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?
My first car was a 1964 Ford F100. It had the Windsor 460 engine and was therefore a real pig for gasoline. It got around 8mpg on flat ground. Living in Colorado’s San Juan mountains, there wasn’t much flat ground to be had, but it averaged out OK. Unfortunately, the gas gauge died. Rather than buy a new float/sender/whatever was busted, I cut an old broomstick to length and turned it into a “gas dipstick.” Open the fuel cap, drop the stick in until it hits bottom, pull it back out and see how high up the gas goes (no smoking, please!). I never ran out of gas afterward, though my dad did a few times after he assumed wrongly that the truck was gassed up.
My second car was a 1982 Datsun Pickup (seriously, that’s the model name, and it was Datsun, not Nissan). It was the kind of bare-bones “minimum viable 4X4” that nobody sells in the USA anymore. One day, the ignition lock froze and I broke the key off in it trying to unstick it. Luckily, a) the lock froze up in “run” so the steering column wasn’t locked and b) the interior of the truck was so minimal that the steering column cover didn’t cover the back side of the ignition lock. Did that make for easy replacement of the ignition lock? I have no idea, because what I did was unplug the connector from the back of the ignition switch and hotwire my own car (connect accessory and run terminals to ground, then bump the starter by grounding that circuit out momentarily). Eventually, I built a mini-harness with spade terminals for easier hotwiring, but I never bothered to fix the ignition lock. I hotwired my own truck for about 18 months, then sold it when I went to college in 1989.
On one memorable family vacation, my dad and I fixed the throttle linkage in his ’74 VW Bus with a piece of wire. That wasn’t the janky part, it’s a well-known VW hack. We’d stopped on the side of I90 in eastern WA (or maybe the ID panhandle) when the throttle went. As soon as we’d unloaded enough stuff to get at the topside of the engine, we knew what we needed, six inches of stiff wire. Unfortunately, there wasn’t any in the obligatory “emergency VW kit,” just the usual extra oil, filters, distributor cap and points, spare starter etc etc. Luckily, we did have wire cutters and a handy right-of-way fence nearby. The janky part of the repair was that a state patrolman pulled up to check on us just as dad and I were vandalizing the state’s fence for the correct repair part. My mom and my two sisters did an admirable job of distracting the patrolman on one side of the car while dad and I harvested wire on the other side. Officer managed, throttle repaired, and we weren’t even particularly late reaching Flathead Lake later that day.
I fixed a broken exhaust pipe with a soup can and 2 hose clamps. Cut off the top and bottom of the can, cut down the side. Wrap around the 2 parts of exhaust pipe and hose clamp on each end. It got me 700 miles back home to a muffler shop. A sharp bit of can did make a really nice cut in my finger though.
Friend bought a motorhome at a charity auction. We started to drive it home, discovered a leaky fuel line. We stopped at a motel, got a bar of soap and rubbed it on the fuel line until it stopped leaking (gas makes soap expand and harden.) Drove it about 200 miles home this way.
Used the same trick for someone who’s gas tank was leaking on the beach of the Outer Banks. They were camping on the beach, I asked if they had any soap, they replied yes, and I told them to rub it anywhere they saw a leak.
73 Baja beetle – it came wallpapered in stickers. I managed to get all of them off except the massive ones on either side that said “Sandblaster!” so it came with a name. (I’m guessing because when put in the sand, all it could do was blast it out behind as it dug itself into a hole)
The floorpan was in sorry shape, but as is usually the case, was far worst under the battery. A couple of sheetmetal screws and a no parking sign and boom, no more battery falling out the bottom.
Driving home from college with my sister in her Alero, we rolled down our window to pick up the toll ticket on the Mass Turnpike (pre-EZ Pass) and merged onto I90. Started to roll the window up and it suddenly dropped to the bottom of the door.
Had to drive a few miles to get to the first service area, where I was able to find some random tools in my sisters trunk as well as a random piece of wood and was able to remove the door panel, push the window up and cram a piece of wood in to hold it closed.
We had to open the door at every toll after that but we got home without freezing!
