on a fishing trip a few years ago, me and a buddy of mine were pulling a boat and trailer back from the lake when the rear universal joint came out of the drive shaft. we stopped on the side of the highway took the rear drive shaft out and threw it in the bed of the truck. locked the hubs put 'er in 4wd (now fwd) and came on to the house. on another expedition we stopped for gas and to put some air in a leaking tire on the same boat trailer and noticed the grease cap was gone off one of the hubs on the trailer. cut the bottom out of a Budweiser can crammed it full of grease and "reattached" it with a large worm clamp. as far as i know it's still on that trailer. there were also a few instances where we used cereal boxes for various gaskets. and one instance where i used some 12-2 electrical wire to bypass a bad electric fan temp module on an old '86 Plymouth turismo (think dodge charger clone) i used to own. strait wired it to the battery terminal to run continuously till i got home. 6 penny nails and bailing wire also can be fashioned into a workable throttle linkage on anything. and once when i was younger (read:stupider) a friend of mine had a fuel pump go out on a dodge truck he owned. i substituted for it by riding on the fender with the hood up holding a windex bottle full of gas and spraying it into the carburetor to get us home. it was only a mile or two, but i wouldn't have made curfew walking. :laugh:
Ive jump started a car years ago by touching both front bumpers, for the neg connection, and a cloths hanger connecting the two positive. let it trickle charge for a while, then fired it up.
The alternator light flashed on , in the 75 F100 I was driving. Sheared the alternator pivot bolt. Took a broom handle laid it on the firewall across to the rad cradle, used binder twine to haul the alternator back in place and drove it for two weeks like that.
Years ago my sister had a 65 Comet that I used to drive a lot during the winter when she was a broke university student. Well, one night, the drivers side motor mount broke while I was trying some performance stunt, as if a 200 six had any guts. My ingenious fix was to find the appropriate sized piece of wood, and jam it between the block and the pass side inner fender. :grin: ou: Worked perfectly. :TU: My sister wasn't too pleased that I "broke" her car, but since I was paying her insurance, maintenance, and gas, she really couldn' complain too much (my car was stored for the winter :grin: ) and I promised her I'd properly fix it some day. She hasn't let me drive any car of hers since then, wonder why. :error: :Brow:
out four wheelin with my dad about 10 miles out in the boonies and had a heater hose blow. so we put a deep well socket in between the two ends and wraped her with some bailing wire and finnished her off with some duct tape. then it started to vapor lock on us so we had to put cloths pins on the fuel line about every 3" or so to make it quit. that only helped a little bit so then we had to start running to the little creek about 300 yards away and use a fishin wader as a bucket and pour water on the fuel line.
Just last year was in a friends Ski Nautique inboard and noticed that the boat was feeling really heavy. Opened the hood and saw water up to the floorboards. Water was gushing out the freeze plug hole. We had the equivilant of 2 inch hole in the boat. Bilge pump was not keeping up. So I had one passenger stuff and hold their shoe to the hole, then pulled the water inlet hose off and covered the inlet with my hand and let the inlet hose suck water out of the boat.
Wow, no one mentioned wire hangers as tailpipe hangers. Also used a tomato paste can as a temporary (until I sold the car) tailpipe connector, again with wire hangers as the clamps. And my all time favorite, my '68 Rambler American had a small engine fire that destryed the positive battery cable so again the trusty wire hanger wrapped around the battery post connected to a pop top as the starter connector got me home.
I had a Jimmy years ago that I used a thick heavy coat hanger for for this. The big heavy rubber hangers that the exhaust shot used kept breaking. I got tired of going back every couple of months to have it fixed so I used a coat hanger. That was the last time I fixed it and they lasted a couple of years.
My uncle had a 3 on the tree chebby. The shift linkage came loose and we couldn't get it in gear. I opened the hood and shifted it into second, but the clutch was too worn to start the truck from a stop. We developed a finely tuned ballet. We removed the hood and set it in the bed. After a stop I would jump out of the bed, shift the truck into first and stand on the running board. We'd get rolling and he'd put in the clutch, I'd shift the truck into second and side step down the running board and hop into the bed. Made it across town through 8 or 9 traffic lights that way. My uncle went straight to the salvage yard and dropped the truck off. When they asked him to drive it over to the new car area we went through our ballet with all of them watching. My uncle cried out "Reverse" or "First" and I hollered back "Reverse (First) Aye Aye Captain". We made a graceful 3 point turn and sent that truck off with formality. John
I just remembered 3 more: I had replaced hoses and belts on my (then) best-friend's 89 Caprice. The next time I saw her there was a long 1/4" think, 3" wide aluminum strap screwed into the fender well, and also bolted into the alternator bracket. Apparently I had tightened a bolt too tight and the flang broke. Her father and brother did the strap job. At college, the same friend's same car wouldn't start one night. Someone had to pick her up at a Denny's. We went back the next day, jiggled the wires at the batteries (it was a deisel), and drove it to the dorms. I proceeded to clean the terminals and seal them with a dielectric grease. I was at the last one when I realized I hadn't disconnected the ground, but figured I'd made it this far... I accidentally touched the final terminal, a positive, to the radiator. It arced, causing a tiny hole, with a tiny little spray of coolant. "That's not good, is it?" asked my friend. So, we called it a day, and I borrowed a torch from the father of someone I was dating. I used some rosin-core flux I had in my guitar case, and fixed it. Then I chased my friend around the parking lot with the torch, lol. Finally, since muffler hangers were mentioned, I had a muffler fall on the way to Cedar Point (amusment park) one summer. There was an old tie laying in the car, so I tied it up with that. Well, the tie turned out to be some cheap synthetic material, not cloth, so it melted through. We pulled off the freeway in Amherst and pulled into their main shopping center (right during their Potato Festival, lol). Got some dog chain and a clip at a department store, and fixed the exhaust that way.
