Art & Inspiration Make do repairs on the side of the road.

I have had two instances where I needed to make on the road repairs.
Coming back from a striping job one day the 55 suddenly dies like it ran out of gas.Rolled to a stop at the back gate of Michigan Int'l Speedway.
I knew I had plenty of gas and as luck would have it I had no tools in the car. Checked and it had plenty of spark but no fuel flow. Possible fuel pump but maybe just a blockage in the fuel line.
My only tool was a Swiss Army knife and after calling my wife and having her bring my tool box out(I was 15 miles from home)I reached under the car and with the screwdriver blade of the SAK loosened the flexible fuel hose to the tank. Pulled it off and nothing came out.
Took off the gas cap and got a McDonald's straw out of the car;slid it into the flex line and tried to blow through it. Resistance first and then it cleared and heard bubbles and fuel started to come out. Hooked the line back up and it started right up!
Just then my wife pulled up.I told her to follow me in case it stopped again and headed home. Made it with no problem.
Next day I pulled the tank out(no easy task on a Safari wagon)and found the culprit: Someone had evidently taken the tank sender out and instead of putting a new gasket on it had elected to glue it in with "monkey snot"(black silicone).A piece had fallen down and lodged in the line. A thorough flushing of the lines and tank and it was good as new.

Second one was coming home from Massachusetts in the Safari. Started overheating if you drove under 30 mph. Managed to make it to my aunt's house in upstate New York and pulled the radiator to have it cleaned. Local radiator shop said the EPA wouldn't let them clean radiators anymore and offered to order me a new core(which would take 3 weeks!).
Decided to see what I could do on my own. Went to the local hardware store and bought 2 gallons of Liquid Plum-R. Blocked all the openings and poured in the solution. Rotated it every 15 minutes or so and after a couple hours back flushed the radiator. All kinds of crap came out! Re-installed it and bled the system(no easy task as the under seat heater traps a lot of air) and we were back on the road. It was almost a year later that I finally pulled it out and got a new core.

 

i was on a motorcycle trip with a friend in north carolina. we decided to ride the old indians to julliet georgia. on the way back it was dark and began to rain hard. so hard my goggles would fill up with water and i had to pull them from my face to let the water out. the old indians have a distributor unlike a old harley. water got in the cap and the bike started shooting ducks. then i lost the rear cylinder. i pulled into a closed gas station. turns out the dist cap had developed a crack. i went through the garbage cans until i found a plastic soda bottle. i cut off the bottle a few inches down from the cap. i pulled the three wires off the dist and ran them down the hole. plugged them back in the dist. went in the toolbox for the elect tape. i taped the whole thing up. nice and sealed. by this time the heat from the bike dried the dist. the bottle was a protective shield keeping the water off. the bike ran great. on a harley knuckle head i had a battery go bad. i was far from home when it started to back fire. up ahead was a exit with a walmart. i limped it in. went inside to buy a 6 volt lantern battery and small wires with alligator clips. i disconnected the battery on the bike put the new battery in the saddle bag. ran the wires and i was on my way home. i just didn't run the headlight.

 

Once when hunting near Stonyford Ca the tie rod end stripped out. I roped it together and drove probably 15 miles to the ranger station , asked them to weld it but they refused until I told them either weld it or I'm driving the 300 miles home with it tied together. The shop guy welded it.

 

Way back I had a 54 Chevy when we got married. We took a trip to Eastern Washington from Seattle and on the way back, late Sunday night, past Lake Easton it started raining so hard the vacuum wipers quit . I had some tools so took the vacuum motor off, ripped out all the rear speaker wire I had just put in for the trip, tied it together through the wing windows to the wipers and my wifey was the wiper motor the rest of the way home!

 

I was driving home from the Open Wheel Gang Picnic two summers ago in my roadster.Took off from a light and after about 40 feet heard a bang and caught something fly out to the right of the car. I ran a flathead with two belts. The fan had lost a blade.It hit the shroud and deflected out.My son suggested we take off the belt and let the fan freewheel or hang with other blades down.Didnt overheat.I was very very lucky the blade didn't hit the rad or hit someone along the road.The blade had cracked at the rivets.Iam a firm believer in carrying a tool pouch!

 

Once upon a weary adventure......in an early nova.... The battery hold down must have worked it's way loose,and somehow=probably the wrong battery,arc'ed under the hood. Nice plume of smoke from all around the hood.
Fried the power wire to the horn relay,which in turns powers the interior......
Only thing I had was a coat hanger,and an old sweat shirt in the trunk. Had enough hanger to go from the bat to the relay,and shreaded the sweat shirt to wrap it all. Made it home-45 miles,but sh$tt$ng bricks the whole way.

 

This summer coming home from good guys colorado., we came up on a friend on the side of the road with a broken off coil over bolt. Got another bolt but it was to short for the spacer to work. My buddy wrapped some heavy wire around the bolt to act as the spacer. They made it home over 150 miles without a problem.

 

This wasn't mine, but a friend of mines repair. Every year he drove from PA to Fl to pick up his Dad, and one year, while returning home it started to pour. The wiper motor conked out, so they ran a rope out the front two windows and tied it to the wiper blade arms. His Dad would pull the rope one direction, then he would pull the other direction.

I asked him how long they had to do that, and he said for a couple of hours ! But it got them home.

Don

 

I used a piece of cord through the firewall on my T.

 

Yep, I have done the string tied to the carb in place of the broken throttle cable. Also, used a wire coat hanger to replace the choke linkage that fell off somehow. Regular notebook paper can be used to clean up distributor points in a pinch.

 

When you drive them, sometimes you have to work on them on the side of the road. My son, while still in high school, drove his 55 panel van up to the Back To the Fifties with our car club. As we were leaving, the throttle cable broke. We pulled one of his brand new speaker wires off and fished it through the brackets and used speaker wire as a throttle cable. It not only got us home, be he drove it around town for 2 weeks before he got to a yard for a replacement.

We were on the way to a car show as new members of a car club. About 1/2 the group went up on Friday, the rest were coming up Sat morning. I was with the Friday group. about 2 hours from home base, one of the guys was having problems with his 65 Nova. It took a bout 10 minutes to determine I was the only guy in the group that had a chance of getting this car running. I discovered that the bolts that held the fuel pump to the small block had fallen off, and the fuel pump had slid out of the block. Fortunately, the pump push rod was still there, but the bolts were long gone. Between the crew, we managed to round up a couple bolts I could make work. One was too long, so we pulled a lug nut off one wheel to use as a spacer. The only tool we could scrounge up that would work was a short open end wrench. If you have ever changed a fuel pump on a small block in an early Nova with an open end wrench, you know how much fun that was. After about an hour and a half, we had success. We drove the rest of the way to the show. The Sat crew brought a fuel pump, tools, a jack, and bolts with them and replaced the fuel pump. That was when I started caring a tool box with lots of odds & ends in addition to most basic hand tools. Not for me, but for every one else.
There are more. Gene

 

Back in the early 70's, I was racing a stock car and hauling it on a recently acquired 47 Ford 1 1/2 ton truck. We almost got to the race track and the truck was having a fuel problem. We got it in the pits and then checked it out. This was a Saturday night race and no place to get a fuel pump for the flathead. Anyway we though about it and decided if we pressurized the tank it might work. We had about 6' of rubber fuel line and duct tape. We put the hose in the filler and sealed it with the tape. When we blew in the hose the truck would run. So with only abut 45 miles to go my pit man blew in the hose, and the harder he blew the faster it would go. It got us home! Gary

 

I was fishing a tournament in my Ranger bass boat when the 225 Merc started struggling to pull the boat up on plane. I pulled the spin on fuel filter to check for debris. When i turned it upside down to pour gas into my hand, the o ring gasket fell out and slowly drifted to the bottom of the lake. Tried making new rubber ring out of several items...What DIDNT WORK, seal made out of soft plastic worms, of any color...What DID WORK, section of 1/4" trolling motor release rope laid into the o ring groove. It dripped a little, but got us the 5 mile trip back to the launch. Later found the problem to actually be a wire disconnected at one of the coils.

Another time back in high school while horsing around out in the country, one of my buddys took the coil wire off my 55 Nomad. Found a piece of barbed wire, bent the ends into a v and pushed into the cap and coil. Actually ran pretty good.

 

OT vehicle, but that is a large adjustable wrench where the clutch pedal should be. Went from American Canyon, CA to Redwood City, CA like that, 63 miles:

 

Wife and I were with her first cousin and her husband in his 68 Firebird on a Sunday going to see a movie. This was before we had 7 day a week auto parts stores. Throttle cable broke in the parking lot of the mall where the theater was. Just happened to be a KMart in the mall, went in looking for a suitable cable, found some vinyl covered clothesline. Only tools we had were a pair of wire cutters, a screwdriver, and a pair of vise grips. Cut a piece of the clothes line off the roll, tied it in a knot at the carb, found a grommet in the firewall we could take out and punch a hole in, threaded the clothesline through, pulled out the slack and tied it to the pedal. He drove it for a week or so like that until he could get a cable from a Pontiac dealer.

 

Rescue tape. While downtown on Friday night at the Bayou Roundup in Lafayette, some body stuck a knife into my lower radiator hose. Found it when we got ready to leave. Was about a 1/2" triangular slit. I had bought this repairs all rescue tape while at the LA Roadsters show from a lady vendor there. Made a couple of wraps around the hose, 2 layers thick. Drove to parts store to buy a hose. They didn't have the one I needed and it was holding ok. So we drove to the show the next day and then home to Texas. I have been lazy and not changed it yet that was 750 miles ago. I think it would hold till the hose rotted,hasn't leaked a drop. Good stuff. It's a silicone tape and you stretch it to get it to work.

 

On old beater "go to work car" had metal tube from exhaust to carb choke rusted so exhaust gas went into choke. Freezing cold morning at 60 throttle stuck on. Shut down motor ( quick on again to steer ) pulled off road. Popped hood, broke ice off from choke to throttle cable, got back in fired up & off to work. Took car pool buddy 5 minutes to breath again.

 

Had a 1963 Cobra, one of Shelby's first (260 V-8) Broke front hub and lost left front wheel near Clear Lake Ca. Got car towed back, sent broken hub to Shelby for inspection and was sent a new hub and set of wheel bearings. NO GREASE SEAL----

Called Dad, who was a mechanc from the old school, he told me that grease seal was just that, just held grease in hub.

I was told to get a small pair of scissors and corrugated cardboard, measure and make a seal.

Seal was still in the car two years later when I sold the car.

Always wondered what the owner thought when he saw that seal.

 

Had a rusted out beater 75 Olds Delta 98 that a rear control arm let go at the frame and the wheel moved back and rubbed in the well. I jacked it up enough to boot the tire back roughly in place and tied the axle front and back with yellow nylon rope and drove carefully and slowly home. I would have left it on the side of the road for the tow truck to p/u for scrap but I wanted the 455

 

Alternator went bad 2 hrs from home. Laid a quick start battery between a my wife's legs, she's a champ, and run jumpers out the window directly into the engine compartment. Drove the whole way home with that little battery. There's Definitely magic between a woman's legs.

 

Racing a 32 Ford coupe on a dirt circle track. Chevy engine. Went out for the heat, had a violent wreck, end for end, etc. The engine and transmission were torn out of the car. We got the engine and transmission fastened back in place with a chain wrapped around the whole motor and over the valve covers and back to the frame. Used the radiator out of the tow truck and made it back out for the feature.

