doing whatever it takes...

[exdeath]

Everyone has their stories of having to rig up some improvised means to tackle a difficult problem... sometimes with methods that are best kept a secret and performed in private if it's someone else's vehicle who isn't familiar with working on cars, lest the owner gasp and faint at the often brutal and ghetto tactics akin to using hacksaws and chisels in human surgery...

My latest was a water pump that refused to come out. After various methods involving mallet and scraper/chisel, slide hammers, 6 foot pry bars, checking various pulley pullers that might work, etc, it remained just as it did when the bolts came out... air tight and probably good to stay in without bolts if I desired. My last resort was a custom puller. It wasn't really ghetto, but pretty extreme for something as simple as a water pump:

http://members.cox.net/exdeath/P1011792.JPG
http://members.cox.net/exdeath/P1011793.JPG
http://members.cox.net/exdeath/P1011794.JPG
http://members.cox.net/exdeath/P1011795.JPG
http://members.cox.net/exdeath/P1011797.JPG

Even with all that, I still had to get on the ratchet with a 4 foot pipe and alternate 1/4 turns on both sides. It was in there so tight that I was seriously afraid of cracking the block into the water jacket pushing against it with that bolt on the left. Finally after several minutes, a crack the thickness of a business card developed between the pump and block, enticing me to continue. I think thats the first time I've ever been excited to hear the sound of dripping coolant...

If that didn't work, a cut off wheel and torch was next...

 

[DougK62]

I wouldn't really call what you did "ghetto". That's actually quite nice - I could use something like it!

 

[nakedfrog]

Duct taped the final hose between the intercooler and intake manifold because it had a nasty tear in it. Got me by for a few days until the replacement hose arrived.

When I had to change a tire on my Super Beetle, it had been so long since the bolts had been taken off, we had to use a five foot length of pipe on the end of a tire iron with my buddy standing on the very end to loosen them.

 

[Nutdotnet]

I grew up in a small town (500) where the only way to get there was by boat or plane.

Needless to say, the majority of our cars where ghetto-rigged.

My first car, a 1982 Buick Skylark, had a sunroof that ended up cracking in a million pieces. Instead of replacing the sun roof with another sunroof I decided to cover the whole with a piece of lexan and about 1 gallon worth of Marine-strength caulk. Looking back, I should have tinted the damn thing.

 

[Vetterin]

In 1970, while stationed in the Canal Zone I was driving a 49 (not a mistype) VW Beetle that had a throttle linkage that I fabricated from a piece of metal clothes hanger and a shoelace. Dam car was still running when I came stateside in 72.

 

[Colt45]

Originally posted by: nakedfrog
Duct taped the final hose between the intercooler and intake manifold because it had a nasty tear in it. Got me by for a few days until the replacement hose arrived.

Same here, i was out of town, blew the crap out of the hose. Wrapped it in duct tape, blew again.

I ended up wrapping it in duct tape, haywire, more duct tape, shopping bag, and electrical tape. made it home!

 

[Pacfanweb]

My best friend has a Jeep CJ-7. He was up in Uwharrie national forest, wheeling. Broke a rear axle...the axle kept trying to come out of the housing. He had to get back to his trailer, so they found an old fence post, used tow straps and a Hi Lift jack to tie the post across the tire, parallel to the ground. It was tied to the frame and leaf spring, so it would keep pressure on the tire to keep the axle from coming out.
They oiled the sidewall of the tire with motor oil so it would slide on the fence post.

He made it just fine.

I made a water pump belt out of pantyhose one time, just to get to the parts store.

 

[TheSlamma]

The "Dogbone" motormount on my Pontiac 6000 broke and had to be ordered.. in the meantime my friend and I took a railroad spike remover (looks like a 7 foot long crowbar) wedged the engine forward and used rope inplace of the mount. Made it the 2 days to our amazement, without the rope the gear shifts were insanly painfil, with it was almost as good as the real mount actually.

This same car also used to eat alternator balts up. Same friend and I could change that belt in under a minute in any weather we got so good.

