Improvised repairs?

Today I was taking my OT car ('76 Mini) on the Vancouver - Whistler All British Run, when I got to the starting point the throttle cable snapped, so I hooked up the choke cable to the throttle and drove it the 16-17km home.

I'm sure there are a lot of you with interesting stories of repairs on the go, lets hear them!

 

once had a brake pipe snap on a morris minor while coming down hill towards a main road , got it stopped just in time and clamped the rear flexi brake pipe till i got home lol

 

Several years ago I was cutting wood with my FIL's 72 f250.
40 miles from town the voltage regulator broke, burning every bulb and fusing the points together.
I did have some tools, so I pulled the points and filed them with a flat rock.
Set the gap with a book of matches and made it 60 miles back home

 

also had to lash a front ball joint back in place on a pos renault to get it the last half mile to the garage at about 10 mph

 

Was in my OT Trans Am, punched it too hard and bent to tab on the throttle cable bracket where it bolted to the intake, causing the bracket to rotate, and giving me 1/4 throttle with the pedal floored. Spaced the bracket away from the carb base with my lucky poker chip...

Same car, driving from Laramie, Wy to Ft. Collins, CO, and hit some road kill breaking off the air dam and causing it to overheat 30 miles from any town. Built a new dam from bits of the old one, cardboard, duct tape and zip ties, ended up driving around with that for a couple more months until I could find a replacment..

 

Had a fan belt break on 57 Chevy 235 six 5 miles from home back in 1965 ,2 oclock in the morning,no one around so I used the top band of my trusty Fruit-of-the Looms to get me home.Generator light didn"t come on til I pulled in the yard and no overheating either.

 

Shoe laces routed out the window to replace O/T throttle cable broken on a bridge - chilly left hand but.... also 4P nail from gutter to replace cotter pin on 70's F100 right front wheel that told me axle nut was trying to leave - lucky I understood at slow speed wobble

 

This spring, I drove the Suburban almost 200 miles without a fuel pump. Enough vacuum will pull fuel through the lines without a pump. It'll run lean, but it'll run.
For the last 90 miles (when I was in Charlotte, NC traffic) I zip-tied the choke closed so it was ****ing through just the primaries.
Live was great until I hit an 11 mile parking lot just north of the Georgia line. Thinking it might also be a weak spark, some HAMBers showed up with some ignition parts, but we ended up parking the truck in a lot overnight until I could get back with a fuel pump two days later.

I've also found that key rings make dandy cotter pins to put shifter and throttle cable linkage back together.

Tach-welded the wrong U-joint cups to a driveshaft to get a Targa Newfoundland race car back in the race. Also stole pushrods out of an abandoned Ford Truck, with hurricane rains coming sideways, to replace a bunch of bent pushrods on the same racecar. That was a week of one fix after the other, but we finished the race.

Had something come through the grill on the Suburban and take out two tubes in the radiator. Pinched them off with my Multi-tool (The Redneck Express Card--don't leave home without it), until I could get the last 20 miles to Lamar Walden's shop in Doraville. Waited for the truck to cool down, squeezed the tubes tighter with a needle-nose vise grip, spackeled them pretty heavily with JB weld, put two gallons of water back in the radiator (it was raining on the way there, helping keep the engine temp down), and drove the truck 45 miles back home.
And continued driving it for two more weeks, including the 90-mile round trip back to Lamar's twice, until I finally swapped in the replacement radiator.

Wounded the head gasket on a Slant 6 Duster in the desert, driving it from California to Georgia two or three years ago. But it was a Slant Six, so I said "**** it" and just kept driving. No water in the oil, but there was a little oil in the radiator. I made it home. You really can't kill a Slant 6.
-Brad