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

Midnite in my 18 wheeler, 60 miles from home, 20 miles to any small town and something happened to my throttle, wouldnt go over 30. So I went 30 to the little town, pulled over and found that the aluminum hinge of the throttle pedal had rotten off of the floor. Got a coat hanger, wired the gas pedal to the drivers seat, It got me home

One nite headed for Paris Texas when my alternator quit working in my 39 Ford pickup. I had my sons jeep on the trailer so I turned on the Jeep headlights, Made it to Paris

 

When I was 17 I snapped the rear u-joint in my 4WD truck. I coasted to the side of the road and inspected the damage. Broke the joint and snapped the yoke. Luckily I had a spool of wire in the truck, I took a really long section, twisted it together, and made a cradle between the frame rails for the driveshaft to rest on. Put her in 4 high and drove basically front wheel drive all the way home, with the rear shaft just spinning right along in it's cradle.


Posted using the Full Custom H.A.M.B. App!

 

My dad bought his '64 Cadillac out of a guy's driveway a couple years ago. This is the fuel system that was in-place when he got it. Just enough gas to get to the beer store!

That is a cheapo electric pump under all that duct tape. He didn't bother removing the Holley Red when it died.

Sheesh...

 

----------
I worked with a guy back in early
1980's who did the same thing. He
had a '70's-somthing Ford F-150 $X4
The pinion bearing was going out
of the the rearend, so he disconnected
the driveshaft, wired it up with
some baling wire, locked the front
hubs and drove the thing in FWD-High
like that for about 3 months until he
got finally around to replacing the
rear pumpkin with another one!

Mart3406
============

 

Love the gas can fuel supply!!!

 

I was studying in Hanover in the early nineties, driving a 71 VW bug convertible as daily (and only) driver. One morning i had to drive to the university for an important written examination (it was about 18 kilometres through rush hour city streets with lots of traffic lights) when at the first red light the throttle cable snapped and the car sat nicely in idle at the green light. unfortunately i had no tools in the car and no time to organize something as i had to be there in time for the examination. Fortunately i had an old stunt kite in the trunk, so i knotted the end of one of the kite lines to the throttle lever on the carb and routed it through the ventilation slits in the engine lid forward on the left side through the drivers side window. It took about 3 minutes and i was able to operate the throttle with my left hand by the kite line coming in over my left shoulder. Thus i made it in time to the university and also could drivee home again in the afternoon, even though it was a bit of a challenge to steer, shift and operate the throttle in rush hour city traffic with only two hands...

 

About six years ago, I bought a very nice '74 Valiant 4-door from an auction. Powered by the infamous slant six, automatic, decent black paint, very nice interior, overall a perfect daily driver. They did not start it up at the auction, which they usually do at this auction, but for whatever reason they were not able to with this car. Nobody else seemed to bid on it, maybe one guy, and he quit after one or two bids, so amazingly I got it for a grand total including all fees of $234. I should mention that I had a used car dealer's license at the time, so I did not have to pay tax and title fees. Anyway, I jump started it, and it started right up. However, it was oil smoking pretty good out the tailpipe. So I drove it out of the auction lot, and parked it on a side street nearby, and picked it up later that night. I put some Bardahl No-smoke in the engine before I drove it away, which greatly reduced the oil smoke. Made it to my car lot about 15 miles away with no problem, although the oil light did occasionally flicker.

The next day, I checked the compression, and found all cylinders to be good, except for one, which had 2 psi. Basically nothing. I forgot which cylinder it was. I assumed that it was likely that the piston had a hole in it, so I took steps to disable the cylinder as best as I could. I set the valve lash to something like .040-.050 in., attempting to reduce valve operation. Then I took the plug wire off that cylinder, attached another plug to the wire, and tied the plug to the valve cover wiring harness clamp, grounding it. This was so that when that cylinder was supposed to fire, the ignition energy would have somewhere to go. All this helped to reduce the oil smoking even further, to the point where I now felt comfortable driving the car places. Now I was not using the car as a daily driver, but I did drive it to the store and other places not more than 10 miles or so from home a few times. So my slant six was now a slant five. Accelerating from a stop, there was a certain RPM range at the low end where there would be quite serious vibration, enough to shake the whole car moderately, but it was only momentary, and at cruising speeds it was quite smooth. In fact it even had adequate acceleration to keep up with normal traffic. Oh, I forgot to mention that it even had operational AC! Not cooling that well, but it was not bad.

