Trego's Mountain Ear

My cat decided my laptop needed to be kicked to the floor. Everyone who has a cat has experienced it – the cat jumps to a flat surface, and makes the decision that whatever is there needs to be pushed to the floor. While cats have a tendency to land on their feet, laptop computers have a tendency to land on their corners. And on most laptops, two of the four corners include the hinges that let you lift the screen.

So my laptop had the right hinge still connected, and the left side of the screen was hanging free. There are an amazing number of problems in using an HP where the left side is loose – all sorts of shut down and start up problems occur because that’s the corner with the switch. I thought of epoxy – but hinges have to move, and generally, anything I fix with epoxy needs to be thicker than the original piece or it will break again.

I pulled out the dial calipers – a handy tool. The computer, at the spot where it was broken was just under half an inch. So I started looking through the scrap for a chunk of aluminum with a half-inch channel. No such luck. I couldn’t find the piece that did what I needed. Then remnants of my early years struck my mind – could I find a piece of metal in the clutter of a half-century of gun repair and modification. Maybe an old Carcano or Steyr clip? The Steyr clip was angled, but Cartridges of the World told me that the rim diameter was0.470 – the right size, but the angle wouldn’t work well. On the other hand, the Carcano rim was .450 – and if memory served, the clip was all right angles. It was a question of looking through 40 years of collected miscellaneous junk for something that looks like this:

Well, it took a while to find it – (I haven’t had a Carcano around in over forty years. Nice enough little carbine, but less practical than an M1 carbine. Thought I was doing great when I swapped it off.) Took a grinder and removed the right side, and I had my brace to repair the broken computer. It took a lot longer to figure out the part I could repurpose and then find it than it did to modify it and fix my computer. And if the cat gets ambitious and breaks the right hinge, I still have one more perfectly original Italian Carcano clip on hand to use for one more repair. I am sure that Mussolini never expected that parts for the rifles he used to invade Ethiopia would be used to repair computers.