tinker with

1. Try to repair, work aimlessly or unskillfully with, as in He tinkered with the engine all day but it still wouldn't start. This idiom, first recorded in 1658, alludes to working as a tinker, that is, mending metal utensils.

Example Sentences

On the experimental and half-spoken interlude “Tomboy Gold,” she says that when she was a little girl her father would let her hold the timing gun while he worked under the car’s hood, and includes enough detail about the process that you feel ready to tinker with your own vehicle.

Read more on Wall Street Journal

Italians often get angry when foreigners tinker with their food recipes - pizza with pineapple, cappuccino after midday or carbonara with cream, for example.

Read more on BBC

These provisions don’t just tinker with tax law.

Read more on Slate

And lastly, if you constantly tinker with what you are cooking, you must refrain when you fry.

Read more on Salon

As a result, they are willing to tinker with a sacred public institution, not realizing that if they break the one institution that pulls us together, we may never pull ourselves together again — or as I often say, if public schools become the place where only low-income students go, the public education project as we know it is over and it is hard to imagine it coming back.

Read more on Salon