whats the oddest old car problem you ever had?

whats the oddest old car problem you evr had? the really strange, down right goofy problems? The reason I ask is because my daily drivers speedo quit working. The needle wouldnt go above 20 mph,or,below 10 mph when I was stopped. It turned out that a spider had built its nest inside my guage pod while the car had some down time. The webbing had the needle all bound up!
soooo ,whats your story?
R.R.

 

This isn't really my story, but it's still pretty weird. A buddy of mine used to work in an automotive machine shop. He says a customer bought a non-running Ford pickup with a 390 in it and brought the entire motor in to be rebuilt. When he was taking it apart, he found a mouse nest in one of the cylinders.It was untouched and uninhabited, but still, think how small a space is left by an open valve. On the other side of the engine, they found the mice's winter stash of food, again piled into a cylinder. Evidently the mice ran back into the intake, found another open intake valve and used it for storage. Anyway, they rebuilt the motor, and the customer picked it up and they all had a good laugh. When the customer put the motor back in the truck, it fired up, but ran poorly. The exhaust sounded like it was plugged, so the owner revved the motor a bit and BLAM! out came a wad of mice. Apparently they'd gotten bored with the intake tract of the big-block Ford and moved on to explore the exhaust!

 

I had a POS Vega daily driver that would get hot and blow the coolant out only when the temperature got down to about 0 degrees. The car would warm up and drive fine in traffic but if I took it out on the highway...kablooey! Antifreeze all over the place. After going nuts over this intermittent problem for weeks, my favorite form of entertainment saved me. When sitting and staring at the hunk of **** with a cold one in-hand I started thinking about air flow. It dawned on me that the aluminum thermostat housing on that aluminum block was right on the front of the engine in the blast of cold air coming through the radiator. I wrapped an old tee shirt and duct taped it to the thermostat housing... problem gone! One would think that with all of the money GM dumps into R&D, they could have stumbled on to that one...Oh, wait a minute. I guess that was one of the MINOR problems with that car design!

 

Back in high school, I swapped a nearly new 389/4spd out of a 62 Pontiac into a 55 BA 2dr post. Went pretty well, sorted out engine/trans mounting problems, had a set of headers made. Fired it up - idled beautifully...revved it up...coughed and sputtered....took it for a ride...idled fine, but as soon as I jumped on it - ran horrible - spent a week trying to sort out what was wrong - my dad came out (not a mechanic, but a very thorough thinker)...leaned on the fender...traced some wires and hoses, reached over, pulled the vacuum advance hose off of the windshield squirter bottle, and put it to the distributor cannister where it belongs, and 'voila' - the stumbling problem was gone - in my haste (makes waste dontcha know) to get going, I just hadn't done a proper job of sorting out everything, and it appears that I was ****ing washer fluid into the engine everytime I gave it some gas. Guess the jar would have run dry eventually - although nobody ever reported any bubbles coming out the exhaust.

"never enough time to do it right, but always enough time to do it over"

dj

 

My 1965 chevrolet truck... had this freaky issue where the running lights would suddenly stop working... brake lights would come on fine. I kept finding 'issues' like shorts... here and there... qwirky previous owner wiring that came loose... a bad connection in the rear lights... I had problems everywhere. When I thought I had it under control... it started up not working again.

I traced it to behind the fuse panel... where it bolts into the firewall, under the dash. Some time in the past, one of the wires ont he running light circuit had been seriosuly over powered to the point of charring the insulation off... so it was a bare wire... that was corroded and sometimes it would connect, sometimes it would not. I replaced a section of it back there with the right gauge wire and I have not had any issues since.

It was fairly about to drive me nuts though trying to figure out why those dang lights would not stay on.



-W

 

my rear end would lock up on my 60 cadillac on the drivers side sometimes. just out of nowhere. id be driving and hit the brakes and the tire would lock up and i would drag my tire, smoke everywhere ect. id pull over and rut it in reverse and drive a bunch of times till it loosened up. after this happened a few times i found out my rear axle seal was bad and the fluid was getting onto everything, and it would make my brakes stick on for some reason.

