Back in 1963, I was driving on a mountain highway on a dark winter night, and while rounding a corner, I ran over a lot of big rocks on the road from a recent rock slide. One of the rocks, punched a gash in the bottom of the aluminum oil pan. After hitch hiking a ride to Princeton to get a wrecker to haul the car into the shop, we ended up jamming a heavy rag into the crack and re-filling the engine with oil. It leaked a little, but at least the car was drivable the 90 miles to where I could get the pan removed and welded. I had no tools, so I got my uncle to remove the pan and weld it with an acetylene torch. It looked like new when he was finished. That was the second time I was caught in the middle of a rock slide on the same highway. The first time, I thought I was going to die and nobody would ever find me. I was climbing a long hill east of Hope BC in the daytime, and in an area where a disastrous slide happened two years later, I heard an ungodly noise. I looked up to the left to see what seemed to be half the mountain coming down toward me. There was no time to turn around, and the only thing I could do, was put my foot down and accelerate as much as possible in an attempt to get past the slide. The rocks and debris came down so quickly, that I was caught in the middle, with large rocks bouncing all around me. I ended up driving over, and bottoming out on a bunch of rocks on the road, but I wasn't slowing for anything, and just kept going. For the life of me, I don't know how was able to escape with only minor damage to the body and the frame. Two years later, when that part of the mountain came down in another slide, it left 140 ft of material on the road and took 4 lives. There was so much material, that the road had to be re-built over the debris. Bob
Had to get a car through inspection so built a muffler bracket out of a coat hanger. The inspector passed the car and commented that I must be an engineer
My dad used those big juice cans, they would wrap around and overlap enough so he could braze them in place. The only one I can think of I did myself was when my o/t dd stripped the end of the speedometer cable. The cable had seized for some reason, causing the square end that went into a plastic gear in the trans to turn a round hole into a square one. Anyhow, a bunch of WD 40 got the cable unseized, then I cut a tiny piece of tin can lid and shoved it into the plastic gear to make the hole kinda square again, then put the cable back in. It was still working when I got rid of it.