I'm assuming you folks have all read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M Persig.
If not, it's about a long motorcycle ride the narrator takes with his son and his two friends. Along the way, there are a lot of philosophical musings by the narrator, which you might expect from someone riding cross-country on a motorcycle with no radio or bluetooth headsets. In particular, one musing struck me. His friends John and Sylvia have a Harley Davidson, which is their pride and joy and in their eyes a technical masterpiece far beyond their comprehension or ability to diagnose or fix. The narrator, on the other hand, rides a CB77 he maintains himself. John and Sylvia have this opinion that their Harley is so sophisticated that it can't be trusted with anyone other than a certified Harley technician. They certainly can't learn to fix it themselves! So they basically just hope for the best, and if something is wrong they take it to the dealer.
There's this one passage where one of the control mountings on their handlebar (might have been the clutch) has started to get a bit loose, and tightening it down doesn't solve the problem. They're sitting round a campfire drinking beer so the narrator finishes his, takes a pocket knife and cuts the can into a rectangle approximately the width of their control mounting and slightly larger than the circumference of their handlebar. He takes off their control, wraps the new shim around the bar, and tightens it all back down.
"Fixed!" he proclaims. John and Sylvia are not impressed - such a MacGuyver solution is a disservice to their state-of-the-art machine, obviously, and they agree to have it fixed "properly" someplace soon.
That's my vague recollection of the passage, anyway.
So there I am last week in my garage, tightening down my lighting controls while on the phone to my mother and sister. They're a fraction too loose (the controls - my mother and sister are honorable women). I remembered this passage and cut a thin strip of vinyl from one of my toolbox drawers, carefully laid it inside the controls and tightened it down. Snug as a bug in a rug.