 

I rewired a car and when I went to start it - the starter motor wouldn't STOP CRANKING!! Figuered I must have screwed up with my wiring so I rechecked every connection, every wire - all was "right" according to my hand drawn schematic. So then I figured I must have screwed up drawing out the schematic - checked and rechecked everything. NOTHING!! WTF - I was totally confused it should be fine! After hours under the dash with a meter I finally stumbld on the problem. Over the years the ignition switch had become carbon tracked bewteen two terminals (burnt into the bakelite). The carbon had enough resistance to prevent the starter solenoid from pulling in when the ignition switch was in the "off" position, but once the current was flowing it would KEEP FLOWING regardless of the switch position. I disecteds teh ignition switch - found the carbon burnt into the bakelite - s****ed it out - filled it back up with epoxy - been working great for about 12 years now.

 

I bought a '62 GT Hawk that had a 350 recently transplanted. The exhaust had a rattle when I got after the throttle. I had the muffler shop cut them off and replace them with new ones. We then shook the offending muffler and out popped a corroded long handle Stanley 1/2" combination end wrench. I don't know if the owner accidentally dropped it down the exhaust during ***embly or if one of his buddies played a trick on him. Anyway, it cost me about $180 for that wrench.

 

The gas gauge in a 67 Mustang I had a few years back worked fine- until you hit 57 mph!
Cruise below 57 and the gauge worked perfectly. Hit 57mph and the needle would slowly creep to empty. Cruise above 60 and the needle would come back up to the correct reading. I tried everything, sender, new gage, voltage limiter, alternator, voltage regulator - still the same problem. Finally I ran test leads from everything I could think of to a bunch of multimeters and took the car for a test drive. Turned out that the sender harness would press against the muffler, melt and short to ground at 57. Cruise above 57 and the airflow was different; the harness would move away from the muffler and the gauge would work fine. Cruise below 57 and either the muffler wasn’t hot enough to melt the insulation or the harness wasn’t pressing against the muffler. I secured the harness away form the muffler, put an extra wrap of electrical tape over the spot that had been pressing against the muffler, and never had the problem again.

Here’s another one that’s not really a problem but weird just the same. My daily driver is a 1986 F-250. During a light rain, at 60 mph, the radio antenna develops a second mode vibration. The darn thing bends like an “S” with a fixed node a third of the way down from the tip of the antenna! No rain, no second mode. I don’t know if Ford engineered them this way by design to keep the antenna from wagging like a dog’s tail or if it’s just a fluke, but either way, this a very rare thing to see in nature. The antennas do this in pretty much everything Ford made in the 80’s!

 

Funny you should say that. Was replacing the flexplate on our 3/4 ton Burb. I lost a big pair of nipper pliers. Figured they would turn-up eventually. Fast forward....Exhaust rattle, bad smell. Turns out they must have fallen off the bench and entered the crossover pipe while it was stored under the bench. Felt stupid.

Here's a better one. High school 30 years ago. Rusty '64 F85, 330 V8. Very quick. Runnin about 100 in the rain on "new" I 81 near Blountville, TN, p***ing a semi. Figured I'd better at least turn the lights on.

Pulled on the switch, saw the high beam indicator light and lost all power. Had happened before in high beam mode.

Quick pushed in the switch, now just behind the truck, and it restarted.

Huge (to me) explosion, I see exhaust parts in the rearview.

A few seconds later, on the CB, I hear "woosh, what was THAT"!

Dad says a few days later, whats wrong with that olds? I just had the muffler replaced last month.

 

Friend of mine bought a 72 Olds 442 with 4 speed from some hillbillies. It had a bad driveline vibration that would come and go.

Turned out the hillbillies replaced the original engine with one out of an an automatic car. The crankshaft is not drilled for the pilot bearing on an automatic car so the input shaft would not fit the crankshaft. So they torched the end off the input shaft and shoved it together.