So I was having fun driving around my nice $234 slant five Valiant for a little while, but the fun stopped way earlier than I expected. It was in the middle of summer, and I was on my way back from Walmart, having gone grocery shopping. I had always driven the car gently, being careful not to give it too much throttle when accelerating. But I guess I may have gotten too comfortable with the way the car was running, and about 4 miles from my house, after turning onto the main road that leads home, I felt like giving it more throttle, to see what it had. The transmission kicked down, the engine revved up higher than usual, and then all of a sudden, I heard a loud clattering, and a few seconds later, the engine locked up and died. I rolled to a stop in a left turn box, and tried to restart it, but nope, it was definitely locked up. Oh no .

I had to call my father, and he pushed me home with another car and a tire on the back bumper. I'm too embarrassed to say what kind of car it was. How many times have you heard the saying about slant sixes, "you can't kill them"? Well, I guess I'm one of the very few that managed to. Soon afterwards, after pulling the head, I found that the piston in that dead cylinder had disintegrated, and had cracked most of the length of the cylinder wall on the thrust side. To make the story even worse, I had to get rid of the car a few months later, as believe it or not, I could not find a pre '77 forged crank slant six anywhere, and I no longer had the room to keep it . It was such a perfect daily driver, I wish I still had it. However, I do still have the engine . I'm not the kind of guy who throws things away, and I think the cracked cylinder is repairable. I plan on building a killer turbocharged or supercharged engine out of it someday.

 

My friend Harry and I took a trip to Los Angeles in the Spring of 1969. After about eight months of low pay/high effort jobs, we gave up and headed home. I was in my '66 Econoline, and he'd bought a 6 cylinder '57 Ford F100. Somewhere in Arizona, his water pump started leaking. We limped into some small town, found a parts store with a water pump, and promptly found that one bolt hole in the block had no threads. The bolt was just stuck in the hole and had lasted for months of daily driving. We replaced the water pump, dumped in a can of block sealer, held the bolt in the hole with a hammer handle, and ran the engine until the block sealer stopped the leak. We shut the engine off and spent the night in the van. It was December so we left the radiator cap loose, and drove two thousand miles back to Cincinnati without incident.

 

My parents returned from a motorhome trip to canada, proudly telling the story of how their fuel pump died out in the middle of absolute nowhere, and they made it many many miles back to town by pulling the engine cover (between the front seats) and using a coffee can full of gas to continually dribble into the carb and keep it running.
Man, they were proud of their effort.
I said, yeah, brilliant - until a backfire lights off the can of gas you were holding.
The look on mom's face was priceless.

 

Racing at the old track in Vegas and on the way home there was this beater Ford pinto off to the side with the hood up. We stoped and the dude said it ran out of oil. We were carrying back our used oil so we filled him up with our leftovers and went on our way. We were heading up the grade and here comes this POS Pinto just flying by us. You think there was a little NITRO mixed in with the oil?

Another trip the radiator core sprung a leak. We cut the offending tubes and folded them over to crimp them. Without any water with us (years ago when bottled water wasnt around) we empteid the small cooler of its beer, the sodas we had been sipping on, a gallon of thinner that was in back and we made it on home. Took the radiator out to be repaired and when we picked it back up the shop owner ask us how we got the inside of the radiator so clean?

 

