Until now, Wrenching Wednesday has been a Members-only deal (not to be confused with Members Only, which is a different kind of cool). But great news: With the introduction of Only Fanbelts, Wrenching Wednesday is free for everyone!
This means that every Wednesday we’ll be talking about wrenching right here in the comments of The Autopian, and today’s topic — thought of by our very own Jason Torchinsky – is one near and dear to my heart. It’s about janky repair jobs, and as some of you might know: I’m the king of that ish.
If you don’t believe me, check out how I “repaired” the failed fuel pump on this 1958 Willys FC-170:
That’s right: A wooden pole shoved into the bedside, a strangely round jerry can tied to it via a J-bolt and some 550 cord, and a rubber hose. Absurd, but it worked!
On the way home from the zoo, the Yugo decided that trouble-free operation felt too weird so the shift linkage vanished. I bodged up a fix with 2 hose clamps and a rock and we made it home. pic.twitter.com/25PWyfq4fn
— Jason Torchinsky (@JasonTorchinsky) November 27, 2021
We can’t forget about the time Jason fixed his Yugo shift linkage with a literal rock! That led to this clever Tweet by Peter — a tweet that ultimately led The Autopian to hire this brilliant now-Managing-Editor:
And don’t forget when Jason used a pen and garden hose for his throttle cable linkage:
And does Jason chainsawing a battery count as a janky fix? (Or a fix at all?).
Then there’s Peter, whose latest bodge happened when his mower’s carburetor-opening cable broke. As Pete noted, it’s not really a throttle cable, as it just holds the carb wide open – which allowed for a very simple fix. “I just cut it down and used a Vice Grip to do the job the cable housing had been performing.”
Nice and janky, there.
I have about 9,000 other examples of janky fixes, but none is as fun as the jerry can-on-a-stick. So tell us: What was your own most ridiculous repair that actually, somehow, worked?Â
another to mention because I forgot about it:
at the start of the summer a friend of mine picked up a 40k mile ninja 650 and has decided to ride the snot out of the thing, resulting in him putting around 12k more miles on it than it had when he got it at the time of this story. about a month ago we decided to go trail riding on our street bikes (my katana and his ninja) (we make good decisions sometimes I swear). About 10 miles up the trail, he hits a rock a little hard and cracks the block on his ninja. in order to get it down the mountain and into town, we used his belt, a sock, and the plastic from some snacks we brought. getting it down the mountain, we beelined it for a hardware store and grabbed some jb weld. we jb welded that crack in the block there in the parking lot, grabbed some oil to top it off and headed home. he has since put another 4k miles on the jb welded, 55k mile ninja 650.
not my repair but my father’s, we were out in moab with a group of friends when the gas tank fell out of one of their stock cj7s on Kane Creek. they were in the back of the group so no one noticed the gas tank hanging down until it snagged on a rock and ripped the whole thing out from under the jeep hanging on by just the lines. somehow no one had any ratchet straps or anything to hang the tank back up under the jeep, so my dad took all three of the seatbelts out of our jeep (who knows where the 4th one was) and used those to hang the tank back under their jeep. while that was supposed to be a quick fix that they said they would take care of before heading home, apparently that stayed as the solution until they made it back to Minnesota and we went without seatbelts back to northern Colorado
Oh man, the Toothbrush exhaust fix!!!
Driving my e36 m3, going down a hill in traffic from a stoplight and the car next to me was making a horrible scraping noise! So I accelerate past and the noise, but its following my car!!???
I turn off the road and find it’s me making the horrible noise. My rear exhaust hanger rubber gave out dragging the exhaust on the pavement…. Somehow the fix was to shove a cheap plastic toothbrush I had in my bag into the mount holes between the exaaust and the hanger bracket to get it working for a week until the new rubber hanger arrived.
77 Celica hatchback. For a couple days it just wasn’t running right. Especially on hills it would be okay and then it would just be stumbling all over the place. Pulled over at the top of Cornelius pass in Washington county Oregon figuring my vacuum advance line was off or I’d busted a spring on the weights or something. Soon as I tried to pop the distributor cap off I realized the hold down bolt for the distributor was stripped. It was the middle of the night I didn’t have a tap set or a new bolt with me. But I did notice there was a little tab of metal protruding from the side of the distributor that came within about an eighth of an inch of the head. So I pulled a body trim screw out of an interior kick panel, timed it by ear and ran that screw between the metal protrusion and the head. My intention was to fix it right later on that weekend. I remembered it about 5 minutes after the buyer drove away with the car 2 years later.
