Post your best emergency car repair

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

Let’s here your “McGuyver” auto repair stories. I have 2:

  1. I was rolling around I-285 in Atlanta when my Mitsubishi Starion suddenly lost power and stalled. I coasted across 2 lanes of traffic to the shoulder and stopped. The car would not re-start. I popped the hood and noticed that a vaccuum hose and housing was hanging loose. A little more inspection showed that the plastic clamp which held the housing to the side of the engine had broken. Hmmm. How to reattach with no tools? I scouted the road shoulder, found a shredded tire, and ripped out a couple of feet of steel belting. I used the steel belt to strap the housing as tightly as possible to the side of the engine. It wasn’t perfect and the car didn’t run great, but it got me 20 miles to the house where I made a new, metal bracket and screwed that in for a permanent repair.

  2. Same car, months later (it was a good one, but parts and repairs were ridiculous). The popup headlights would not retract. Turned out that a plastic bushing had worn out (seeing a trend? Lotta plastic in cars!). Of course, one cannot buy just the bushing, it’s only sold as an assembly - for $200. After a few minutes thinking I went to Home Depot and bought 5 cents worth of aquarium tubing, heated it with a lighter, and stretched it over where the bushing went. Voila!

2

Here. Hear. Heer. Heir.

Pick one.

3

One time I got a flat and pulled over and tried to put on my spare. Unfortunately, the side of the road was sandy and therefore wasn’t very stable. In the middle of being changing the tire (when I had the tire off), the jack rolled over and the car fell to where I couldnt fit the jack in: it sank into the sand.

I tried it again after I dug out a little sand: it fell and sank again.

I scoured my car for something that would provide a little stability. I found a tennis racket. I knew that it would be able to provide a firm surface I could jack off of (hush!) if the jack was placed on top of it. I also figured out that even though the strings might bend, they wouldnt’ break, as the instantaneous force given by hitting a tennis ball with a racquet was probably on the same order of magnitude as a car, and distributed over more strings.

The racquet’s strings did bend (several inches!) but provided a stable platform for me to change the tire after I dug the hole yet deeper.

4

Does a motorcycle repair count?

I was on my way to the shops one day and noticed my neighbour standing and puzzling over his Cagiva Mito.

“Nice bike,” says I.

He says he would agree is only the damn thing would run. The cap for the oil tank had popped off somewhere and the bike seemed to require a lid for the engine to run smoothly - possibly something to do with pressurisation, who the hell knows with Italian two-strokes.

“Wait here,” I says.

I owned a two-stroke at the time as well, a Yamaha RG250LC and consequently I had a heap of empty two-stroke oil bottles lying around, of differing brands. Anyone out there who has owned an old two-stroke motorcycle will recognise this situation. I grabbed an assortment of bottles and took them back to my neighbours house.

Damned if the BP bottle cap didn’t fit like it was made by Cagiva. The bike ran perfectly after that. Cagiva, of course, wanted some ridiculous price for a replacement oil tank cap, which was replaced by a cap off an oil bottle costing $5.

5

I had a Mercury Capri, (a cute little coupe with a German Ford 4.) While driving on I-465, I heard the sound suddenly change. The whole exhaust system, from the header on back, was dragging on the ground, held only by a bracket at the back. I usually carry a pocketknife, but not that night. I wandered down the shoulder in the rain, and I found a broken beer bottle. It took about 10 or 15 minutes to saw through the rubber part of the bracket, and I left it by the side of the road.

I bought my first car, a '59 Pontiac Bonneville, for $75. When it blew a radiator hose, it developed a stuck/burned intake valve and started backfiring through the carburetor. I took off the valve cover on that side, and I adjusted the exhaust valve so it was always open. Then I pulled off that sparkplug wire, and let it hang. I sure wasn’t going to do a valve job on a $75 car. It ran just fine on 7 cylinders for another year, and I sold it for $100.

6

we were off-roading and my friend “pop’d a bead” (this means the tire gets pushed into the rim and there is no contact surfacebetween the tire and the rim)
we had several 12V compressors, but none could provide the amount of air volume to re-seat the tire …

so we put a couple of drops of gasoline (maybe 20 drops) into the tire, stepped back and then threw a lighted match at it …

big bang - as the mixture exploded - the tire/rim lifted off like 2ft off the ground, fell back and was not only inflated, but also properly inflated (20psi)

and on we went :smiley:

cheers
alfred

7

I was southbound on the 405 (L.A.) at 80 mph on my '94 Yamaha Seca II. Suddenly it got quiet. The engine quit. I coasted to the right shoulder and attempted to restart. No joy. The bike had been running perfectly. What went wrong? No, years later, I don’t remember my thought process; but I quickly latched onto a theory. There is a safety interlock in the kickstand. The engine will not run if the motorcycle is in gear and the kickstand is down. I checked the kickstand, and sure enough there was a broken wire.