 

[marvdmartian]

Had a buddy, years ago in my navy days, that held most of his exhaust system together with old soup/vegetable cans (cut off both ends with a can opener, then cut laterally with tin snips), hose clamps and exhaust repair tape. :roll:

Personally, I had a beater pickup truck when I lived on Guam. Being ~12 degrees north of the equator, there's not much use for a heater (coldest morning in January might get all the way down to 70F), so most people, myself included, will not bother replacing heater hoses that rot out. Just cut the hose off ~6" from where it comes off the engine, shove an old spark plug in the end of the hose, and tighten a hose clamp down to hold it in place. Perfection! :laugh:

 

[Toastedlightly]

I think I may trump many of you. I JB welded a spark plug into a spark plug hole on an 87 Cabriolet VW. The plug blew out due to a bad helicoil job). It ran just fine for 3 days (granted, I didn't rev the motor more than 3k rpm).

 

[potato28]

A few of us duct taped a crunched bumper back together and used it on the same car.

 

[JeffreyLebowski]

The most I've ever done was use zip ties to hold the electric fans in the front of my 91 Trans Am.

 

[radioouman]

Originally posted by: Pacfanweb
I made a water pump belt out of pantyhose one time, just to get to the parts store.

hehe that is awesome!

I don't have too many good stories, but I did have a transmission fail and it dumped all of its fluid one night. I lost drive, so my Dad brought out a gallon of tranmission fluid to where I broke down. We poured it into the overheated (smoking) transmission and I drove home. My Dad followed and said that I had transmission fluid dripping off my rear bumper. I crawled under the car the next day, and the bottom of it looked like it had been steam cleaned!! All of the undercoat had been dissolved and it looked like brand new shiny steel!

 

[iamwiz82]

Originally posted by: Toastedlightly
I think I may trump many of you. I JB welded a spark plug into a spark plug hole on an 87 Cabriolet VW. The plug blew out due to a bad helicoil job). It ran just fine for 3 days (granted, I didn't rev the motor more than 3k rpm).

On one of my excursions offroad with friends one of them high-centered on a rock, which put a hole in his transmission pan. We didn't notice it until later that night at the hotel, so we bought some JB Weld, dropped the pan, cleaned it out in the sink of our room, and then JB Welded that bad boy. Good as new!

Another time I peeled the diff cover off of my rear differential and it was leaking pretty badly, so I got a tube of RTV and smothered the entire underside with it and let it sit over night. Good as new!

Another time, a friend had his rear main seal go on a trip, so we got RTV and RTV'd the heck out of it just to stop it from smoking so we could get home. Not quite good as new!

I've been on the trail a few times when tie rods have bent. A winch usually straightens it enough to get you home. Two car batteries are all you need to get a weld on a snapped control arm or tie rod.

EDIT: I cannot believe I forgot my personal moment of stupidity and the required ghetto-rigging necessary to fix said mistake. I hydrolocked an engine, and after being pulled out we yanked all the spark plug wires and the air filter. We used straws to suck the mud and water out of the spark plug tubes and the intake manifold. To get the water out of the cylinders, I pulled the spark plugs, pulled the fuel pump fuse, and turned the engine over, creating my very own 5.2L fountain. After getting everything back together it still wouldn't start, we needed some sort of starting fluid. That's where the hand sanitizer came in. Put some of that down the throttle body and she started back up.

I did end up eating a few valves, but she still got us home.

 

[Black88GTA]

On a road trip from Evansville, Indiana to Michigan in my old Mustang, I had the welded on exhaust hanger fail and the whole thing start dragging on the expressway behind me. So, I pulled into a truck stop and got two rolls of chicken wire. I wrapped the wire around the exhaust and through some random holes underneath the car and anywhere else under there I could find that would hold it evenly, and twisted the remainder of the wire together.

I meant to get the hanger fixed but just never did, since the wire seemed to work so well. It lasted almost a year like that! By the time the wire was failing, the muffler the hanger was originally welded to had holes in it and needed replacing anyway.

I can't think of much else. I try to avoid jerry-rigging stuff if I have a choice.

 

[skyking]

Most of mine involve equipment or boats, not cars.
I went to work for this outfit, and the foreman had a truck mounted drillrig. The oil guage capillary tube wore through on the first morning I was there.
I walked over to my car, grabbed the 4" vise grips, a roll of tie wire, and crimped it off and tied my vise grips to the engine.
"Let's get back to work. you can get a replacement tube at lunch, I'll install it for you."
The foreman was a little dumbfounded that I did it so quickly. It was a pice of crap contraption, and I ended up fixing it many more times.

The best was not a ghetto repair, but a diagnosis.
Guy was in a parking lot, hood up on a '65 ford truck, Cherokee nosed up to it with jumper cables. I tell my wife I'll be right in. "Oh, I know" she nods knowingly and heads in to the building.
I had my rubber handled kershaw pocket knife and nothing else.
I walk up and they tell me it just died in the road, the've been cranking it till the battery went down.
I grab a plug wire off, stuff it over the knife blade and hold the back of the blade near metal. "crank it".
nothing.
I use blade to pry clips off distributor cap.
"crank it".
rotor turns, a good thing. No spark at points, not so good.
hmm.
looking at points, I notice an extra screw floating around down there, like somebody dropped it during points condenser change. It was grounding the breaker assembly!
pop off rotor for better access, use <you guessed it, my pocket knife> to chase crew up side of housing and into my hand. rotor on, cap on "crank it"

It blasts to life!
They are just standing there mouths wide open catching flies.
I hold out tiny screw, guy holds out his hand. I drop it in, and just walk away. 3 minutes, tops.

 

[Raduque]

Cooling fans in my Accord are wired to a switch mounted next to the shifter. Speaker wire runs from the switch, to the battery, to the fans and back.

My first truck had a couple ghetto things on it. It ate batteries like no tomorrow (my dad and I could not for the life of us chase down the short), so I wired in a switch between the positive terminal and the wiring. The switch was under the hood, so I had to get out, flip the switch, get back in and start it, then flip the switch after parking. It also had a problem with the brake lines where they go into the master cyl leaking so I JB welded the fittings and filled it back up, good as new.

My dad broke the lower A-arm mount in my Oldsmobile once (where it connects to the spindle) about a half-mile from home. He used a floor jack to compress it back up into place, a length of chain and a padlock to hold it there. She made it home, surprisingly.

 

[Bignate603]

A friend of mine just finished a 500 mile trip with a piece of wood jammed in where an air shock blew out. He said it rode a bit rough.

 

[radioouman]

I thought that the neutral safety switch was leaking on the transmission on my old truck. I pulled it out with a big ass socket. (Maybe 1 1/4"?) BUt when I put the new on it, I accidentally over tightened it and stripped the threads. It never made contact after that, so I traced the wiring up to the firewall, then spliced into it running a wire into the cab to a switch that when pressed, grounds the circuit. To this day, if you want to start that truck,you have to press on that switch to ground the circuit and then turn the key.

 

[compman25]

Had a 70 Bug and late one night the throttle cable broke about 10 miles from home. Had my friend sit on the bumper and work the throttle by hand, whenever I needed to shift I'd honk. He'd let off for a second and I'd shift, getting up to about 30mph with him holding on to the decklid. After a mile or two I thought it might not be the smartest solution, so I pulled over and just cranked the idle up and started slamming gears, not stopping for anything all the way home.

 

[thecoolnessrune]

Originally posted by: compman25
Had a 70 Bug and late one night the throttle cable broke about 10 miles from home. Had my friend sit on the bumper and work the throttle by hand, whenever I needed to shift I'd honk. He'd let off for a second and I'd shift, getting up to about 30mph with him holding on to the decklid. After a mile or two I thought it might not be the smartest solution, so I pulled over and just cranked the idle up and started slamming gears, not stopping for anything all the way home.

THAT is awesome.. :laugh:

 

[bobross419]

My '94 Suzuki Swift ended up having some problems starting, the compression was shot, and after pulling the head the machine shop determined that the head was warped beyond the point where they could mill it. I checked on ebay and found a refurbed head for a reasonable price. The head was listed to fit a 94 swift and the casting mark (S-5) matched the one on my current head.

The head that I get actually goes to a 95 and up Swift with the S-6 casting. There are a few major differences between the two heads, so I contact the seller and tell him he sent me the wrong one. He basically tells me that the only thing he can do is refund my money with a return because he doesn't have the S-5 head that he took a picture of.

Not wanting to be without a car for even longer I tell the guy to go screw himself and decided I'd make this head work.

The main difference between the two is where the thermostat sits. On the 94 the thermostat is part of the intake manifold and on the 95 the thermostat is part of the distributor housing. The end of the head with the distributor is so different that there is no way that you can use the 94 distributor housing. I went down to the local U-Pull-It and grabbed the distributor housing off a 95, but the way it mounted interfered with my 94 intake. Swapping intakes was out of the issue because it would require a new wiring harness. I decided to cut off as much of the 95 housing as possible then JB weld in a plate to keep water from spraying out everywhere.

Once I got everything back together I was able to get her fired up. She ran for 3 months before the engine finally went out beyond easy repair.

You should have seen the look on my fiancee's face when I was describing what I was doing.