After you've lived in North Idaho for a while, you realize that there must be a vast market for duct tape. The folks at Merwins must sell tons of the stuff. Personally, I've never seen duct tape used on a duct. But I have seen it used to fix many other things around town, such as cars and shoes.
At our house, we always have a roll of duct tape on hand, and it's never been used for ductwork either. For example, many years ago, we got a plastic bin for kitchen scraps from a gardening catalog. We refer to it as "the cootie bin" and it's generally got a plastic bag with things like potato peelings and other veggie residue in it. Anything that could potentially stink up the garbage too bad during the week goes into the cootie bin instead to contain its smells until we take it to the dump on the weekend.
When we got the cootie bin originally, we opened up the shipping box and found that the lid was separate from the bin itself. It was supposed to attach to the bin with little tabs. Except there was no way to get the little tabs to expand out to fit the holes in the bin. On its first day out of the box, I broke it trying to get the stupid lid on.
James evaluated the problem and used two of his favorite repair items to craft a new "temporary" hinge: a coat hanger and duct tape. Although not pretty, the new hinge works fine.
Of course, repairs like that are never really temporary. O-so-many years later, I think we did have to replace the duct tape once, but the coat hanger is still going strong. We also proved to ourselves that we must have been destined to live in North Idaho -- a place where duct tape is the preferred repair tool for most jobs.
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