I’ve done little things here and there but was always temporary. Closest long term one is using two radiators. My ’53 3-ton’s original rad got clogged up and wouldn’t clear out. So, I grabbed a free S10 rad. Later, I bought a proper replacement rad, but it turned out to be a 3-row and not a 4-row, so the S10 rad went back on, in front of the new one. Have it plumed to the heater core ports, with some plumbing T’s for the actual heater and even a valve to “turn off” the heater core in the summer. Still works.
Speaking of the heater, I had to create my own fan assembly. The old 6-volt fans just wouldn’t work on 12v, while the 12v fan and motor wouldn’t fit. So, I used this large carboard tube and other scraps to make a housing for it and direct the air flow into the heater core housing. Also threw on some duct tape “for good measure”.
I’ve also used thin galvanized steel air ducting for some and a scrapped car hood for most of the rust repairs on my Jeep J10. Before doing those repairs, a gaping rust hole in the hood was “repaired” with a piece of thick plastic in-store display sign and screws. On the same vehicle, my tailgate is a wood board and door hinges. Hey, it’s still a work truck.
1991 or thereabouts: I was a college student and needed to get from Baltimore to DC for an evening lecture with a couple of friends from my class. I borrowed my roommate’s Traveler (he was the guy who got me into Scouts) because I was driving a Mazda B2000 and it was February and snowing. We got about halfway down 95 and the windshield wipers quit. I pulled off and found a length of twine in the back, tied it to one of the wiper arms, ran it through both butterfly windows, and out to the other arm. A very pretty lady named Jennifer sat on the console next to me and pulled them back and forth with the twine for the rest of the way down to the city. We made it home that way too.
Not so much a janky repair as a solution to janky engineering. Yugo content: Yugo engine mounts look a lot like control arm bushings, with the screw running vertically. After a while (this was in the early 90’s, so not that much of a while) the mounts sag and the shifter doesn’t want to work because the linkage is out of alignment. Mercedes exhaust hangers are exactly the right size and shape to plonk on top of the collapsed mounts to take the weight.
My ’88 XJ was a rusty mess (shocker, I know).
The muffler blew a hole in the top, which burned a hole through what was left of the floor and lit the interior carpet on fire on the highway. Well, more of a smoldering mess as a wash fluid bottle had broken and soaked the carpet.
So after cutting out the afflicted area with a kitchen knife and driving through winter with the windows down so I didn’t die of the sweet, sweet carbon monoxide poisoning blowing directly into the back seat, I “fixed” it.
Using a chunk of flat tin, I wrapped it around the muffler and tightened it down with metal clothes hangers (wrap around, and use vice grips to twist it up tight).
Then, I took some steel shed siding, hammered it flat, and using rivets and RTV silicone, sealed up the floor.
Almost every exhaust hanger was replaced with coat hangers as well, including one that was hooked to the leaf spring shackle.
I was a broke college student. While I was living at home, $60 of the $100/week I was making was going to gas. So it took me 6 months to save up the $150 to have a complete cat back put on at the local muffler shop. (This was around 2008).
That Jeep was FULL of my teenage kludges.
As a career diesel tech, I’ve made lots of janky fixes on my stuff, but the Jeep stands out.
On a date with a girl while in high school, the heater hose in my car gave out in the relative middle of nowhere. It was the supply hose going to the heater core. I was able to limp the car into a place where I could refill the radiator, but without a way to block off the hose it would just quickly leak the water out again.
I had a couple of tools in the trunk and thought to myself a pair of vice grips would do the job, but high school me didn’t have a set of those. He did have a pair of pliers that would be the right size to clamp the hose shut but there was no way to keep them closed.
A week or so before I had been working on the windshield washer, and had replaced the small rubber hose going from the pump to the nozzle under the hood but I still had a couple of feet of hose left that I had lazily thrown in the trunk.
I clamped the pliers down on the heater hose, wrapped the handle with the washer hose and tied it as tight as I could. Was it perfect? No, but I got the girl home before curfew and was able to get my car home so I could properly fix it the next day.
Well not me, but the previous owner of my 350z vert (hate on it as you will) decided to use bathroom caulking to seal up the holes in the convertible top. Real good quality I tell ya! It didnt really work but its still interesting anyways. I also found drywall screws holding in a plastic piece behind the aftermarket infotainment screen.
