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Our 2022 CR-V’s heat shield popped loose last week and got its front end chewed up by the highway. How? Why? Who can say. I ordered replacement garbled-consonant-brand bolts from Amazon after trying very hard to buy them locally, and got them yesterday, but ended up fixing the problem as I almost always do: jankily.

Here’s the thing: I don’t have a garage and I’m only passably competent with tools. I found a clear hole where a bolt was missing and screwed that bad boy back in, but these weird Honda prong things that purportedly hold the shield on wouldn’t go in properly. Maybe something’s warped or jacked up, maybe I’m just not very good at this, maybe lots of things. Maybe all those things.

But you know what did fit? Zip ties. Couple of zip ties and the whole works is now good as new basically functional to drive for a while. Hell, a similar thing happened to my old Toyota and I drove it zip tied together for years and never thought about it again.

There’s very little that can’t be fixed with zip ties or duct tape. One of my favorite birthday presents from a couple of years back was a whole rainbow of duct tape colors and, like Frank’s Hot Sauce, “I put that sh*t on everything.” I’ve done some of the bootleggiest repairs imaginable on all sorts of things big and small, and none of them have failed me yet. My Kindle Oasis cover started getting old and sticky? Now I have a sweet blue cover. Kindle Scribe cover gets cracked in my backpack? Blue and red duct tape. Dropped my acoustic guitar on a dumbbell and cracked the corner? Brown duct tape and you can barely notice.

Duct tape can even improve stuff that isn’t broken yet. I keep my fretboard chart and string height rule in a dope little pocket in my chord notebook. I make pen loops on my daily driver notebook with duct tape. I use colored duct tapes on the spines of my work and personal notebooks to tell them apart at a glance. I have a handle on my old backpack made entirely out of duct tape.

Like, subscribe and hit the bell for my next post where I will tell you everything I’ve achieved with shoestrings. Not a shoestring budget, actual shoestrings.

And don’t get me started on bread ties.