That's not the craziest repair I ever saw but it's up there.

 

Here's a couple:

I had a 68 Chevelle with a pretty serious small block in it back around 1975 and it had a problem that I never did figure out.When it rained out and you turned on the wipers to either low or high speed,several things would happen simultaneously:The speed would be somewhere in between slow and fast,the instrument lights(if they were on)would go out,the fuel gauge would go to empty,and both directional indicators and the high beam indicator would glow faintly.Then things really got crazy:

When you attempted to turn them off,several different events would occur:the wipers would not park but rather seem to be fed current through the 4 way flasher circuit moving about two or three inches up and down,the instrument lights,high beam and directional indicators would flash on and off and the fuel gauge would move up and down.The only way to stop this sequence was to turn off the ignition(not practical when you're driving on a wet freeway).When you restarted the car everything would operate normally unless you turned on the wipers again.

The consensus was there was either a bad ground somewhere or a wire was shorting.I put separate grounds to everything I could think of and pulled the main wiring harness plug tracing everything back.Still didn't solve the problem.

My cousin who was something of wiring expert took a look at it one day while it was doing it's thing and told me I could do one of three things:

Bring it to him and pay him by the hour to trace the problem;live with it;or sell the car to some other unsuspecting fool.Luckily I didn't have to make the decision as shortly afterward I tore the side of the car off on a concrete light pole base while screwing around in a parking lot.

Another one was on a brand new Mercedes Benz 450SL roadster that we sold at our dealership:

At the time our shop foreman was a pretty savvy diagnostician and this one had him completely baffled.What would happen is when the car got up to about 35 mph or so the windshield wipers would come on.Slow down below 35 and they stopped.Simple right?

Our service manager was a former M-B service rep and a serious gearhead to boot.VERY sharp. He listened to Peter describe the problem and then went out to look at it.He bent over the engine compartment to look around and asked Peter to get him a wrench.

When Peter came back Matt said,"Never mind;I don't need it now,it's fixed". About that time Peter is asking him what was the problem. Matt;being somewhat of a ball buster refused to tell him.Needless to say Peter isn't exactly happy as he put several hours into trying to find the problem and here Matt fixes it in less than a minute!

At the end of the day Matt finally tells him: The problem was that on the SL's,the windshield washer tank is located in the left front of the engine compartment right next to the radiator.The washer pump has a two pin plug on it and in the same harness is the wiring for the auxiliary fan which also has an identical two pin plug on it.

What was happening was the two plugs had been crossed at the factory apparently and when the car was driven the auxiliary fan was,"windmilling" and at 35 mph or so was acting as a generator and creating enough current to fire off the washer pump which when activated also turned on the windshield wipers.

Matt figured it out when he turned on the windshield wipers and heard the auxiliary fan start up.

 

A girlfriend of mine inherited on old Plymouth Valiant from the grandparents back in high school. It ran pretty well on an old straight six and single bbl carb, but after a while it started stalling. Strange part was, it only stalled when turning left. Never gonna win any stock car races that way! In the end, it turned out that the fuel bowl on this little carb had a hole corroded in the side that it shared with the main venturi. Turn left and a big slosh of fuel would get tossed in and stall the engine. A little bit of epoxy later, it was all set, and she quit having to turn right 3 times to go left.

 

those are really funny ,what else have you seen thats along the same lines?
R.R.

 

that reminds me of something that happened to a buddy. he had an 80's camaro and outfitted it with one of those ugly *** antennas with the bowtie about 2/3 of the way down. driving through a light rain, it started vibrating and then swinging back and forth harder and harder...then it broke off right below the chevy emblem and cracked his windshield BAD, right in the middle of the driver's side. he'd only had the car for 3 days!!

 

My first vehicle was a '75 GMC Sierra Cl***ic pickup that had headers and dual gl***packs on it when we bought it from my uncle. The truck always had a little rattle from the drivers side of the motor at an RPM just above idle, but it went away as you accelerated... just a minor nuisance. When the headers and flanges finally started rusting and leaking 3-4 years later, I pulled them off and replaced them with some stock manifolds a buddy had lying around. When I pulled off the driver's side header, I found the cause of the rattle...

