Duct tape and Bailing Wire, Stories of the dangerous and wierd

Duct tape? DUCT TAPE!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=keQapOSxuYU

 

Broken throttle cable on an old Shovelhead. Stole a buddy's speaker wire and looped it around the handle a couple of times. It worked just like the real deal.
Another time we ripped the steering box off the frame on a jeep out trashing the dunes. We grabbed the front A frame from underneath an old mobile home and bent rebar thru the holes and around the front bumper on the Jeep. We towed it home with the homemade tow-bar.

 

Back in 86, I built a 81 Mustang and put a 460 in it. I was coming back from the Mustang Round-up at Bellevue College in Washington state and by the Seatac mall on I-5 in the fast lane the engine stopped. I pulled to the left and pop the hood. Luckily a guy in a 429 Boss Mustang stopped to see if I needed a hand. I took the distributor cap off and spun the rotor. Just what I thought, I sheared the press pin that holes the distributor gear in place. I did not have any tools to speak of with me, but the guy in the Boss had a very cheap Chinese tool kit. I pulled the distributor and ask him if I could have a allen wrench. I took the allen wrench and beat it in the press pin hole, when broke it off. Put the distributor back in the hole which I had marks on it to know exactly where to put it back in in the right spot, hit the key and it fired right up. Told the guy thanks and off I went 60 miles to home. It only took about 20 minute to fix, tops. He said if he would not have been there to see it for himself he would never had believed it. After that at car show he called me MacGyver when he would seen me.
By the way what cause the gear to shear the press pin was one of the shims under the valve spring broke and the oil pump picked it up and stopped the pump just long enough to shear the pin. The motor only had a few thousand miles on it at that time. So I tore it all apart and cleaned it out and re-ringed and bearinged it.

 

A non-turbo M35 is a total dog. You basically drive it with your right foot planted to the floor. It take s a ling time notice when the accelerator return spring breaks. With no springs or bungees to be found along side the road, I tried a coathanger fashioned into a device for pulling the pedal back off the floor. Eventually realized it was easier to drive barefoot and wrap your toes around the pedal like a monkey.

 

on a vacation in norway my exhaust pipe broke in two
I used a empty soup can with the botton and top cut out to hold the two halves togetter and firmly put
wire around it
it held until we got home

 

Beer can fix.

Had the main leaf of a rear spring break on my 48 convertible. Broke in the front near the eye so it was pushing up on the frame. Weight of the car holding it in place. It dropped the car about 3-4 inches on the driver's side so it was tilted and rubbing on the rear fender. Took the bolt out of the fender brace and forced a squashed beer car (empty) between the fender brace and the fender which pushed the fender out enough so it would not rub. Made it the 40+ miles home in order to get a replacement leaf and fix.

 

was on a camping trip with a bunch of scouts a few years ago when we were due to come home mates car wouldn't start (no power) traced the problem to a faulty ignition switch. Used a safety pin from first aid kit to push thru the wires to make conection, drove home no problem. kids started calling me McGiver after that.

 

A friend in Kansas runs a junkyard, err “Auto recycling center”. When people need a cheap fix they stop there.
One summer a man and his family from Arkansas stopped because the engine in their sixty something Chevy station wagon was knocking.
It turned out that the knocking was because one of the rod bearings had spun. Of course they had little/no money.
The fix was to cut sections out of the two connecting rods that were on the damaged journal. A rag was wrapped around the journal to keep the oil in and the big end of the rods were bolted back on over the rag. The pistons were then pushed up to the top of the cylinders.
Viola’, an odd fire V6 Chevy. The folks drove it back to Arkansas; later my friend got a note from them saying that it ran fine but was a little down on power. After a week or so they traded it in on a different pile of junk.

