If you can look at a broken situation and decide that a bungee cord, half a roll of duct tape , and complete confidence in yourself are all it’s going to take, you might just be a Redneck. And that’s not a bad thing! You can find a fix before someone else even finds the number of a professional.

Redneck engineering gets a bad rap because the results are objectively unhinged and occasionally load-bearing. But the internet has been collecting the best of them to give them the respect they deserve. These are the fixes that should not work, the repairs that would make a structural engineer dry heave, and the solutions so aggressively practical that they loop back around to brilliant. Duct tape was involved in most of them.

The phrase "necessity is the mother of invention" was coined by Plato and has been used to justify some genuinely world-changing innovations. It has also been used to justify attaching a car mirror with a zip tie and a prayer, which is a slightly different application of the same principle but operates on identical logic.

When resources are limited, and the problem needs solving today, the human brain does something remarkable: it looks at what is available and starts connecting dots that no engineering textbook would ever connect. The results range from structurally impressive to alarmingly dangerous, and the line between those two categories is thinner than most people would admit.

Duct tape is the star of the show, though, because it is not the joke product its reputation suggests. It was developed during World War II by Johnson and Johnson for the US military, originally designed to keep moisture out of ammunition cases. Soldiers immediately discovered it could fix almost anything else as well, and the name came from its water-repelling properties.

Modern duct tape has a tensile strength of up to 40 pounds per inch, which means a sufficiently motivated person with enough rolls can theoretically hold together something that has no business being held together. The redneck fix that involves duct tape is not always wrong. It is sometimes just ahead of schedule.

WD-40 occupies the other half of the improvised repair toolkit and has an equally legitimate origin story. It was developed in 1953 by the Rocket Chemical Company for the aerospace industry, specifically to prevent rust and corrosion on the Atlas missile. The name stands for Water Displacement, 40th attempt.

That means it took 39 failed formulas before they landed on the one that works on everything from squeaky hinges to removing sticker residue to, in the hands of the right person, solving problems it was never designed for. Between duct tape and WD-40, the unofficial rule is simple: if it moves and it should not, use the tape. If it does not move and it should, use the spray.