My late grandfather had a '53 Chebby 3-ton lift-bed truck he used to haul wheat. It must have had about a million miles on it, and looked like every one was over hard road. The ignition switch was a household lightswitch hanging from the dash (floor starter pedal), there were no interior door panels, the driver's side door release was a vise-grip, there was no inside passenger door handle. The driver's seat bottom was completely worn away, so you sat with a couple of Sears catalogs between you and the bare springs. That's only the half of the interior... Under the hood, the 216 (?) straight six had 2 or 3 heavy-gauge bare steel sparkplug wires, bent just right so as not to touch anything. (Any car radio within 50 feet was totally obliterated.) Grandpa filed the points every year, whether they needed it or not - never replaced them, just kept on filing. I swear he put kerosene and used motor oil in the oilbath air cleaner. Of course, there was nothing but yards and yards of bailing wire holding the exhaust on (complete with Thrush muffler, lol). The bed's hydraulics consisted of two really long multiple-ram cylinders that never went up at the same rate. One side ALWAYS went up about 2-3 feet ahead of the other, which made it fun at the grain elevator. Oh, yeah - to check the hydraulic fluid lever (which was always leaking like a sieve), you had to raise the bed, leaving it in the "raise" position so it didn't leak down, and then get between the frame rails to the dipstick with the bed towering crookedly above you. My favorite "Grandpa" stories: 1. Grandpa took a full load of wheat into town, and the right front wheel bearings died and took the nut with them while he's cruising down the highway. So he coasts to a stop, retrieves the wheel/tire/brakedrum assy, puts it in the passenger seat, and continues on into town, balancing the truck on 3 points. After he unloaded, every time he touched the brakes it would drop down and drag, so he was coasting to a stop at every light and sign between the elevator and his farm (took him forever to get home). We got new bearings on, and grandpa welded a new nut onto the stripped threads. :shock: 2. Another year, Grandpa is again delivering a full load to town, and it blows a hole in a piston, and starts belching clouds and clouds of smoke (moreso than usual...). grandpa delivers, drives it on home, and we put a "new" piston from a junk (nearly siezed) engine in with the "old" rings on it. If we wouldn't have had to pull the pan to get the piston out, he'd have left the pieces of old piston in there. :eek2: That truck was still "running just fine" 10 years later when the shed it was parked next to caught fire and burned to the ground. Among other things, it melted the windshield, burned the wooden sides off the bed, and burned a fuel hose at the tank - burning fuel then ruined the hydraulics, so Grandpa finally declared the truck a goner. But he drove it to its final resting place!
HA!!!! I'm not the only one who's had 2X4's tied together with string sitting in thier car... Ahh, them were the days. How about doing the 455/400 swap into my 84 Cutlass.... didn't have a crossmember (didn't think that far ahead), wanted soo bad to get it on the road that we cut the stock th200 crossmember and just bolted it to the floorboard :eek2: Lasted for a while... probably shouldn't have raced it like that, wouldn't have had to buy a new trans, driveshaft, fan shroud ou: Still beat the other guy to the finish line though (it fell 2/3 down the track) :grin:
In 1987, during a rainstorm, I lost the wipers on my old '71 Skylark driving home at night from school in night Newark NJ. Not wanting to stop and wait (for those familiar with the area), I took off both shoe laces and tied one end to each of the wipers, while feeding the other end through the windows into the interior. I worked the wipers with my hands from my seat, while I steered the car with my left knee. ou: It was rough, but I got home safe and sound. p
seeveral years ago,had a tire develop a leak. to get by till i could get it fixed, i put a screw coated with sealer in the hole. drove it a while this way recently, the throttle cable mount on my truck broke at the firewall. i used a hose clamp to tie it to the power booster line. works great
I had a '66 Plymouth Fury back in the day. The car would sputter and die at the most inopportune times. Seemed to me like it was running out of gas all the time, but I I knew the tank was full. In the course of troubleshooting the problem, I knew it wasnt the fuel pump, but what it turned out to be was a handful of rust from the gas tank clogging the filter. At the time, locating a new fuel tank for this car wasnt an option, so it was time to get creative. I went down to the local parts store, picked up about 6 feet of fuel line, 2 five gallon plastic fuel cans and a brass "t" fitting. I cut the original supply line coming out of the tank, drilled a hole in the trunk, duct taped the gas cans together and ran the fuel lines into the caps that I had drilled for a tight leak free fit. Worked like a charm and no more clogged filters!
