How about a list of crazy fixes you have encountered/done in the past. for instance, one day a mechanic freind and i were going down the road in his car and i noticed a noise in the engine. I asked what he was doing about it. He advised that as it got louder, he just turned the radio up more. :laugh: :laugh:
The best one I ever heard about was in the early days of nitro methane cars in the 60's. The team called the Surfers, where a group of college engineers and they had figured out the right combo pretty quickly, while other teams struggled. They were known for goofing off between rounds while other teams thrashed to get their cars ready. One of the few times they did have a problem, they damaged one rod. To fix the problem they put a hose clam on the crank in it's place, to keep the adjoining rod in palce. I think they pulled the lifters and pushrods from that cylinder to keep the valves closed as well. I'm sure it had a wicked vibration. I believe it made the pass ok, not sure if they won or not though.
Okay you have hit on a subject that I could go on and on about. They say neccesity is the mother of invention. Ive spent a lot of time with "Mother". Ill give you a few examples. Locked my keys in the trunk of my 83 Pontiac. So I popped the hood, grabbed some wire , ran the wire from the positive battery terminal into the inside of the car , popped my trunk release switch out of the glove box , bared the wire touched the hot lead from the battery to the bared section of wire , popped the trunk open and recovered my keys. Did you know that the 2 prong "resistor block" on older style mopars can be replaced with a paper clip to get the car home if the block fails while you on the road :Smarty: Also if you have only 1 jumper cable and both vehicles have steel bumpers you can touch the bumpers together to complete the negative circuit then use the 1 cable to hook the positive sides together. I learned both of these lessons on the same car at the same time I also owned a 71 Monte carlo that on the very first start of the day would only start if I stuck a 3/8 drive craftsman ratchet down the throat of the carb and pumped the gas 3 times before turning the key.It would be fine for the rest of the day after that :eek2: And finally my most ridiculous one at least in my opinion. I used to drive a truck for work that had a 2 way radio in it. But that was the only radio it had in it. I would carry a "boom box" in the truck with me for tunes. I got tired of buying batteries for the boom box . One day I noticed the boom box ran on 12 volts. So I decided to tap it into the trucks electrical system. But instead of waiting and doing things the "right way" I put on the mickey mouse ears and went to work with what was available on hand. First I had lots of wire, so I took 1 section of wire and wrapped it around the positive side of the boom box battery compartment, then wedged it into place with a tine I broke off of a plastic salad fork ou: :laugh:. Then I pulled out my electrical tape and my pocket knife and bared a section of the hot wire for the 2 way radio. Wrapped the other end around that and taped it all up. Then I wrapped another wire around the negative side of the boom box battery compartment and I ran that to the holder on the back of the 2 way radio microphone. When the microphone was hung on its holder it completed the circuit and I had music. But if I had to answer the 2 way as soon as I pulled the mic off the holder it broke the circuit to the boom box.Once I was done with the mic and I hung it back up the boom box came back on again It was a backyard version of voice override :Smarty: . Sometimes i think about it and I dont know what scares me more , the fact that I actually think stuff like this up or the fact that it actually works :shock: Dan
Well, there is the cigarette paper in place of the fuse. On my 89 lesabre the ac compressor seized up so instead of fixing it I just got a belt for a non AC car and bypassed it. If a brake line starts leaking, (depending on where it leaks) you can pinch it closed with a pair of vice grips. For a while I had a peice of an old bicycle brake system hooked up to my Riv's carb. (At the time I had a manual choke, the previous owner really had no idea what he was doing.) On My Dad's old Ford f150 the Hood release cable broke so all he did was get some wire, hook it around the release and let it dangle behind the grille. Not a fix persae but on his motorcycle his speedometer stopped working but the tach still works so he just memorized how fast he was going at what RPM in any certain gear.
All these replies, and duct tape hasn't been mentioned yet. You guys are strange. p Dave, One of my friends dad's did the same thing back in the 60's. I forget what actually broke, but to fix it they yanked a piston, rod, lifter, and pushrod out between rounds. He didn't win the next race, but he didn't lose points for not being able to run. :laugh: When I was in high school, we had a mid-70's? caddi beater with a 472 in it. The carb was pretty crappy and we found that it run best with a broken tree branch shoved down in it to hold the secondaries open. We drove it for a couple months like that. ou: And finally... I found this in a car I used to have!! (see pic)
one of my buddys had his fuel pump go out on his motorhome on the last leg of his trip.he emptied the window washer,filled it with gas from his atv stash,somehow fastened the squirter hose in the carb & would push the wash button to fill the carb when it started to sputter :laugh: it got him to a repair shop
i hafta do the same thing. I put the 3.9 rear gear in my GS so the speedo is off. If any one knows how to fix that plz tell me lol.
You just need to change the speedo gears in the trans, they are color coded and you just pick the right set for the gear and tire size you are running. Most trans shops that still know about non computer trans can help, or I'm sure somewhere out on the net is a chart.
there used to be an early 80s lesabre runnin around town with a 2 by 4 wrapped with duct tape for a rear bumper.
