What you are calling "White oil" is really just soluable oil used in machining parts .same as the "oil" in the little bottle of "Bars Leak" It turns water to milky white and is very good rust proventative.
Yep, the 3.8 was notorious for small coolant leaks. We even had a recall for a while where apparently they forgot to add them in the cooling system, so we had old people lined up with their Buicks for a while for their parts. Funny, ginger root must have magic powers, my wife sent me out for some "gripe water" for my new boy, I was wondering wtf gripe water was and it was ginger root, apparently settles the stomach of newborns and fixes coolant leaks....
I used to have an old 56 F100 with the 6cylinder engine in it. It used to burn a lot of oil, at least a quart a day. I started using 90W120 gear oil in in instead of oil because I was too broke to rebuild it. That stopped the burning and it ran quiet and better. But still leaked. My daughters old Nova with a 6 cylinder was not running right. She had just bought it a month or so before. I took the carb off to clean it and instead of a needle and seat, someone somehow used a piece of a rag for the seat with the needle valve. Easy fix but I don't know how it ran as long and as well as it did.
I'm guilty. Bought a used car from a small dealership, drove it home, tune up, oil change etc. As soon as it got warm, rod knock. I drained the new oil out. Put the old back in with a couple quarts of gear lube and took it down to a big dealer, traded it in, paid full price and got the hell outta there.
Ah, Motor Honey. So thick you couldn't get it down a SBC breather tube cold. And forget about funnels.
Wrigley's spearmint gum wrapper wrapped around the blown fuse..... or I bought a '55 Ford once that had .22 rounds in place of the fuses, now that is a way to hide the ammo
its peat moss and other stuff ( some powdered sodium silicate ) , and it was the cause of the O/T dexcool gumming problem of the late 90s .as the worker was supposed to put 2 crushed pellets worth in and some cars got too much of the powder . your supposed to use them on a Oem car that has a aluminum head or manifold and iron block for the disequal expansion rates .
also guilty of the motor honey trick when I was in college for a old 225 in a dart , 3 quarts of oil and top it off with motor honey or gear lube , got me thru 2 years of school ( was at Ann Arbor and drove home to the sw side of Chicago on breaks ) , had to take the battery out of the car and bring it inside in the winter so I could crank it over in the michigan winter with that goo in it also you had to let the car sit and warm up before you moved it as the oil pressure was real high . when I came home one summer I changed to 15-40 truck oil and it knocked like heck , and at idle the oil light would flicker . when I pulled that motor out , we opened it up and the crank was black and some of the bearings were on the steel , no copper in them at all .
banana peels in rear differential works but stinks bad! mid 90's cadillac used no head gasket just block sealer that needed replaced every so many thousand miles!
Anyone remember the Andy Griffith episode where Barney bought the shoe box ford that had been "doctored up" and while he was driving it the shaft started coming out of the steering column at him while snake charmer music played in the background? .......I have heard some "doozies" in my time and believed most of em when I was younger but the one Porkn****** told about the guy saying he fixed all the cocanut dents (true or not) reminded me of some of the older guys around here that use to sit around "telling tales" (lies) just for entertainment
Bananas in a to-be-traded Valiant diff- Squeezing them into the fill hole was fun. Handy tip- you will get 10 miles before the noises start again. Removing "alt" light globe when alternator is shot. Install a 12volt radio in a 6V beetle, running off a small motorcycle battery in the front.
Had an old Nash Metro with a leaky gas tank ( pinholes ) . Old timer suggested rubbing the leak with a bar of Ivory soap! Worked great until it rained.
Don't know if he was kidding or not but my dad used to talk about his uncle turning an old worn out Model A on it's side, removing the pan and wrapping bacon rind around the main bearings to take up the slack.
Although this isn't exactly where this thread is going I have to add a story from the sixties on using ingenuity to repair an engine cheaply. The Pelzer brothers in Lyman Iowa (a wide spot in the road on Hiway 71 in SW Iowa) were pretty handy and a customer had a Ford truck with a Y block that had lower end issues. The owner was cheap and to fix the broken main bearing cap they fabricated a piece of strap iron over the cap to hold it together, after ***embly it ran fine with good oil pressure, it's been almost 50 years since I watched them do it, and I still wonder how long that old truck kept running.
Sometimes things work because we don't know that they won't. A little knowledge can stop even the most cleaver man from ever achieving anything.
I ran bananas with the peel and all in a noisy Ford nine inch. Stuffed a couple of raw wieners too. Didn't smell great when I pulled the plug to put oil in later but it didn't howl ever again.
Dumprat.When I worked in a gas stations waaaay back when. My boss told me during world war 2 when they had flat tires on their jeeps they would dismount the tires and stuff them with bananas to keep them rolling.Bruce.
When I was still in Mexico we called bananas the mystery fruit, if you were plugged up they would loosen you and if you were too loose that would plug you.
Working as a diesel mechanic we repaired several engines that had cavitation erosion damage to the cylinder liner seals and the lower counter bore of the block by applying bondo to the counter bore and sanding it smooth, and turning the liner 90 degrees. It works as long as the erosion hasn't gone all the way thru the liner. Used motor honey in an engine once, not sure it did any good at all. A spark plug spacer did help keep the plug from fouling. Used Alumaseal (sp?) in several cars over the years, even got it to seal up a corroded freeze plug. It seemed to work better than Bars Leak. Dawn dishwashing soap to clean up oil fouled cooling systems. Foil gum wrapper to repair blown fuse on the side of the road. Tire sealer on a motorcycle tire, got me 3 hundred miles home.
Speaking of bondo, that reminds me of another story. As a teenager, we were getting ready to head to the beach one summer day in my buddies Rambler, and it developed a leak in the top radiator tank, puking coolant all over the street in front of my house. Searching through my dads garage we found a can of bondo, mixed some up and patched the tank, let it set up, then refilled the radiator and off we went to see the beach and the babes!
I remember a few years back here on the Hamb, a build thread for I think, a 36 Ford brought outer Mexico. Was a runner, but got stripped down for build, and when they pulled the intake, there was a large piece of oil soaked blanket in the valley. I'm sure someone said this was a common thing? Anyone remember this?
Spark plug spacers! That's a totally new one for me. Friend of mine used to run a should have been dead LUV pickup with some 2 part oil additive straight with no oil. Can't remember brand name do remember it cost about $20- and get him by for about a month of 35 mile round trips to work. Did that for a couple years.
Having some spare parts in the trunk is a good idea in our old cars, but never thought one could sit on them. The mexican blanket interior comes to the rescue.
The Jalopy Journal