 

my radiator cracked a few days ago. I told my friend. he walked inside and grabbed an egg cracked it into my radiator we started the truck the small crack that was spraying a small stream about three feet turned into a small trickle and stopped. i plan on fixing it but now it does not leak.... crazy shit

 

On a fishing trip, coming home from Canada. 5 guys towing a boat in a 440 powered Chrysler. The fuel pump breaks. We are north of Niagra Falls on a Saturday evening. The guy at the garage says Monday till he can get pump. (Some guys gotta get to work Monday morning.) We had 4 cans of fuel for the boat. The kind with the squeeze ball on them.... You guessed it. 5 guys took turns squeezing that ball to eastern PA.

 

Nice! A bobbed duece. Me likes.

 

Engine fire on my motor home.... (damn mice...). Burned up a half-dozen vacuum hoses and plastic fittings for emissions. Sent the oldest kid into the woods to bring back a small tree limb which I then used to carve plugs to stop up all the vacuum leaks. Made it back home on this, but fuel mileage was under 5 mpg....

As a side note, went to Ford to replace a few damaged parts and they insisted that what was on the motor didn't exist (there was two small plastic valves in the AC that got melted into unrecognizable lumps), even after I showed them the diagram on the sticker under the hood. Took a SWAG at the hose connections without those parts and mileage went from 9 to 12....

 

was coming home from college in Ann Arbor , was around the zoo on 94 when car just up and dies , no electric at all , open hood look around aparently my cousin who was helping me install the motor broke the fuselink wire and twisted it and wrapped it with electrical tape ( it burned up over time ) , well wanted to get home and it was daylight and had all highway to drive , took a peice of speaker wire and wired it from the battery straight to the distributor ( hei) and made a jumper to get get it started , got me home so I could beat somone and have him fix the car , I love the maxifuses they sell now as no more trying to splce a too short of a wire anymore .

 

Around 1974 driving a 66 Corvair when steering failed ( Steering shaft ball nut had cracked). Walked the 1/2 mile to my girlfriend's house and she came back and help me push the car. A few city blocks so we had to hand turn the front wheels to go around a corner...then push the car ,stop, hand turn wheels and continue on.

 

I used to carry baling wire in my trunk and it became known to my friends as universal muffler bracket.
41plym

 

I had a mid-engine Corvair that I would need to leave in the driveway while I went on vacation, and I wanted to disable the car so that it would not be stolen. My first thought was to just remove the coil wire, but that was too obvious, so I replaced the coil wire with a piece of black rubber hose the same OD as the coil wire. I even put the coil wire boots on the hose. The day after I returned from vacation, I jumped into the car and drove to work. En route it occurred to me that I had not reinstalled the coil wire, but I figured my wife - also a race car driver - had replaced the coil wire to move the car. When I got to work, I checked and found that the black rubber hose was still connected from the coil to the distributor. I removed the hose and brought it to my lab where I discovered that the hose had a resistance of about 8000 ohms, about the same as a resistance spark plug wire. It turned out that the black color was due to carbon granules mixed with the rubber when the hose was made.

 

1969, winter gig in Billings, Montana with STRAWBERRY ALARM CLOCK: Hammond B-3 too froze up to start. Crowd starting to riot. Used a piece of thick twine to "rope start" it.

 

As a broke ass college student I commuted 80 miles a day so I drove a Datsun b-210
The ignition switch broke so I pulled the bottom of it off and used the key to jump across
two terminals to start it, drove it that way for 40,000 miles.

 

I was coming home from a trip across country in my 64 Volvo . It started running badly and quit. I found the spring on the points was burnt in two, why I didn't know. Two sets of points later I figured out the pivot on the points plate had worn off (car had close to 300000 miles on it). I took a piece of vacuum line and stuck it between the points spring and the distributor housing and made the last 650 miles home.

 

Taking my cabriolet for a shakedown run down the highway with my buddy Matt. Saw the volts dropping fast and the engine temp going up so we pulled over on the shoulder. The aluminum offset generator bracket had stripped out, the generator had dropped and the belt was loose. I was too dumb to bring any tools or spare parts with me. Matt found a small piece of stranded wire on the shoulder of the road. He stripped the insulation off with his pocket knife and wrapped the bolt threads with copper wire and with dental floss that he had in his pocket.

