Here's a piece of repurposing that gives a whole new meaning to "rough and ready". We had a partial eclipse of the sun here yesterday, and I needed an ultra-strong ND graduated filter for the shot I had in mind. But of course I didn't want to spend a ton of money on a filter that I might only ever use once.
So I cut a semi-circle out of a blank CD and taped it to an old step-up ring (that has also been repurposed several times before judging by the superglue remnants). The result was about a 14 stop filter that pretty much did the job I had in mind, although the transition was really too abrupt for it to really function as a proper graduated. I ended up merging one shot with the filter and one shot without it in Photoshop.
Here's the filter:
And here's the end result: