What have you seen, what was your experience? Banana peels, oatmeal, leather rod bearings, stop leaks, knock eliminators, ring sealers, oil burning, slipping transmission. Putting some radiator sealer in this morning. Got a small heater core leak in my daily, fogs my windshield when I put the heater on. It's either that or reroute the hose, 'cause I'm not pulling the dash apart and core out for just that. On the flip side, years ago my first car had an oil burning 283. I sent to JC Whitney for some magic pellets that you put down the plug holes. All it did was foul a few plugs.
I had stop leak in my rad from the po. My truck still runs on the warm side even though I flushed it out about four times. I wouldn't use it unless you just need some time to gather cash for a rebuild. On an other product on a daily that is long gone I had a trans that had just started slipping. I used transmedic and my trans took a complete dump less than a week later.
I used to swear by Casite Motor Honey. I actually used a bottle in my bike when I lunched my top end up on the great divide in Montana and had to get to a funeral in the Bay Area. I would still use it in a pinch. I have known of more then one used car dealer, and a few individuals that have put saw dust in a rear end to quiet them down in order to sell the car. I lived in a town once where there was a sued car dealer that guaranteed his cars, "10 blocks or 10 minutes whichever came first." people actually bought cars from him. I have used pepper in a radiator and still would. But it is not permanent fix, neither is motor honey for that matter. my granddad said that they used to put oatmeal in a T radiator to block a leak. he also said that it would not work on a car with a pressurized cooling system and I got the impression that it was first hand knowledge. I have heard of people putting an egg in one to seal it up as well. I have used water gl*** on a cracked head and it worked. Someone told what the chemical is that is water gl*** the other day and I have already forgotten. guess I should have written it down. You have to flush the hell out of it prior it doesn't mix well with anti freeze.
I had a customer come in with a Pinto (that he just bought) that was just ******* oil out of the valve cover. This was about 1978 and the Pinto was a 1972 or so. So we order the gasket and I pop off the valve cover. It was a true WTF moment... someone had laboriously cut up an old chenille bedspread to fit under the contour of the cover. With it off, the valve train noise was deafening. We put a gasket on it and suggested that he get his $$ back on it.
Stop Leak is the last thing i'd ever use. Clogs up water p***ages and builds up gunk behind freeze plugs. Fix things right or not at all. My Grandpa said years ago they used Horse **** to repair radiator leaks. The oats would swell up and repair the leaks.
My brother and I are guilty of draining the oil from a '63 Bel Air 2 door and feeding it 4 full quarts of STP. Ran quiet and smooth for about 10 minutes then built up enormous oil pressure, enough to blow the oil filter right off of it. The goo shot everywhere. The STP even landed in the Ash tree standing over the car and continued to rain down the **** for weeks afterwards. We eventually had to cut the tree down.
Someone I knew had a 55 Ford with a 365 Caddy motor in it that had absolutely no oil pressure. Five bottles of Motor Honey fixed it right up. He then sold it to a poor unsuspecting SOB.
OK I am writing it down this time. LOL I used it on an old chebby when I was a kid (6 cylinder) just went to the auto parts and asked for water gl***. It lasted until I was ready to shove a 283 in its place which was quite a while. A guy that used to pit near me sprung a leak in his FE one summer and he used it right there at the track and it lasted him the rest of the season. Thanks
The sodium Silicate we used for sealing card board boxes. That **** works.I had a chevy my wife drove home one night after the radiator hose burst. It overheated in just a couple of minutes ,combustion coming out of the radiator cap ,bad stuff. Put some Sodium silicate in it and watch the combustion g***es stop in about two minutes. Car lot we used a bunch of brake fluid in crankcase, stopped rear main and other leaks . They say it swells rubber,Go figure. Mop and glow floor wax on weathered vinal tops ,makes them look new. Just used some on a fibergl*** motor home, faded out fibergl*** exterior, looks like new. Rubbing compound mixed in paint gun for flat finish.I worked a lot of years part time in car lot.
Ammonia on the interior for that new car smell. I learned that from a detailer back when Lynn and I still had the body shop. he wiped all the vinyl down with it (cut with water)
Back in my demo derby days, we put a bottle of Slick 50 in the oil one year. We lost the rad. and the oil pan was punctured in the first heat. We ran the sbc for two more heats without oil or water for two more heats. After the last heat, we sat in the pits for about 10 minutes with the gas petal floored betting when the motor would pop before we were told to stop. It ran just as well in the end as it did when we pulled in.
There was a 1947 Chev 1 ton yard truck that had the brake fluid changed to a mix of ATF and lacquer thinner to get the all the rubber to swell up. That lasted for maybe 2 days, then it was back to kicking a 4X4 off the running board. ( no OSHA then )
We used to squeeze some extra life out of our batteries by adding a teas**** of Epsom Salt to each cell. Would easily get me to the next payday or Sears & Roebuck sale on a Die Hard, Homart or Ted Williams certified battery. Old timers said it removed the build up on the lead plates to allow charging. I think it's some type of magic....
My Pa Pa told me when he was a kid he and two others wanted to go to Colorado from the north east part of Kansas in a model T this would have been in the early 30s. They made it to colo. and on there way back it started knocking, They stopped in a small town and a small shop owner left the door unlocked and let them use his tools to put a piece of leather on the crank and they limped it home.
When I was in high school a buddy of mine had a big luxury Chrysler of some kind from the mid 60's. He wanted to sell it, but the rear end was very noisy. He was talking about it in front of my dad who then told us the used car dealers used to put sawdust in a noisy rear end to quiet it. We all thought it was worth a try, so Dad made us some good co**** oak sawdust with a rip blade and his table saw. We put some in and drove it, couldn't tell any difference. So he made us some more and we must have had more than a quart in it before we got tired of stuffing it through the little fill hole. Didn't make any difference at all. I built a yard tug in the 90's out of a 4 x 4 International Travel-all that I had been given with no engine or trans. All I had for an engine to get it working was a very worn out 352 Ford. Figured I'd put it in there temporarily and change it out that coming winter.... 10 years later, well you know how it goes. Anyway, I had to buy a set of the little spark plug spacers called anti-foulers that screw into the plug hole and the plug screws into them to hold them an inch or so away from the combustion oil bath. That fixed the fouling problem, but it still used a huge amount of oil and made a big cloud of stinky blow by gas. After a few years I decided to get the J. C. Whitney 3.95 engine overhaul pellets and decided why not go whole hog and get the crankcase treatment too for 7.95 or whatever it was. I know I had less than 15 bucks in it including postage. I followed the instructions and warmed up the engine, then put the can of snot in the oil and the pellets in the plug holes, then started it and revved it up for several minutes. You could actually see the crankcase vapor cloud diminishing and hear the difference in the way it was running. I kept using that old engine for several years afterward and it pretty much had quit smoking. I wouldn't use it in an engine I gave a **** about, but it really did work in this one. I've used several brands of stop leak over the years. Living in Alaska and making a lot of road trips across the state where it might be 70 miles or more to the next town, I usually have a can of it with me. Hit a moose one time 60 miles from anywhere that shoved the radiator back into the fan (Christmas Eve, of course). Luckily, it was warm out... just above freezing, so I got out my Handyman jack and pushed the core support forward to about the right place, pulled the fan blades into their approximate locations and got out my needle nose pliers. I started busting tubes and folding them over a couple times then squeezing them flat above and below the damage. 32 of them as I recall. My flashlight was about dead by the time I got ready to try it. I put in a can of rabbit turds and snot, don't recall the brand, maybe Bars-Leaks and filled it up with antifreeze. I started it and watched for 10 seconds or so, then shut it down and pinched a few of my folded tubes a bit tighter. Started it again and watched it for several minutes. I had just a couple drippers, so I headed on down the highway. When I got to the next town, most everything was shut down, but the Safeway grocery store was still open for a few more minutes and they sold me a 5 gallon gas can and let me fill it with water. Also another couple gallons of antifreeze. I still had 300 miles to go, but made it over 200 before I had to add coolant. Got to my dad's house at 4 AM instead of 8 the evening before, but I made it and felt pretty good about the whole thing. Never had any issues with plugged heater core or any other p***ages. Last summer my dad got his 31 Model A pickup out of the shed to go to a cruise the next afternoon. He thought he had it all ready to go, but the drain valve for the cooling system wasn't quite closed and the water leaked out overnight. He took a neighbor for a ride in the morning and came back in a big cloud of steam. We filled it up with water, but it was barely running. He had worked as a mechanic in the 30's and decided it needed a head gasket, so we pulled the head and sure enough, it was burned between 3 and 4 and over to the water jacket. The block looked okay. Saturday morning and we needed a head gasket for a Model A. He was pretty dejected cuz he wanted to take his girlfriend on that cruise. It dawned on me that he had about a foot high stack of old gasket sets on the shelf in his old shop up the hill, so I told him to go look. "By Damn, yeah", he said and he and the neighbor headed up the hill to look. They came back in 10 minutes with a brand new unopened full gasket set for a Model A. The brand was Montgomery Wards and he'd had it on the shelf since the late 50's. We cleaned things up and bolted it back together with the new head gasket. Everything worked fine except the head was cracked on the top about halfway back and it was seeping water. I had read a story in Rod and Custom when I was a teenager about the things old timers had used for quickie repairs. I remember they talked about cayenne pepper as stop leak or a raw egg. I had both in stock, so I put in an egg and a couple s****fuls of pepper. We ran it at fast idle and in a few minutes the leaking crack was healed.
Lots of GM cars got stop leak before they ever left the factory. Pretty sure it's made out of ginger root.
I knew a guy who bought a '60's Caddy, huge red convertible pimp mobile off a used car lot. After a short while he changed oil. Stuff looked like mud and drained s l o w l y. After new oil & filter it sounded horrible. He pulled the valve covers to look and found indoor-outdoor carpet glued inside. The car went back.
When I was in college, I made a carburetor base gasket out of a lucky charms box. I drove it another 70k miles and sold it like that 5 years later. Same car, a few months earlier I had an intake gasket fail. It was a Buick v-6 and had that metal valley pan setup. Of course, special order and I had to get to cl*** the next day. Didn't have any silicone to plug the gap or anything else handy. I did have some play-dough. I shoved it down tight into the gap, and it ran perfect. At least untill the stuff dried out. After cl*** the next day, I had to re pack it. Got me by for 3 days that way till the part came in.
I read about using a heat gun and a can of compressed air (keyboard cleaner) to remove dents without touching the paint. It follows the same method of using a torch and ice water to remove hail damage. You get the dent nice and hot with the heat gun, then hold the can of air upside down and spray the dent to shrink the metal back and pop out the dent. Well in theory, I could see it working since the metal was so thin so I tried it on my OT daily driver with a small ding in one of the paper thin door panels. I heated it up until I could smell the paint, I wasn't going any hotter than that, then hit it with the cold air. Yeah, nothing happened except for having a nice circle of frost on my door. I waited a little bit and tried it again. The dent is still there. So in other words, save yourself the time and a can of air and p*** this one right on by.
***** hose used for a belt brought a friend home before when the old belt broke at 2AM after a night at the bars. I never asked him where he got them, though.
LOL I knew a guy from Florida that owned a body shop and he said they used to use heat lamps to remove coconut dents from roofs. He said you put the heat lamps inside the car and waiting until it was good and hot then opened and slammed the door. he said that the down side was about every 9th or 10th car is would blow a window out. But he also said that he made enough on the others to cover any broken gl***. I never tried it but the theory sounded good.
The one I'll not forget was a customer pulled in our garage & had weird noise coming from his old dodge truck rear diff , I popped cover off & nothing but saw dust mixed w oil. Trip to nearby wrecking yard n I had him rolling down the road few hours later. Here's a few good ones I've ran into most work well ....... Chopped up apples n baking soda n a bowl is guaranteed to help rid nasty car interior odors especially "cig smoke". Works for me. Buffed my first couple lacquer paint jobs with baking soda years ago works great. Have a local mechanic uses brake fluid as water pump lube , " not for me!" Bend brake lines like oem by shoving a coated electrical wire hanging out each end a bit. ex. On a 3/16 steel tube use 14ga wire bend super crazy angles with ease, after each bend pull wire back as u go, you'll never use tubing bender again. Field test most alternators to see if charging easily by holding a knife blade to rear center shaft area n it'll pull blade against case. "Never unplug any post 1986 ish alternator plugs while running! Works on old stuff only. Best gl*** cleaner is one w ammonia but always use news paper or "bargain hunter" paper to wipe clean , zero streaks. Flux
I live in Florida but never heard of the coconut removal dents. Have to believe he's pulling your leg.
Used car dealer in our small Iowa town in the 1960's had a novel "fix" for Fords with Y block 292 312 rocker arm noise. These motors were notorious for having no oil up to the rocker arm ***emblies for a variety of reasons including low oil pressure or plugged oil line due to poor maintenance. The used car dealer would cut several pieces of burlap feed sacks, saturate them with heavy oil and place them over the rocker ***emblies and re-install the valve covers. The oil would slowly drip of the burlap material onto the dry rockers and the burlap would also add an element of "sound-deadening". Another one down the road !!
My father in law told me about the leather belt trick. His father did that on, I believe a late 30's Dodge. ****oned it up and traded it in on a new Dodge. He was also telling me the other day about something they called White Oil that they put in the radiator water to help keep the water side clean. Said they never had any corrosion issues.
My old man was a "T" fan. He had a connecting rod hanging on the shop wall with a leather bearing in it. You could even see the hole for the belt adjustment.
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