[Vintage Engr]

At the risk of going 'off-thread', but definitely staying within the 'best botch jobs theme'.
Try this one.

In my early days of domestic TV engineering, pre 625-line, & before I went into Broadcast Engineering, there were a number of TV's that used an early incarnation of flywheel sync, especially those used for fringe area reception.

Some of these were rather complex circuits, and when they developed an intermittent or difficult fault, one of our engineers came up with a solution, for use where signal strength was o.k.

I was called out to such TV, I think it was a Ferguson. The fault was nothing top do with the sync-separator, I think it had frame collapse.
On removing the back, there was (pre-ice-cream-tub days) an upside-down Golden Virginia tobacco tin with an ECC83 neatly fitted to what was now its top.

I fixed the frame fault, & curiousity got the better of me.
On removing the lid/bottom of this mini-chassis, it became obvious that there was a hard-lock line osc/sync sep built into the tobacco tin!

I have to say it was a very neat job. I did find out who did it, & apparently this was his 'standard mod' for problematic flywheel sync faults! Or Fly-wink, as he called it.

Definitely better than locking the field osc to the mains via an 0.1uF! Which was o.k. until the broadcasters went from mains lock to Xtal lock.

David.