I've seen an early 80's ford pickup that had ruated out fenders on top of the wheelwells. The guy used duct tape as a backer behind bondo to "Fix" the rust. ou:
well i wouldnt call it a fix but i saw a s10 with such bad rust i saw throu the bed to the other side. well i guess thats almost seeing it o No:
My Daytona has a couple pci slot punch-outs securing the top of the radiator in place. As for the Buick: Had a large tree branch fall through the top. My dad rolled down the windows, wrapped clear plastic around the top, and taped it. I later removed that and taped & glued a piece of clear vinyl (that you put on the floor of your house to protect your carpet) over the hole. Got a new top that summer. Years later the top started to go from age - ripping in the wind. I duct-taped the hell out of it, first with the good stuff, then with cheap black tape to match the top. It's been like this since I parked it in the drive a few years ago. After converting to HEI I needed power to the electric choke on the crappy Holley. So, on a coworkers advice (just to get it going), we spliced some speaker wire from the choke to the HEI positive terminal. I've yet to do it right. Also, when I put 15" rims on, with 70 series tires, the passenger side tire rubbed the fender b/c the bracket holding the bottom edge of the fender (in front of the wheel) rotted out. So I wedged a 2x4 higher up in the fender to provide clearance.
On a parts run with a friend of mine and only 20 miles to get home the lights went out. I wripped the fuze with a bubble gum wraper aluminum foil to get us home. He sold the car about two months later with that "tempfix" still in the fuze box. ou: Carrying a car to St. Louis, the water pump gaskets blew on the 350 chevy. I cut some new gaskets from a piece of cardboard I had.
I bought a 78 le saber for a beater work car. The roof leaked. first I punched a hole in the floor board to let the water out but then I got fancy and went down to the lumber yard and bought some asphalt roof coating and put over the holes in the roof. It looked like it had hair. I drove it a couple of years, then my daughter took it to college and drove it 3 years, then my son got it from her and drove it a year. Never did any more to it.
well a little while ago i had a vaccum leak in my manifold. We just busted out the carb kit and put the richest running secondaries in there so at WOT the air coming in from the leak and the carb just kinda evened each other out. adn for my own little ghettoness, i clipped a tree in my witner beater and the grille/headlight bezel broke so the headlight wouldnt stay pointed up. So my dad jabbed a stick under it to hold it in place. It took two or three sticks for me to realize it had a purpose and my dad to realize they weren't falling out.
I pulled a head from a Mopar 440 that had a big blotch of JB Weld in it to try to cover up a massive crack on the intake runner. :eek2:
How about black pepper or a raw egg into the rad to stop leaks,works great but the smell makes ya hungry! ou:
poor repairs I have done many things no one would be proud of, Once my throttle cable broke on my Buick at the gas station. I just cranked the Idle up to about 1600/1800 and manually shifted it to get home Another time my brothers 56 Dodge had a similar episode, this time we had shoe laces (not engineer boots like the first story.) we found a hole in the firewall and ran the shoe laces to the carb, it was ok except the shifting gears made you fall back in the seat a little and pull on the shoe lace thus gunning the carb. Trying to pull out in traffic took some getting used to. When I first had the th400 built for my car, I had no shifter. So we fashioned a steel rod that came off the selector shaft of the trans up through the floor board sort of like an "L". WOT shifts into second often ended up in neutral and sometimes reverse. I only ran it that way a couple of weeks. Coming home from Rhinebeck NY Goodguys event, I lost one of my 'sneakerplug' caps, the oval two bolt style. We were able to find one bolt/nut, the gasket and several soda and Yoohoo cans. I had a full set of tools and after a short while, the best we could do was to use the gasket as a flange, flatten the cans and cut them with some heavy steel scissors I carry in the tool box and 'build' a header plup/cap. Again, I only ran this a little over a week-I have witnesses that will swear/lie that it never leaked!!! I could go on, not to mention the stuff I have seen come through the shops over the years and the stories from other hot rodders trying to get their cars home safely (?). And vice grips for brake lines? please...I drove a 31ft RV 35 miles home with a broken brake line just using the trans to slow down, what little brake pressure I had to get it to stop and park to hold at the stop lights. Parking brake, oh yeah, the cable was seized so I had previously diconnected it, you know...how often do you need to use it in an emergency anyways??????? ou: ou: ou: Did I tell you about the time I had a 'race' trans built out of an old 4spd Hydromatic (Olds/Pont/Cad automatic from the 40's-50's). The genius took out the parking pawl and I had (again) no parking brake cable in the car. I had to use wheel chocks to keep the car from rolling, not easy to put down by yourself especially when on an incline. OH YEAH, the list of stupid things I have done goes on and on. :beer
i had a 77 cheby truck that the park prawl was broke so i tied a 2 by 4 to a pice of string and threw it out the door to the tore then let the truck rest on it then when i took off i moved up a bit and drug it in. the reason for the string? the truck was lifted 6 in and had 35s on it really couldnt just open the door and reach out and grab the block.
