Today I needed to drill a hole through the inner bodywork of my vehicle to connect the water tank to the water pump. When I bought my drill last year, I chose the smallest standard drill I could find that still had enough power for the size holes I typically need. It’s worked well—until now.
The space I needed to drill in was so tight that the drill bit couldn’t stick out more than 10 mm from the chuck. Unfortunately, my drill just wouldn’t fit.
Normally, you’d grab an angle drill for a job like this. But hiring one just to drill a single hole felt like a waste of money. I thought about calling a few friends to see if anyone had one I could borrow, but I didn’t want to wait days to finish the job.
Since I needed to use a step drill bit to make a 25 mm hole in thin sheet metal, I decided to get creative. I ground a few flats onto the drill bit shank, hammered on an old socket, and tried turning it with a ratchet. After 15 frustrating minutes of slow progress, I was ready to give up and start making phone calls.
Then I remembered: I had an old air-powered ratchet tucked away in the shed—something I bought over 20 years ago to service a particular machine. It saved me hours every time I used it, but I hadn’t touched it in years.
The only problem? I don’t have an air compressor at home.
But then I had a lightbulb moment. I changed the air fitting on the ratchet, fired up my truck, switched on my ARB onboard air compressor, and got to work. The compressor couldn’t quite keep up with the air demand, so the process became a cycle: a few seconds of drilling, a few seconds of waiting, then drilling again.
It worked. Success.
That’s what we call Kiwi ingenuity—or a classic number eight wire solution. It’s a mindset I picked up while driving old ex-army Bedford 4×4 trucks across North Africa, and later, a Bedford coach through the Arctic Circle. When you’re far from home with minimal tools, you learn to make do. And sometimes, those moments of improvisation become the most memorable parts of the journey.
One time, we were stuck in a torrential rainstorm with a burnt-out windscreen wiper motor. We were parked on the side of the road trying to figure out what to do when a young Australian woman on the trip suggested using a bit of string or rope to manually pull the wiper blade back and forth across the windscreen. The guys laughed at her… until it worked.