 

When I was a young'un, O ring on the oil filter on a 318 let go, and oil was squirting everywhere. I was stopped near a phone box, and cut a circular seal from the front cover of the phone-book, stuck it on and drove 500 miles home.
A friend's SBC inlet manifold developed a water leak (rotten block-off plug) , and the only thing I could find with the right 3/4 thread was a nice brass garden tap. Screwed it in, turned the tap off, and drove home. It was still there years later.
And a VW with a busted accelerator cable, connected up a long piece of fence wire to the carb, removed the back seat and found a hole to poke it through, and then hand-operated the throttle.

 

In 2011 Ladyhrp and I met up with my pal Dave to go to Pigeon Forge around 10:30Am Wednesday morning and the drive to Cherokee,North Carolina was uneventful and we stopped there to top off the tank before heading over the mountain.

Icranked up and pulled out of the station and all of a sudden the truck started missing,,,Damn!

I pulled back in to the station and lifted the hood,,noting jumped out as wrong,,cranked it again and it acted the same,,so I played with the timing and it ran a little better but still had a miss so in my on simple way of thinking I had fouled a plug,,so we preceded on our way winding back and fourth through the mountains and eventually arrived at the motel.

We decided to let it cool off and go find a set of plugs.

With the new plugs in hand Dave and I started replacing them and noticed the R45 AC plugs that I just bought and the R45 AC plugs in the truck are entirely different and because the new plugs were about 1/2" longer they wouldn't fit.

After we check to see if we were getting fire we decided to see if I had compression,,,nope,,double damn!!!

We removed the valve cover to discover a broken exhaust valve spring,,it's almost 9:30 PM and Deuce Roadster takes me to Advance Auto and we lucked out and found a spring and a valve spring compressor,,got back to the motel and it was raining and getting late so we postponed trying to do a parking lot repair until Thursday morning,,,guess who didn't sleep worth a crap Wednesday night!

Thursday morning we awoke to rain again,,We didn't have a way to put air to the spark plug hole to hold the valve but my pal Deuce Roadster had a plan,,,Rope!,,huh? I'm not really happy right now but I ain't gonna hang myself!

We pushed the truck under the covered entrance at the motel as Randy explained that we would get the piston up to it's highest point and start stuffing rope in on top of the piston and that would keep the valve from dropping,,,about this time Barry ratrodO showed up and helped out.

After about 45 minutes the job was done and I was a happy camper again,,

Luck was on my side,,,I didn't drop a valve to could have wiped out my engine and good friends like Dave,Randy and Barry,,not to mention a lot of people around the motel offering tools. HRP

 

Pete sounds like you know my little brother well. He had lots of those light bulb moments. I loved that man dearly and we should have been imprisoned more then once for the fun that we managed to get ourselves into. It just should not be legal for two men to enjoy life like we did when we were young.

the Henderson 4 like the Indian 4 that it became had a distributer instead of coil on plug like a Harley. The Ol Man had a cracked distributer cap and no cash for a while when I was little, he carried a gas soaked rag and when it got wet which was a common thing in the bay area he would squeeze the rag on the distributer to dry it out. It worked really well but in retrospect I am not sure that it was the best idea in the world.

For @prpmmp another little brother story. Dennis and I had rode our old bikes up to Minneapolis to party with some fellas up there. Quite the trip we made in on a shoestring so to speak and on the way home he learned that you could get a tank of gas for sweeping the gas lanes in a service station. But I digress. We were living at the lake of the Ozarks at the time, and in Sedalia, Missouri he managed to short his wiring out. As in pretty much fry his wiring harness short it out. We managed to cut enough wire out of my harness and what was left of his to make him a simplified harness IE headlight and motor no switches except on and off. But unlike my bike that ran a magneto he ran conventional points and coil so he needed a battery. We didn't have enough wire to rig him up a ground on the battery, so he went dumpster diving and found an old coat hanger which made a really good ground wire.