A bunch of years ago, I bought an off-topic SBF V8-powered '71 Pinto on-line, more or less sight-unseen from a guy in Portland Oregon. I took a Greyhound bus, one way to pick the car up, with plans to drive it the approximately 3000 miles back home from the west coast to Kitchener Ontario. When I arrived to get the car it was pretty much as advertised - decent rust-free body, a fairly radical, over-cammed and otherwise, 'built to the tits' 302 small block Ford v8, T5 -five speed tranny, 3.73-geared 8 inch Maverick rearend and disk brakes, 5 lug hubs and 15-inch Dodge cop car wheels with 205-50 X 15 tires all aroind.. Definitely home-built, on a budget. with a lot of cast off and scrounged parts, but not too shabby and the price was right. One problem the car had was the carburetor - a pretty much worn out 700 CFM Holley double-pumper, that was leaking fuel, surging and running way to rich. If you kept the revs up, the carb wasn't too bad, but below 3000 rpm it was so rich that there was black smoke and raw fuel coming out of the tailpipes.and I had a 3000-plus mile drive ahead of me. After a couple hundred miles of driving,and achieving a best of about 5 or 6 mpg eek due to the screwed up carb, I decided I had to do something or I'd never make it the rest of way back home. I stopped in a small town somewhere in Idaho and found a shop that would allegedly "rebuild" the carb . A 150 bucks later, I was back on the road again, the car still a bit too rich but running a lot better. Fuel mileage had increased from an abysmal 5 or 6 mpg to a merely semi-absymal 10 or 11 mpg anyway! All was well for about a day or so until, after a coffee stop somewhere in Montana, I was pulling back on to the Interstate. Coming down the on ramp, the highway ahead of me was clear and I decided to nail it (just to "clean 'er out" and "dust the plugs off", don't cha' know! ) By the end of the ramp, I was at 6500 rpm, at about 100 mph and just about to nail 4th gear, when the throttle stuck and jammed wide 'effing open!. For about 5 or 6 seconds, all hell broke loose and my life flashed before eyes until I got the car under control again by turning the key off and coasting to a stop on the shoulder of the Interstate . I got out see what had happened and when I took the air cleaner off, I found that both of the carb's secondary booster venturiies had shaken loose, fallen completely out and had wedged themselves against the throttle plates, jamming them open. Being in the middle of nowhere and not knowing what else to do, I gingerly removed the the booster venturies. and restarted the engine. Surprisingly, it ran OK without the secondary booster venturies and the fuel simply dribbling out of the holes in the carb body where the venturies had been. Apparently when I had carb (allegedly) "rebuilt" at the stop back in Idaho, the guy had somehow disturbed the venturies, loosening them and then had failed to properly re-swage them in place. A few hundred miles of driving had shaken them loose and when I nailed it coming down the on-ramp, they fell completely out. Not having the money to have the carb "rebuilt" again or to just buy another one even , I stopped at a Wal-Mart and bought a tube of "JB Weld", tore the carb apart in the parking lot and "JB-Welded" the venturies back in place. (I tried disconnecting the link to the secondary side of the carb too but (*don't try this at home kids!*) found that without the link in place, that the secondary throttle plates would get sucked and then stay, wide-open, all on their own - even when you backed off and closed the throttle) I made it rest of the remaining 2000 miles or so, back home with the 'JB-welded' secondary venturies, and the car running at least reasonably well. But I took care, to try as much as possible, not to open the secondaries up for the rest of trip...not an easy task with a mechanical secondary carb!

Mart3406
==============

 

Grandma has told me a couple stories of great grandpa's (picuted) ingenuity in a pinch in the 30s and 40s.

When the '32 Chevy had a dead battery, he wrapped a rope around the generator pulley and made the kids run through around the yard pulling the rope, so as to charge the battery enough to start.

 

I traveled through Australia (25 yeaqrs ago).
I was working with My Buddy's Dad at their ranch outside Lameroo for a couple of weeks.
We took his truck down to their south ranch (~8 hour drive) driving mostly on dirt roads...
After taking care of the sheeps we loaded a huge combine on this 40's something truck.
I didn't know the tie rod ends was toast...on the way down.
He had a bunch of electrical wire wrapped around each tie rod so they wouldnt fall out.

With Gasser stance...huge combine in the back...(probably helped taking some weight of the front)..we were doing 50+ on dirt roads, all night.

Maybe he's still hauling around with the same setup?

T

 

Still working my way through the thread. Anyone come up with pepper in the radiator to heal holes including freeze plugs yet?

 

I broke a tie rod end.... So I used a coat hanger and some duct tape to save the tow bill.... I had it up to 35 mph and then she shook..... Violantly LoL but

 

When was 18 (a long, long time ago), I had a '68 VW bug that I was driving. I was planning to drive it from NC where I lived at the time to Miami, FL after graduation to go on a cruise with a group from my graduating class. I had been saving beer money for months for that trip and was all ready to go - then, 2 days before D-day my bug dropped a valve on #3 going 65 down the highway. It was a total catastrophy. The engine was completely destroyed by the time I figured out what happened and got it shut down. I was totally bummed. Luckily I was working for a good guy that had a VW speed shop at the time and he let me have free run of his usable parts dumpster. So I scrounged up enough used (discarded) parts to put another engine together. I used all mixed-matched junk - pistons, rings, everything was just mixed. At the time a gasket set for a VW was $5...lol. So I bought a gasket set and that was it. The block that I had to use was badly worn in the crank journal (common on air cooled VWs) and I couldn't afford the machine work and the oversized bearings - SO - I made shims out of beer cans for the standard bearing inserts and put it together like that. LMFAO!! I drove that car to Miami and back and it used 31 quarts of oil. LMFAO!! But I made it!! We had to stop every 100 miles and swap out the plugs because they would get fouled and it would start missing. I carried 3 sets with me. My passenger would clean them as we rode down the road.

 

Another Great Grandpa story: When the old '32 Chevy vacuum tank (fuel pump) quit working, he put one of the kids on the rear bumper with a tire pump fitted in the fuel filler to pressurize the fuel tank and get the car to town. And yes, she did get sprayed with gasoline. She is the one holding the watermelon in this photo.