As it happens, I had just that day stopped carrying a pocket knife because I never seemed to use it. Somehow I needed to strip some wire.

I have a P-38 can opener on my key chain. I’d had it for years before this incident, and it’s still on my keychain even today. If you’re not familiar with the P-38, it’s a two-piece flat metal stamping with a blade that opens 90º. Works great to open tins. Only the blade is about as sharp as a particularly dull rock. Nevertheless I was able to use the point to tear the insulation on the broken wire, allowing me to pull off a ragged piece. I tied the exposed end to a spring, completing the ground.

The engine started right up when I pushed the button.

8

Decades ago I had an original VW bug (made in the Black Forest by elves). Four cylinders. During my hour and a half to 2 hour drive to school one day it suddenly started doing the cha-cha. One, two, three, BONK; One, two, three, BONK. All they way, eating tons of gas, which I could ill afford since I was on a shoestring budget and gas was getting up there – something like 25 or 30 cents a gallon, mind you. When I finally got home, my husband fixed it. I had no idea how. Several days later it did it again. This time I got him to show me exactly what was wrong. It was a loose distributor wire. When the thing came loose, the engine was only firing on 3 out of 4 cylinders. So the next 3 times this happened I just opened the back of the car (where the engine was) and stuck the wire back.

Now, here comes the clever part. One day the dam wire fell off 3 times during one trip. Getting tired of having to stop and shove it back, I looked around the car and environs for something to make it stay. Having no luck at all, until I thought about the fact that I was chewing gum. So I took a big sticky wad of green minty gum and smooshed it all around the connection. The wire never fell off again.

Some time later, I took a look at the results of my efforts, and saw that the gum had hardened into a solid vulcanized cement. Cool. Some years later we sold the car, and I often wondered what the next actual mechanic to look at it thought!

9

Herr.

10

Our first official date weekend. October 1988, in fact.

Coming back in his mid 80’s escort from Michigan State, its a bit nippy so the heat is turned on and this white filmy stuff starts going over the windshield. Turned off the heat to stop that nonsense.

I had just had the same thing happen to my POS car about two weeks earlier, so he popped the hood, located the hose that had a new hole in it, took off my sock and tied it around the hose and made it home.

Brilliant!

On a mid 80’s Caddy (future inlaws) we had taken the caddy to the airport for our ski vacation because hubby’s sister needed his car to take skiing that weekend up north because the ski rack she had could be attached to his car’s rain gutters. We took the caddy, because you could fit a coffin inside of it easily, so ski gear inside isn’t a problem.

Came home from Colorado. The deal was that he would get the gear, I would shuttle over to long term parking for the car. It was very easy to find this luxury land yacht in the parking lot, it stuck out in the aisle by a good two feet or so.

The engine would juuuuuuuust about turn over, but not quite catch. I had this exact problem with my current POS car, and I popped the hood, opened up the thingie with the wingnut on it that houses the air filter and carberator.

The carberator wouldn’t stay open long enough for the engine to catch. I tried to clean it with my fingers to no avail. In my car I kept/still keep assorted tools with me and tried to find some pliers to put half inside the carb thingie to keep it open, but this was not my car. I had to settle for a pen with a clip on it, praying the clip wouldn’t vibrate off and drop down into the engine. That would be bad.

It held, I got it started and was about 30 minutes delayed because of it all. I met my husband, who is loaded down with all our gear and he says, " What took you so long?"

" Let’s just say that you are lucky that it was me that this happened too and not your sister."(she panics.) I showed him my greased up hands and we were off.

I apologize for the technical vagueness above. Tech manuals cause instant coma’s with me.

11

Driving on the DC beltway, during rush hour, in my wife’s '86 Grand Am… All of a sudden, the brakes fail. Through a combination of putting the car in neutral, and judicious use of the parking brake, I manage to get off 495 and onto a surface street. I find a nice big parking spot and pull in. A search under the hood reveals that the check valve on the brake booster is broken. There’s a 7-11 down the street, so I bought a tube of super-glue and glued it back together. All fixed!