How about a middle of the jungle repair. When I was in Mexico still I had this ragged old 4Wd 3/4 ton Suburban for a while. One of the villages that I visited was a 4 hour trip from home which involved 2 hours of log road and about 1.5 hours if off road through the rain forest. I just happened to have a group of young Americans visiting me and one night about midnight I was leaving this village with them and the old truck just dies in the middle of no where. I discovered that my hot wire had pulled itself out of the ring end which I could have repaired with a pair of vise grips except it lacked about 4" of reaching. Hmmmn, I thought about it for a minute and snagged my jumper cables which served as my hot wire for the trip home. So it gets better if the young people weren't nervous enough about the battery cable, my headlight switch fried just as we got to the log road. I had one of the kids hanging out the window with a hand held spot light until we got to the first settlement where I managed to borrow enough wire from the lady with the soda pop stand to hot wire my headlights. We had no tail lights turn signals or brake lights for the rest of the trip home but at least we could see.

 

Had to drive my old jeep from Dallas to North Carolina for work. I decided to take my sand tires along on my motorcycle trailer. My idiot boss insisted that I take a gallon can of green paint to touch up any scratches on the machine I was installing. Got perhaps 100 miles from Dallas and looked under the driver's seat where the paint can was....it was swollen up like a basketball because it was 100 deg out and I had no A/C. I gingerly lifted it up and sat it on the rest area curb and quickly left.
Got almost to Little Rock when the sky dumped massive rain on me. Of course, the jeep doors were off and I got soaked when I got out to put the doors on. Fortunately, I had one set of dry clothes with me. I stopped and changed in a gas station rest room. By then, I was running way late so I decided that I needed to call ahead and tell my partner that I would be late arriving in North Carolina. I pulled off at an exit and there was a pay phone booth next to a little bar. It was dark outside and raining. I called. Getting back into the jeep, it wouldn't start....starter would not turn but the battery was OK. Just then, two drunks came out of the bar and offered to help. They offered a push start....but I had a trailer attached. They said they would push me backwards and I could steer the trailer straight.....wow, it worked. I thanked them and went on my way. I got to the Mississippi River bridge at Memphis. In the middle of the span, I threw a driveshaft.....transmission end U Joint. Wearing my last set of dry clothes, I had to lay on the bridge in the rain and remove the driveshaft. I locked the front hubs and put it into 4 wheel high range. Cold and soaked, I motored on. No motel would have rented me a room for the night since I was covered with mud. I drove all night. The next morning, still driving but in North Carolina, an older (60's) Mercury passed me with all kinds of motor noise. It sounded like a thrashing machine. When it got maybe 50 yards ahead of me, his motor let go out the bottom. All kinds of oil, parts, smoking parts, and stuff came out from under his car......it made all my woes seem small. I laughed and motored on.

 

Did this same, exact thing to get back to Phoenix from Tucson. When I got on I-10 I'd wrap the wire around the shifter...Cruise Control.

 

Got stuck at a venue (Polish Hall) after a wedding in Glen Cove NY. Fiancee's brother's Caddy had a problem where the carburetor would lose prime (bum fuel pump). We needed to pour gas down the carb to get it going... every gas station in town was closed. Flagged down a cop.. no help.

I had an idea... at gas stations, the hoses often retain some amount of gas in them. Found a relatively clean 7-11 coffee cup. Went to a closed station, un-slung a few hoses and got enough gas to fill the cup. Go back to the car by about 12:30 am... dumped it down the carb and it fires right up... saved the day...

 

Years ago in southern Mexico (1995) my 55 Chrysler, 331 Hemi threw a rod during the Carrera, one guy in the group Stanley Jones said "what the fuck, run it on seven cylinders" with no other options, the chances of finding a replacement piston and rod in Mexico being zero, we dropped the pan, knocked the piston out, wrapped a piece of pop can around the journal, held the lifters off the cam with hose clamps, pulled the plug wire off and by golly the son of a b ran and easily made sixty mph although with quite a vibration. We were no longer competitive but we were running.

 

LOL I used to love right on the Pan American Highway about 30 or so miles north of Las Ventosas, you should have taken a left right there unless they changed the route. I made lots of roadside repairs to American's cars along there over the years.