Emergency Repair

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Nico leaves tomorrow for Colorado where he is doing a one week internship with SideStix, the company that manufactures his forearm crutches. Nico has been a beta tester for their new crutch designs and has successfully broken every part at one time or another (handle support, articulating foot, cuff retainer, shaft, and handle grip) through his normal (extremely active) use of the crutches. Each time they improve the design until it is, using their phrase, Nico Proof. During a soccer game this weekend, Nico broke the cuff support on one of his crutches rendering it completely unusable. Sending him to Colorado on a competitors crutches was not an option so this evening I devised a very clever repair. I inserted a large headed screw into the crutch shaft, drilled a couple of holes in the retainer (to create little wells) and filled the entire cavity with epoxy. Even though the epoxy does not bind to the retainer material it fills the wells and surrounds the screw to make a very strong mechanical retainer. Hopefully this will be good enough to get him to his destination where the failed component can be replaced.