Corvette: First generation BMW X5 lumbar seat bladders are the exact same width, are of significantly hardier construction, are individual chambers and are basically free; compare to C4 1993 Sport Seats (which are made of tissue paper, are a single molded piece and cost hundreds of dollars each when they are in stock). You just attach a third one to the bottom of the mounting “carpet” on the assembly and shove it into the setback, then connect it to the air pump. I eventually just gave up on the shitty C4 seat hardware (I was converting from my 1994 sport seats) and mounted the seats on the seat base and guts of a set of C6 sport seats, but it *did* work for the lumbar until then.
Seville: One of the ballasts for the factory HIDs failed, and they were expensive and all used. I went to the junkyard, got two non-hid headlight assemblines, pulled them apart and put the halogen projector in my headlight assembly, then bought an HID drop in kit off of Amazon and wired it to the 12v line for the factory ballasts.
ATS: Never really broke when I owned it, but I had a strut tower bar in it that was designed for the 4 cylinder so to make it fit my 6 cylinder I pulled the plastic engine cover off.
996: The interior paint was doing that gooey nastiness that 90s soft touch plastics all did, so I bought a bunch of spare panels, wrapped some of them in microsuede I bought from hobby lobby (including contrasting colors on the two pieces that surround the gauge cluster) and spray painted the center conse with a rattle can from Wal-Mart that looked almost identical to the factory aluminum trim the car had originally been optioned with.
Elise: I loathed the stupid factory wiring for the USDM taillamps, so I bought a Curt 3 wire trailer adapter harness and an STS-4 sequential turn signal module and made my own taillamps harness with four part sequential turn signals while also converting the bulbs to 3157 sockets I cut off of a junkyard 90s Grand Prix. All red unlike how I did the sequentials on the Corvette but I still prefer it; and completely reversible.
After fitting a Ph1 clutch assembly to a Ph2 Renault 21 Turbo (Ph1 has bleedable clutch hydraulics with separate pipework / cylinders whereas Ph2 is one complete unit which comes pre-filled) I discovered that the actuator rods were at different angles between the two when mine snapped leaving no way of operating the clutch.
I managed to find some small diameter tube which I managed to slide over the two ends of the broken rod. To then stop the rod falling out of the tube I put a couple of tie wraps around the clutch pedal and the bulkhead to limit the pedal travel. Drove 150 miles home for a family friend to weld it up.
Later discovered that the clutch pedals were totally different between Ph1 & Ph2 and people would cut & shut the two different ones to clear the foot rest on the Ph2 which wasn’t there on the Ph1.
1: 1996 Mercury Villager. I was about to leave on a long trip but my headlights were badly out of alignment. I did a rough alignment in my garage and went to a local hack shop so they could finish the job. The idiot doing the job overtwisted the adjuster and broke the attachment point right off the bucket. The headlight was now flopping in the breeze. His next step was to claim it came in that way. I didn’t say anything but just glowered at the manager, who backed down after about 3 minutes of my stone-cold silence. He promised to replace the bucket for free, but it would be at least a week. I told him I was leaving in 4 hours for a week-long trip and his trained monkey just about ruined everything. I ended up fishing a bunch of popsicle sticks out of the trash and jammed them under the headlight bucket until the alignment got close enough. A little duct tape and some gorilla glue held it all in place. (Epilog: After the trip I returned to the shop and they installed a piece of junk headlight bucket recovered from a junkyard. The interior reflector was all rusty and dull inside. I opted to stick with the popsicle sticks until a right and proper bucket showed up, not some true junkyard junk. I don’t know how that shop is still in business 20 years later.)
2: 2002 Saturn Vue FWD 5-speed. Shift handle popped out of the cables running to the transmission. Dealer said 2 weeks minimum to get new cables in (apparently the cable ends aren’t replaceable). Choices were to leave it in third gear all the time or rig something up. I jammed the shifter back into the cable ends and held it all in place with some colorful nylon zip ties I stole from one of my children. It held for years, and I even traded it that way.