Someone I know had a Civic Wagovan and the carburetor, with an automatic choke, started acting up on it. Since he was dirt poor, he could only afford a random carburetor that had a manual choke. So he quite jankily fitted a choke lever into the dashboard and presto! I can only imagine that the carb he got was from a lawnmower or something as most cars stopped using manual chokes in the early 70s.
It happened in my 1990 Toyota Pickup 4×4. A buddy and I were in Hells Canyon and we were making our way back to camp after a morning of bow hunting. We were driving on some dirt roads and then all of a sudden we hear this loud knocking and started losing speed. We stopped the truck, get out to look where the noise was coming from and I look under the truck to see my drive shaft hanging on the ground. Come to find out the u-joint on the rear end gave out. I was a 20 year old at the time and never dealt with this before.
I didn’t have any tools on me at the time, they were back at camp for some reason, so we couldn’t disconnect the drive shaft from the transfer case. So we had to limp back to camp using the front wheels while the rear drive shaft was slamming on the dirt and sometimes pavement roads.
We were able to drive into town (Halfway, OR) in my buddy’s rig and there was one auto parts store there, a NAPA affiliate, and they were able to over night a u-joint to us. We used a couple of larger rocks and some deep sockets to get the u-joint connected back into the driveshaft. We did this in 90° weather on the shores of snake river. Didn’t buy any other special tools for it. Just used rocks, some deep socket sets, a hammer, and a crescent wrench.
Was able to drive back home to Portland, OR a few days later and then proceeded to drive it for another 2 years before selling it.
I once fixed a leaky exhaust in an old CUCV Suburban at work by rolling down the driver’s window and breaking off the handle, does that count?
68 Beetle with a rusted out floor pan. Broke AF. Stole a stop sign from an abandoned unfinished neighborhood, cut it to shape, and with some pop rivets and fiberglass patched the hole.
My buddy’s brother did this with a yield sign in his ’85 Mustang (in ’90 – yay for Michigan road salt!). The sign came into their possession when their older sister ran it over a year or so before.
Heh, been there. Used a real estate sign to patch the floors in my K2500. But I was real cheap and didn’t bother even screwing it in place, so it’s just sitting there loose under the floor mat.
Bought a 1990 Miata in 2004. At certain times, the exhaust system would rattle because one of the rubber bushings was worn out. As a quick fix, I took two big zip ties and wrapped them around the bushing to provide a little less range of motion. You know… Until I got a chance to fix it properly.
8 years later I sold the car.
It’s story time.
I’d say the jankiest repair I ever made was by the light of a cigarette lighter, laying under my ’85 Duster Turismo on a gravel road. I had been at a party, and a couple buddies who had arrived earlier and drank most of the available beer seemed to have knowledge of another party, but with girls.
Being the only sober one with a car, it was my job to get us there. Too bad the entire exhaust system fell off about three miles out of town. Good thing I had an entire roll of speaker wire in the back. We managed to wrap just about all of it around various parts of the exhaust system, but much to my dismay there didn’t seem to be much under there to attach it too. So, we just went ahead and tied the ends to the door strikers.
This genius move meant we had to hold to doors closed as we were driving. It didn’t take much of this to realize we were going to have to abort the mission and head back to town. We made it back down the gravel somehow with just a little further left to go on asphalt, the dome light flickering away the whole time. All of a sudden, a loud “CLANK” followed by quite the impressive grinding noise and sparks shooting out all over the road were the new normal as we were completing that last mile into town.
Welp, not only did the exhaust decide to let go, but my buddy in the back apparently had one too many before we took off and the contents of his stomach decided to do the same. He gurgled a bit, then tried to lean forward far enough to get his head in the window space and managed to vomit an impressive amount of liquid all over the back of my other buddy’s head and the interior of my car. Presumably, a good deal of that spray did make it out the window as well.
What happened next caused me to start laughing hysterically, despite all that was going on. With the bondo-and-primer colored car moving down the road at around 1:00am, dome light flickering, sparks shooting out from underneath, streams of upchucked Keystone light periodically geysering out the passenger window, the guy sitting next to me in the front seat says with complete sincerity:
“Okay guys, let’s not make this look obvious”.
Pbr can cut into a strip to shim the exhaust to fit the 3-2-1 header I had on my 86 mini. Worked great! Alsoon the mini, instead of replacing the throttle shaft bushing (I was broke) I put gobs of grease on each side of the shaft where it came through the carb body. Worked great too!