... a spark plug stuck down in the collector! No idea how it got there.

 

I had a mid 70' moter home with a mopar 440 I bought used. For the first two years fan belts would last 500 miles on a average. changed everything in front of the engine twice in those two years and still no cure. the third spring we took the thing out of storage and started camping. hauling along our box of extra belts. never used a belt in the next two years. Napa probally still has lots of belts in stock waiting for me to pick up, along with the box of belts in my shop that I never needed.

never did find the problem

 

I have a friend with a beater Dodge omni with exactly the same problem. He's gotten really good at slamming it into neutral and reving the engine just before a left corner to keep it running through the turn, then he drops it back into drive and away he goes. Oddly his girlfriend won't drive the car...

I had a '78 Nova with a mystery brake problem. From the day I bought the car the brakes felt spongy. The 2nd day I bought it I repalced a bad rear hardline, but that didn't help. In the time I had the car I changed the front calipers, front rubber lines, rear wheel cylinders, shoes, adjusters, hardware and drums. Rear rubber line, master cylinder (twice), and proportioning valve. Still never worked right, I ended up junking the car without ever once having the brakes work right for more than a day or two.

 

First car I ever owned was a 66 Caprice 2 dr hdtp with a 396, buckets, console, etc. Whenever I turned on the left turn signal, all five interior courtesy lights would flash with the signal. Turned out previous owner had installed a tape deck, then removed it before selling the car, and had some wires spliced here and there and connected the turn signal harness to the interior light feed wire.

 

Had a 55 chev pickup with a 327 in it, going to town one day on the freeway and lost all power and saw smoke coming out from under the hood. I got it coasted to the side and popped the hood in time to see both battery cables melting in half, Turned out to be a short in the starter that resurged thru the system. Cost me a starter, Battery, two cables, alternator, and an ignition wire to the switch.

 

I have two. First goes way back. Bought a M38-A1(thats a jeep) from a guy for $800. Rebuilt the motor, cleaned up everthing else, spent about $1500 more on it. Thing kept blowing up rear ends. after the third rebuild (at about $600 each time. my dad talked me into selling it to one of his co-workers for $1000, damn guy even asked to make payments... I loved this thing, but dear ol dad pretty much made me sell it. So, away it goes. Turns out that there was one metric tire on the rear, same brand, same markings, just a 2something instead of a 31. The difference in cir***ferance was enough that after a few hundered miles the spider gears would have enough, and.... POW!
Sure miss the old heap.


#2 This ghost still lives. Put a 472 cad motor in my 52 caddy. At first I had a Holley 750 Dbl pump no choke. I took it off because sometimes, when I would give it light gas, say accellerating from a stop sign when in traffic, or to get into a driveway, it would go wide open, and take off like a bat outa hell, for about a second and then mellow out. Really cool, unless I'm behind someone, or trying to drop the kid off at school. I'd stomp on the brakes and it would just burn out, 'til the mellow out part. This got really old, really fast. I buoght an Edelbrock 750 off a friend and swapped out carbs.Damn thing still does it, just not as agressively as with the Holley. I've checked everthing, but have'nt solved the problem. All I can do is leave extra room between my bumper, and the one in front of me. I just wish I could figure out how to make it do it on command, 'cause it's faster on "the ghost" than it is when I floor it. Crazy part is feeling the gas pedal pull itself to the floor, and then return like nothing happened! F'N dead old lady that owned it before me, is having fun with me, at least that's what I think.

 

I was bleeding the brakes on my VW bug. For hours. All cylinders and lines were new. I could not get the fluid to the rear wheels using the buddy system. Finally traced it down to a ball-bearing lodged in the brand-new suction lines to the brake fluid reservoir. The guys at the parts house that sold me the hoses are probably still laughing..... ****s!

