My friend Steve Hawkins is an avid motorcycle rider, and an excellent amateur mechanic. Honestly, I’d say he’s as much an engineer/tinkerer as he is a wiz with a wrench. It takes a bit of an engineering mind to think outside the box and figure out the solutions he comes up with. Case in point: After a mishap in a parking lot with his 2003 BMW K1200 recently, Steve was left with several busted up pieces of plastic fairing. Most of us would just bite the bullet and spring for OEM replacement parts, or try to source used replacements online, but Steve took a different tack- he looked up how to weld plastic. Yes, that’s really a thing. No, he’d never attempted it before. And that engineering mind went to work…

So the takeaway is, be willing to search outside the norm, look beyond your default setting in a matter. You never know what solution may present itself.