My ’78 Toyota Pickup has zip ties and an Amazon one-size-fits-none nylon strap with a plastic buckle holding the battery in place.
Even worse: this afternoon I offered a woman a jump start when her car (a very crappy old Mitsubishi) was at a parking lot with the hood wide open. Her brother “had just given” her the car, and the battery was lying on its side, and neither terminal was bolted on securely. One terminal couldn’t be tightened enough to hold, and the other had no nut on it to tighten at all. Obviously the battery was not the correct one, and I suspected that he had stolen a battery and had to flip it sideways so that it would fit into that spot. Once I managed to secure the terminals on, and hooked up my jumper battery, the car started right up (she was very happy). And it roared as if the catalytic converter was missing.
Does replacing a head gasket and having left over parts after putting the engine back together count?
It started up and ran, albeit very poorly since the pistons were already shot… And I’m sure the missing parts didn’t help either.
1971 Volvo 240 had a leak somewhere in the front that would lead to standing water inside the car. It would mostly pool in the back seat area but every time I would decelerate I’d have to make sure my heels were nowhere near floor level so they would miss the surge of water moving forward. Finally got tired of doing that so the “fix” was to drill some holes in the low points of the floor pan.
As a farmer, I could write an entire book on the janky repairs I’ve done on farm equipment. Often these are repairs to just get a machine back to the barn, or just a temporary repair so we can get done harvesting a crop, but always creative and when they work I’m proud of them.
A couple standouts:
Hauling a cow to NC and my passenger side trailer hub lets go and I see the wheel roll up the hill past me on I-81. Fixed the thing in the dark with the incorrect bearing set and limped the rest of the way to NC. Incorrect bearing failed again, this time less than a mile from destination. By this time it’s 3:00am and I’ve been awake for 24 hours, so I call it quits and sleep along the road. One could say this repair failed, and it did. But it also achieved a near-success, and I met a lot of nice folks as a result. I did wind up fixing it the next morning (correctly) and the trip home was uneventful.
Another time, I had an old farm Jeep that I would occasionally run over to my other farms to move cows. One day, a brake line blew and I had to drive home 7 miles without brakes. That was pretty sketchy in and of itself, but the janky fix to that, rather than go get a new brake line, was just to plug the rear brakes. I think I eventually replaced the line, but I know for sure that I ran it with only front brakes for a while.
The next farm beater I had (‘89 Toyota pickup) was practically made of janky repairs. Once the battery (which had no hold down) slid too far and broke the power wire to the ECU. I fixed the wire (a rather large one IIRC) with two tandem 10 gauge wires because I didn’t have the right gauge wire in my shop. Made a battery hold down with some fence wire and never had a problem again.
I could go on, but you get the idea.
That’s like the old fix for the wheel cylinder blowing out on a car with single circuit drum brakes. You just take a vice grip and clamp it on the brake line leading to the offending wheel until you get home..
Got my 95 neon running this summer after being dead for 23 months. Before then, it had sat for 9 years. My buddy gave me a “rare” aluminum side motor mount. It was apparently stripped, but I didn’t know it. The bolt fell out the second drive I took in it. Luckily my wife was following me, so I took that car home, grabbed some tools, and came back, realized the mount was stripped….and then jammed crap in the way so it couldn’t fall out and wrapped it with 2 long hose clamps. I drove it like this for about a month until it did it again.
https://i.imgur.com/Lp5n1Kh.jpeg
Jankiest repair I’ve done was a wheel well rust hole fix. Lowes Auto Body for sheet steel, riveter and steel rivets, JB Weld, drill and wire wheel. Then to Advance for the premium rubberized undercoating. Because this may be janky, but premium janky. About six hours later the rust was exorcised from that spot, the panel beat to shape and held in with both JB Weld and rivets. A few days later it got coated once the JB Weld cured. It lasted until I traded that car in three years later.
My jankiest fix was no fix at all. 1985 Honda Accord. They had nearly 1 million vacuum lines under the hood. One was leaking, and caused it to never idle on it’s own. NEVER. Not in the 2 years I owned it. This is when I learned to master the heel/toe method.
Oh, leaky vacuum hoses? A liberal spray of clear polyurethane spray paint will fix that! It will also repair cracked insulation on wiring !
Part of the Z4 is PC case fan.
…I’ve said too much.
Had the bumper cover come loose on my Escort GT. Being a broke kid out of college, the fix was some wood screws that matched the paint.
Looked good at 10 feet then people would ask “Are those….” yes, yes they are.