 

a buddy called me one day and asked if i would checkout his 53 olds work car it had a miss in one cylinder. It had spark, and gas, it ran pretty good but still had a definite miss. Finally we decided to pull the cylinder head. everything looked ok valves looked good, valve train was ok, then I asked him to hit the starter ****on, and then saw the problem, that piston didnt move, all the rest were pumping up and down! it had broke a rod!! then he told me that it made a noise once wen he was goin to work last week!

 

I had a '68 Mopar convertible with a power top. When I tried to lift the top the motor would run for what seems like forever before the top slowly moved and then became normal. The reservoir was full and I could not see how any air could get in the lines. The motor speed was nice and steady, and I could not figure out how to get liquid (non-compressible fluid) to behave like a pneumatic cylinder.

Out on a date with a new girl I hit the power top. A little stream of Hydraulic fluid started to spray from the back seat. Keep the girl cold with the top down for the trip home. Next morning I looked for the little stream of fluid while a buddy hit the switch. Somebody who owned the car before put some super elastic hose in the stainless line. I watched as the hose turned into a balloon, then just as it looked like it would pop, the top began to move and the balloon went away.

Never saw the girl again.

 

I borrowed my sister-in-law's car on a trip to the states a few years back (tiny Ford hatchback, Festiva maybe?). It was a total POS, but it ran ok. She got T-boned on the p***enger side a few months previous, and my brother put a new door on it. The shell wasn't twisted, the junkyard door was straight and a perfect fit, but every time you wound the window down, the door popped open. That's annoying enough, but the car had power door-mounted seatbelts, so as the door opened the belt would move forward at the same time (while you're stuggling with the window winder). We never did find the cause, because the car died a death when it spat a drivshaft out the side of the ****** case.

 

in high school i had a 64 tbird. i got the 390 so hot one time i couldn't get it to stop running it sounded dead but then it'd roll over againfor 20 minutes or so. and it was while i was parking far a school dance (ultra embar***ing) i just left it and went inside to find some girls. i think now though i'd rather work the car than the girls

 

#2 This ghost still lives. Put a 472 cad motor in my 52 caddy. At first I had a Holley 750 Dbl pump no choke. I took it off because sometimes, when I would give it light gas, say accellerating from a stop sign when in traffic, or to get into a driveway, it would go wide open, and take off like a bat outa hell, for about a second and then mellow out. Really cool, unless I'm behind someone, or trying to drop the kid off at school. I'd stomp on the brakes and it would just burn out, 'til the mellow out part. This got really old, really fast. I buoght an Edelbrock 750 off a friend and swapped out carbs.Damn thing still does it, just not as agressively as with the Holley. I've checked everthing, but have'nt solved the problem. All I can do is leave extra room between my bumper, and the one in front of me. I just wish I could figure out how to make it do it on command, 'cause it's faster on "the ghost" than it is when I floor it. Crazy part is feeling the gas pedal pull itself to the floor, and then return like nothing happened! F'N dead old lady that owned it before me, is having fun with me, at least that's what I think.[/QUOTE]
Sounds like you have a broken motor mount, when the engine torques to the side it pulls the carb linkage open. Check the drivers side mount, I've seen it many times with this symptom. Brian

 

I had an early Scout that a po had mixed parts from the small and large slant 4. I think the 192 head on the 156. So I decided I could fix the huge vacuum leak by welding onto the bottom of the intake. When I bolted it back together and poured in the antifreeze, it started running out the tailpipe. turns out the 2 different engines use the center port for different things and I had thrown away a "propane" gasket with the center blocked off.

 

Demonic possession in a 53 Chevy I would start the car it would purr like a kitten I would drive it anywhere with no problems. if my wife walked by it or even got around it it would start missing and spitting and sputtering. The car hated her. Found it it was cheaper to get rid of the car.. Kept the wife...

 

Lizards. A whole family of them took up residence in an engine I had rebuilt and was storing. Some of the liitle SOB's died in oil p***ages. Had to dis***emble and clean the whole thing.