Alternatively, you could use the spring out of a ball point pen  

So the best toolkit in the world would comprise WD-40 and gaffer tape.  Love it! - I'll get packed then!  

The hammer always used to work for me.  Very useful for taking out the aggression when you lose the odd spring or two.

Woops, sorry Andy

Don't forget an aggresive pair of pliers

Thanks for the support and ideas guys.

Mark, being in the military, I'm surprised you've never heard that expression before. I first heard it as a very young man when I was on fire picket at Sennybridge camp in Wales. The sergeant got us to test all the hoses, including the one coiled up on the gatehouse wall. It must have been there since national service days and had spent twenty odd years being blancoed and sitting in the sunlight, such as you ever get in Wales. We unrolled it and connected it to the hydrant. Once the water was turned on it virtually disintegrated and sprung about a thousand high pressure leaks, soaking said sergeant from head to toe with hilarious consequences. Purple with fury and looking like a big wet wounded peacock, he yelled at us to turn that effin' thing off.  He ended his order with the phrase above. The bastard got his own back by making us sleep on the guard house beds and we got eaten alive by bed bugs. What a dump that place was.

Andy - probably something to do with the sheltered existence of a crab rather than a pongo, much more refined and educated you see my dear chap, and swearing is so frowned upon in these PC days.   Marvellous tale from Sennybridge though - certainly made the rest of the office wonder what I was cackling at.   You're right that the place was a rather a god-forsaken dump and I don't think it has changed much since then.    The Light Blue "mots juste" in tricky situations tend to be more brief and pithy, like the time a Jet Provost was getting airborne from Cranwell, one of our primary flying training stations.   Now, the Jet Provost was not endowed with a surfeit of power and thus had rightly earned its title as an aerial vacuum cleaner - variable noise, constant suck.   Off the end of the main runway was a nice line of poplar trees that had grown taller over the years, and one of the old and bold pilots had not factored this into his take-off calculations on a hot, windless day, which led - unsurprisingly - to a lack of adequate height to clear the trees.   In the midst of working like a one-armed paper hanger in the cockpit and just before the aircraft ploughed through the trees, the last call from him to Air Traffic on the radio was a cheery "Timmmbbbeeerrr!"      In case anyone was wondering, he did survive as an older, bolder and wiser pilot.

Glad your SOH has returned - keep up the fine work and remember the other fine mechanics saying

If you can't fix it then bodge it.....

As a seventeen year old cadet, I was once shouted out on parade by a big loud sod, no doubt for some petty transgression, such as accidentally saluting with my left arm. His cap peak was nearly perpendicula to his nose, so as to obscure his eyes. Actually, he had only one good eye, the other being glass. You could tell which the glass one was as it was the only one with a flicker of humanity in it.

"Zarse! Still! Stand still!" He bore down on me and continued, "Hif hintelligence was haltitude, then hewd be a bleedin' 'ole in the ground!"....

I think he may have had a point.