Today I’m going back to a time before I was a mechanic. Before college, I’d never really done any mechanic type work, except for a little bit on our lawn mower with my dad and brother. One year, the starter died, and we had to replace it. This led to some creativity with the few tools that we had.

The starter was held on with Torx bolts. The only Torx drivers we had were interchangeable screwdriver bits, but we couldn’t get enough force with just a screwdriver. The solution we came up with was by putting the bit in a 1/4″ socket on our 3/8″ drive breaker bar. We now had the torque needed, but then our 1/4″ hex extension stripped out, so we needed to improvise to replace that. Now the solution was to use a 1/4″ hex bit going into the bit holder of a multi-bit screwdriver, and then the Torx bit in the other end. Nowadays this would be a lot easier, because I have all the tools to properly do this, but this was pretty cool to come up with.

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-Dan