I bought myself a quartz64 model a from pine64 (my instance is hosted on there) when it came out. It has a sata port but no sata power.

Turns out SATA SSDs only use the 5v part of the sata power connector so i took a sata power cable from an old PSU and an old usb cable and soldered the 5v line of the sata connector to the usb power. Look like crap and I fully expected shit to blow up but it somehow works really well.

(No I did't have electrical tape)

CPU mounting bracket (the bit that goes behind the CPU) snapped on my server's motherboard while I had it out for cleaning, so I just zip-tied it in and put a bit of wood behind the board to keep it firmly pressed against the CPU.

It worked fine for 2 years until I decommed the server, never had an issue with it.

An only slightly "stupid" story.

Washing machine broke while full of water. I partially disassembled the washer, found the pump, designed and 3d-printed an adapter for a cordless drill to drive the pump, and successfully manually drained the washer (as a first step toward fixing the washer.)

It was printed out of PLA, so not really strong enough to do the job, but I printed with 100% infill for added strength and printed like 6 of them. Three or four of them broke before it was done draining, but that's why I printed the extras.