 

I don't want this great thread to veer into left field, but this is only one example of so many good Country Western Song First Lines I see on many threads on the HAMB.....
There are many accidental poets on here.

 

The same Story With my 98 F150

 

My last Great Grandpa story: They had to have a car, because they lived way out in the country and had to have a way to get to church (how priorities have changed). When the roads were muddy, it took a team of horses to get the car unstuck. Not exactly a renaissance man, Great Grandpa didn't believe that girls had any need for education. That included learning how to drive a car, until the one day he had to drive the team of horses, and there was no male around to drive the stuck '32 Chevy. That was the day my Grandma (the dark-haired girl in the front left) was taught how to make the car go. Great Grandpa didn't bother to tell her how to make the car stop once it go going out of the ditch. The horsed had to run for their lives and Great Grandpa almost got what he deserved.

 

My daily needed a part ordered up to fix it, so I had to drive my '93 GMC 1-ton work truck the last few days.

Now that truck is a great truck, it would pull a house off the foundation, but I got it cheap because it's majorly rusted. Both front fender wheel arches, and any attachment to the inner fender are long gone. So when the right front bottom inner fender also rotted through, the battery tried to fall out and it's weight pushed the inner fender onto the tire.

I didn't have time to rip that all apart to change it - I suspect if I'm not careful it will turn into replacing the radiator support and the other side fender as well. Then I noticed the battery has a handle on it.

So I grabbed a firring strip I used to use as a sign at the swap meets, stuck it between the bed and cab and broke it off the right length, and shoved it through the handle and across the air inlet and onto the overflow tank, with the front of it on the radiator support. Presto, battery supported, no more tire rub. Been that way all weekend.

 

Great stories guys, funny, cafty and scarey lol

 

My buddy and I were heading back to Maine from the Nat’s East in York, Pa. a few years back. Just south of Hartford, Conn., I looked back and saw nothing but smoke rolling out of his car, big time. I pulled over and he followed. Evidently he hit this big chunk of metal lying in the road, his 48 Mercedes was real low to the ground, and it was a direct hit to the oil pan of his 302 Ford motor. He lost all of his oil. We called AAA, and to make a long story short, after 4 hours they refused to haul his car. They said it was too nice and too low. Even his supervisor drove out and said no. There we were, hole in the oil pan and no oil in the motor. Then we had a brain fart, and went up over the banking to a CVS drug store. We bought some 2 tube epoxy, oil, alcohol, and bug spray (mosquitoes). While at the show my buddy bought some insulation for a car he was building, with the insulation he got some metal tape that they said would stick to anything. Well we were going to put it to the test. We cleaned the pan with the rubbing alcohol, took a quarter stuck it on a piece of the metal tape, put epoxy around the quarter and stuck it over the hole in the pan. Filled the engine with 5 quarts of oil, and headed home. It worked, 3-1/2 hours later we were home safe and sound. In fact a month later he had to grind the fix off the pan. He bitched to AAA, in fact got a response from the president, and he said they have no control over the independent wrecker companies.

 

just saw on the news here a guy got pulled up by the cops driving down the freeway using vicegrips instead of a steering wheel

 

I'm prettty sure that's "too much information". Besides, it sounds like you're just trying to make the Kiwis jealous!

Accidental Poets. That's a John Prine song title if I ever heard one.

 

Threaded plug on top of a SBC inlet manifold lets go and leaks, found an old garden tap with the same thread, installed it (with the handle turned off), it looked a treat hovering over the water pump.
Looked like you could get hot water from it when you wanted a coffee.

 

This stuff is great

 

I,m sure I've seen him out there, except he has replaced the insulation tape with the much-safer cable ties.

 

In western Montana in November '66 ,my younger brother and I were coming home from school ( a 31 mile trip) , the wipers quit on my 49 Ford Deluxe four door. Digging in the trunk we found some bailing twine, strung it from one wiper to the other and around and in trough the wing vents, Little brother working the wipers we made the last 10 miles home.

 

I went to pick up my date and blew a hole in the exhaust pipe on my '56 Chevy as I was driving down her road. I pulled in the driveway and I knew my date's mother wasn't thrilled with this yahoo with a crappy looking, noisy car was going to take out her daughter for the evening. My date grabbed a #10 can, some a pair of tin snips and some bailing wire. We cut the can to fit around the exhaust pipe and wired it on. It wasn't perfect, but it held for a couple of weeks until I could afford to buy a replacement.

I knew right then that this resourceful farm girl would be my wife someday. That was back in 1962 and we've been happily married for the last 48-years and she's as much in to old cars as I am.