Fixed the sliding door roller on my 2002 Odyssey for under $5 by using some nylon spacers and e clips I purchased at Lowes. The OEM part was about $100 at the time. Didn’t last quite as long, but I kept the spares in the glove box and did them every 2-3 years until I sold the van.
I’d like to suggest that maybe “janky” is the wrong word here. Ingenious, inventive, field expedient, creative may all be better words.
Every comment I’ve read here shows creativity and ingenuity in order to overcome an obstacle and I congratulate all of you. This is “Autopian” at its finest, and maybe we should use that.
Roughly 15-year-old armored truck on a Ford chassis, powered by a Detroit 4-cycle V8. Halfway through the day, on a route through small towns and backroads in central Indiana, it just died and coasted to a stop in cornfield country. The fuel cutoff solenoid had failed, and when it did so, the default state was “off”. Rather than wait at least an hour or more for one of the shop mechanics to drive out, I rigged up a linkage to pull the cutoff open with a couple of paper clips and a rubber band or two. And we were off and running for the rest of the day.
I was 1/2 way across the state of Pennsylvania when the bracket that held my alternator in place snapped. This relieved all the tension on the belt and therefore I was running on battery only. I took the next exit, stopped at the first discount store and bought a set of vicegrips to clamp the bracket back in place. Finished my drive to NJ and ordered a new bracket.
My 1980 cutlass supreme was equipped with the semi-infamous 260 V-8 (AKA sludge-o-matic/gutless cutlass). True to it’s powerless roots, it was equipped with a 2-bbl carb. At one point, half the bracket holding the accelerator pump cracked and collapsed, leaving the pump sitting on top of the intake manifold. This bracket was part of the casting for the carb, so there was no way to replace it. Needless to say, it was fun driving the car like that. I didn’t have a ton of money for a new carb, so a wise mechanic friend of mine came up with a solution – he fashioned a makeshift holding bracket for the pump using a cotter pin. It was still unsupported on one side, but the pin went through the hole on top of the pump and the pressure from the bent ends of the pin was enough to pinch it on to the good side of the bracket. I drove it like that for the next three years, and it was still functional when I parted with the car (I did tell the next owner about it).
In college, I had an 84 Honda Prelude SI that somehow broke an ear off the thermostat housing. I bolted the good side, clamped the broken side as best I could with a pair of vice grips and then drove it that way for 30k miles.
I wrapped about $4.00 of quarters with some duct tape to make a post to keep the suicide doors on a 1972 Cadillac Hearse from popping open on a trip back from Chicago…
Landscaping (thus, waterproof) spray foam to patch a rust spot on an unobtanium location on an Isuzu Amigo to pass PA inspection.
My lone mistake was not getting something that like Eastwood chassis spray that has a flexible wand to get into tough spots in that hole. I did what I could, but after a year we were seeing some spots return to bubbling. I was fully prepared to address it ahead of a major problem when the motor’s bottom end let go, and I sold her off.
When I rebuilt the differential for my Leyland P76, I took advantage of the fact that a number of Australian car manufacturers used versions of the same rear axle design manufactured locally by Borg Warner. A set of 3.5:1 ratio gears sourced from an XA Falcon panel van with a 200cu in inline six (a rare ratio generally only available from that particular model) was fitted to an LSD centre from a later XF Falcon, and stuffed into the P76 housing.
The only problem was that the early gears used smaller diameter ring gear bolts than the later ones, so the bolts were going to be a loose fit in the holes in the flange on the LSD centre. Rather than get some sleeves made to make up the difference, I found a roll of brass shim stock in the shed, cut a long strip of a width just less than the depth of the bolt holes in the flange, wound it tightly around one of the bolts until it made the bolt just too thick to fit through a bolt hole, then trimmed it back bit by bit until it just fit. Unrolled the strip and used it as a template to cut one for each bolt, rolled them all up around the bolts and bolted everything together.
This setup survived a lot of abuse in a V8 manual car with big tyres being driven by a madman, despite everyone telling me it would all fall apart. So much so that when I swap all those bits over into yet another Borg Warner axle (from a Chrysler Centura) to go in my Valiant ute, I have no plans to replace the shim stock with proper sleeves, which I have now found someone manufacturing for this sort of conversion.