It held good enough in the stripped bracket to keep the generator up and enough tension on the belt that we were able to limp home. Matt said if he was ever riding with me again and I did not bring spares a a tool kit, he would kick my ass. I threw a roll of dental floss in my newly put together traveling kit just a s a reminder.

 

My grandfather told a story about losing a water pump belt (1940's), he was on a 2nd date with a girl, had her take off her pantyhose and used it in place of the belt. His date later became my grandmother.

 

Me and my granddad were a ways from home in his 65 Ford PU when he pushed the clutch and it went to the floor. We pulled over and I crawled under to find the clutch rod had fallen off due to a missing cotter pin. I rummaged through his tool box, pulled out a hand full of combination wrenches, crawled under and found one that would fit nicely between the z-bar and the clutch arm allowing about the right free play. Used a nail for a cotter pin. We drove it that way for a week till we found another rod.

 

Fixed a guy's coilover with a couple zip ties on the side of 71. He made it to the nats and got it fixed for good....and a few years later ended up living up the road from me

 

We moved in the middle of an engine rebuild on my Fairlane, so everything had to be packed up. Only piece I couldn't find when putting it all together was the clutch actuator rod. Measured it and went to Tractor Supply. Did you know that a plow hanger for a tractor will double as a mid 60's Ford clutch actuator rod? It was so nice of them to think of me. I found the real part a month later wrapped in a towel -- still haven't replaced it.

We live on zip ties an tie wire with the dirtbikes and Jeeps.

 

Had a similar experience on my Harley years ago. Rusty gas tank plugged the petcock, bike died right on the Golden Gate Bridge! Got it up on the sidewalk, pulled the petcock out of the tank, one thumb over the hole to keep the gas from pouring out, trying in vein to clear the rust with the other hand. A thousand tourists walking by talking pictures, meaning I had to stop what I was doing and flip them off, 'cause I wasn't all that happy. Finally a guy and his wife pushing a stroller stop, the guy asks what's up, thinks for a minute, reaches down into the stroller and pulls a giant safety pin off the baby's diaper! I clear the petcock with it in seconds, he wipes it off and puts it back on the baby. I offered him a rental fee, he said no, it would make for a great story to tell the kid some day, how he saved a biker on the GG bridge.

 

'58 VW --- hydaulic brakes went out. Used Ebrake & downshifted. Throttle cable died. Moved choke cable to carb. Like driving a plane. Set the engine speed and drive. Like that for probably 5,000 miles. Lot of country. Few cities.

 

hmmm probably get in trouble for posting this but ...
on way back from a car show in my 62 Impala convertible late one night and suddenly no gas pedal coast to the side of the road and discover some one made off with my cotter pin and washer on my carb to throttle connection so nothing to fix it with. Search of the car finds nothing but a bra from my EX-girlfriend in the console {but that's another story ].After a lively conversation with my new girlfriend I Used the bra to make a throttle leaving the hood on the safety latch open enough to fashion a linkage to the carb with my hand over the windshield with the top down made it the last few miles home .

 

Wow! I never expected all these cool posts.

I remember as a kid going snowboarding with my dads friend charlie in his '54 chev truck. It had one headlight and the boards were all rotted out. We drove to Mt. Hood and on the way back hit a blizzard. There was no wiper motor just a little dowel stick hanging out below the dash it went through a hole and was wired to the one wiper blade. It worked, but I wouldn't say well. Two spinouts and 45 minutes later we got back to Portland. (I thought, note to self. Get ride from my uncle with the subaru next time.)

 

BTW. We never made it home with that rig. We fixed the return spring in the next town, kept trucking and abandoned it at a truck stop with grease boiling out of the transmission.

 

A friend of mine had a cabin cruiser on the St Croix river. The fuel line plugged tight and the gas tank was in the front with the inboard engine in the rear. No way to get the gas to the engine. They had an LP grill to cook burgers on, so they unhooked the gas hose from the grill and held it in front of the carb. The motor ran good enough to get them back up river 5 miles to the dock.