzing Waters. To set up the story, Otto's German show, in the 1950s Resi Ballroom in Berlin, was seen by traveling showman Harold Steinman when his "Skating Vanities" show was temporarily confiscated 'for inspection' at the east/west German border. Otto was an incredible engineer and had already put some amazing feats into his shows' technology, building almost everything in the factory including pumps, motors, light fixtures and controls, but with Steinman he made his shows portable with even more impressive tech bits. Otto ran his shgow as "Przystawik's Dancing Fountains"; Steinman took them on tour as the Dancing Waters and bought many portable show units. Sometime in the fifties, Otto and his son Gunter moved to Florida, updated their tech even more, and coined the modern term "Waltzing Waters". Tech continued to improve.

Steinman's widow sold the old shows to Michael Connery, head of a firm called Show Fountains Inc. (builder of the Sunset Stampede show, for anyone who's been to Sam's Town in Las Vegas). Since Waltzing Waters only SOLD shows, Connery continued to run Dancing Waters which RENTED shows - shows using early 1950s technology.

Switch focus to moody Gardens, Galveston Island, Texas. The Moody Foundation is nonprofit. They wanted to add a show to their park. Connery dug up an old Przystawik touring show, which had ended up in Nuremburg; the town had fixed it up with a rudimentary automatic show control (the old shows, and Connery's rental shows, were "played" live from a switchboard - a demanding and difficult skilled job which required years of training to do well, for reasons I won't go into here). The Otto-era touring shows were made from galvanized steel; they came apart in sections, and were dip-galvanized monthly. The show in Nuremburg was kept up this way. Connery bought it, sold it cheap to the Moody Foundation, attached a modern show controller, modern pumps and some really rickety lights - the latter NOT waterproof, so they were stood up at the back of the dry pool, which had a sump at the front for the pumps. The gearmotors which drove the moving nozzles weren't waterproof, either - they sat on top of the pipes, covered by sheet steel boxes. Oh, and he gave all the pipes and nozzles a thick coat of white paint. This was installed in an oval area by the parking lot, still there today with flowers in it.

Galvanized steel. Water. Ocean. The sort of temperature Galveston gets. Paint. Get the picture?

Few years later, water is squirting out. Yeah, so? It's supposed to, the thing has over 800 nozzles. Out of the pipes themselves, though!? The weather, the temperature, and the salt blown into the pool were eating the pipes from the inside, and the show looked terrible. The gearmotors were rusted beyond repair, too, and several pumps had quit. A note on pumps: The early shows had single-speed pumps; Otto got variable heights by varying the power to each pump with big resistors, which could be altered at will by the player. Gunter and his son Michael (now running Waltzing Waters) updated first to valves, which tended to fail, then to variable-speed pumps which were even more of a maintenance nightmare, before settling on a system that gives three heights using no valves at all. Connery stuck with the very unreliable and expensive variable-speed pumps.

Moody had a fit. Connery offered to "fix" the show. Michael Przystawik offered them a new show at a steeply reduced price. Internal politics prevailed, and Connery won out. The show had the pumps (but not the gearmotors) replaced, got reinstalled in a new pool right on the water, overlooked by the Moody Gardens restaurant... and received another glossy coat of white paint or three..or six... I first saw the Moody show around 2004, knowing none of this history. The site engineer and I walked ON the pipes as he showed me the equipment - the Otto shows were that tough and strong (and I didn't know this one was already in its death throes from pipe damage - oh how glad I am that I didn't crush a pipe doing this!) I did manage one small fix, one of the rotating nozzles wasn't turning - two others, I couldn't seem to fix - and the light boxes were covered in rust and duct tape. They did NOT look safe. I stayed to see the show. It ran at 9:30 PM, and the Gardens closed at 10:00. I was the only viewer. The show looked terrible. The spinner nozzles were slow or stuck, the moving jets didn't move, at least 3 of the 20 pumps were burned out, while water raining on the gearmotor covers sounded like amplified snare drums and almost drowned out the music. The lights worked, but they were aimed AT you through the water - though this is the only way to get bright light without fixtures either submerged or mounted above pointing down, it's blinding. It works reasonably well if the audience is lower than the pool and can't see the fixtures, but the restaurant looked steeply down at the pool.

After this visit, I get the above story as well as an update. Moody: "Help. The show is hemorrhaging!" That was their term for it, I'm told. What happened? The show got shut off for a year. The water in the pool evaporated, leaving a salt crust on the equipment, inside and out. It ate what was left of the steel. When they finally refilled the pool and turned it on, it was a disaster; water sprayed out in all directions, nozzle tips and entire spray manifolds broke off, paint fell off revealing big holes... A nightmare all around. Przystawik was offering them an even bigger discount... but Connery had offered another cheap patch on the same show (as much as I love saving historic equipment - very few Otto shows still exist - this thing was garbage by this point). Unfortunately, though the powers-that-be now KNEW Connery had deceived them - twice! - they were about to let him do it again, because it was cheap and that's all that mattered.

Wish I knew more updates, but I DO know Connery is out of business - he defauled on payments and Steinman's widow took the Dancing Waters stuff back, and Show Fountains shut down as well. Waltzing Waters snapped up the Dancing Waters name, and are using it for...rental shows.