The battery tray was long gone when I got my 1972 Delta 88, but at least there was a small 2×4 keeping the battery off the inner fender. Now, of course that wasn’t exactly stable and relied on the side post cables for balance, so I supplemented with two more small 2x4s. Finally put in a proper new tray this summer after only 22 years.
But for field repairs, that would be the time the fan shroud fell off that same Oldsmobile. The bolt holes were stripped and useless, but luckily I had zip ties and a knife. Stabbed a few new holes in the shroud, zipped it back to the core support, still holding seven years later.
A chunk of 2×4 is what held up the hatch of my ’89 Horizon when the strut decided it was done living.
92 Ford Tempo. There are two, one by the previous owner and one by me. One of the fenders was rusted out pretty badly, so they added foam to a black garbage bag, shoved it in the whole, and rattlecanned it black to be close to the right color.
The floorpans were pretty much just rust and held up by the carpet. For a while I tried not to put my foot through it. Asked a buddy about welding new floor pans in. He pointed to the fender and said it’s like putting lipstick on a pig. I did my best Red Green impression and wrapped a piece of plywood in duct tape and screwed it in place for the driver and passenger side and ignored the rear seats. It was still holding up fine two winters later when I sold it.
I’ve replaced the bolt holding clutch lever twice with a branch of a tree when the bolt fell of during riding (once with moped, once with motorcycle).
I repaired a radiator hose on a Jeep XJ with tape and tube socks. Was enough to get me back into town and to the auto parts store!
I grew up on a farm and don’t even know where to start.
Broke a tie rod on a pickup and fix it by driving it straight ahead so that caster would align the front wheel stopped it and then welded a fence post over the broken tie rod.
Attached to carburetor to a tractor after losing one set of nuts and bolts into freshly plowed ground by cinching it down with baling wire.
Oh, baling wire choke cable, did that a couple times.
Wired up the headlights on a harvester with the Romex pulled out of an abandoned house.
Oh, I know, we had some military surplus deuce and a half, 6 x 6 trucks that we use for hauling tomatoes. I can’t remember if they were GMC‘s or Studebaker‘s but they were really underpowered for getting over the overpass next to the Heinz plant where we were hauling tomatoes. So my uncle bought 3 Wrecked California Highway Patrol cars with big block Oldsmobile engines in them and did an engine swap into the three army trucks. I think it involved welding the subframe from the CHP cars into the trucks, but it was 60 years ago. Anyway, the radiator on the truck was vastly inadequate for the big block Oldsmobile engine.
What to do?
Well what we did was get a 5 gallon jerry can filled with water and attached an electric fuel pump to it and crimped a piece of copper tubing so that it made a nice misting spray and switched it so that when the engine started to overheat it would spray water onto the outside of the radiator. Problem solved!
Awesome, love a cheap solution that’s hyper specific to the job it needs.
Broke college kid driving an 82 Dodge “charger” 2.2 auto. Rear ended somebody lightly and broke the inner fiberglass mount for the headlights into a bazillion pieces – headlights now flopped wildly.
In the light of day I could see that the inner bumper was just a square metal tube – nice and straight. Cobbled together a new headlight mount out of a 2×4 and a piece of 1/2” plywood carefully cut to hold the headlight buckets. Even made the adjusting screws work. Mounted the whole thing to the metal tube with some 12 gauge electrical wire twisted nice and tight.
This looked good enough with the hood closed that the insurance inspector actually didn’t believe I hit somebody and denied the other driver’s overblown claim. It also lasted for another 2 years until I had to trade the shitbox in because of a bad carb.
Not me, but Motorcycle journalist Doug Richmond told me of a repair he effected in Baja (in the 60s) on a Honda motorcycle he had ridden the length of the peninsula. He had broken an engine case on a rock and the oil within was making it escape. He threw the bike down on the opposite side and wiped off all the oil. I believe he cadged a roll of masking tape from a local (he usually carried electrical tape as a repair tool). He put the masking tape in several layers over the hole, added oil to the full mark and rode the bike home. Was able to replace the case cover after getting home.
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.