12

Having a “Jeep”, which stands for "J"unk, "E"ach & "E"very "P"art, I carry lots of spares.

I’m embaressed to say, but this little technique was learned much to my regret…

The “Jeep” had a AMC 360. The cam gear drove the distributor gear. They didn’t like each other, and like young couples often do, fought. This inevetably led to the distruction of one of the two.

Well, I knew this. I carried lots of spares.

One day, I had to (after coming to a stop in the mountains, bad weather approaching) remove the distributor, replace the drive gear, reinstall, time (by hand and guess), restart and drive home down a rocky wash.

Standard “Jeep” stuff. Actually, this is a good story. It doesn’t end up with me walking.

When I got home, I got the timing light out and did it right. I was within about a degree of where I should have been. (Big Deal! Timing by hand is easy! Just twist till it runs good! :smiley: See what “Jeep” taught me!)

13

I was driving cross country from San Diego back home to NJ in my 1977 Camaro.

The rear most Muffler support fell off. the Muffler pipe got damaged and the car started acting up fast.
I pulled over and accessed the situation and with my tool box and swiss army knife, I used a YooHoo can and aluminum tape & 3 clothes hangers to jury rig the muffler back together. It held up the remaining 2200 miles to get home.

Jim

14

I was driving my 1981 Plymouth Horizon with roughly 90K miles on it when the horn went off for no obvious reason. Wouldn’t stop, and of course, I hadn’t hit the horn in the first place. (It didn’t help that my boyfriend and I were tripping on LSD at the time.) I had a pair of pliers/wire cutters and some black electrical tape in the glove box. I instructed him to start cutting wires until he got to the one that stopped that damn horn beeping and then splice the others back together. He found the correct wire on the second try, spliced the first chopped wire back together, and we were off, in blessed silence, buzz restored.

15

Way back in the olden days when cars had points. Remember them? Car wouldn’t start. No fire between the points. Gum foil, rememember that? You could peel it off the paper. Peeled the foil off, put it between the points. Got me home.

16

My friend and I sort of co-maintain an extremely tempermental early 90s Mazda MPV. I have no truly awesome stories yet, but I’m working on it…

The hood release doesn’t work, so for a while the procedure (if you were dumb enough to let it latch fully, that is) was to stick a bent bicycle spoke through the grille and poke around until you yanked on the right wire. But some friendly mechanics attached a loop of wire that sticks out from under the hood, and now you can pull on that to get it open.

There’s some kind of short in the ignition system that drains the battery. Rather than try to get THAT fixed, we just pull out the headlight and taillight fuses when it’s going to be parked for a while and pop them back in before going anywhere.

The power steering is broken - there’s a leak somewhere and a whole bottle of power steering fluid will leak out in a few hours, so we don’t put any in anymore. For now, we’ve decided to just leave it that way, because “power steering is for rich people.” But at one point, I decided that I NEEDED to have power steering for some reason. I had power steering fluid, but no funnel, so I just poured a little into an empty Diet Coke bottle, because that let me get closer to the power steering pump than the regular bottle.

The gear shift indicator is broken, so you generally just have to guess, then take your foot off the brake and see what happens… but what I’d like to do is set up a piece of cardboard to label the various angles that the gear shift lever can be at with what gear it actually is.

Crappy cars are more fun, you get better stories.

17

I know exactly what you mean. With my first car (1974 Pontiac Ventura), I kept a coat hanger handy to do just this thing. I think it’s the butterfly valve in the carburetor that would stick? (I’m also a little hazy on the technical terms.) I had another coat hanger wired under the hood (this was when you could open hood just from the outside) that I’d use to get in the car when I locked myself out.

On this same Ventura, the carburetor would vibrate loose periodically. I got to know what it felt and sounded like when that happened. When it did, I’d just stop, open the hood, tighten the carburetor screws, and head on my merry way. I finally got wise and put some lock washers on those screws.

On my 2nd car (1984 Pontiac T1000 – like a Chevette), I came out of IBM class one day and my car wouldn’t start. I was a customer engineer (hardware repair), in a class with a bunch of other CE’s. It took about 15 seconds to find out that one of the terminals on my old battery had rusted off. Well, one of the guys gave me a jump start. I drove to the auto parts place. Since my ignition lock was getting old, I was able to pull the keys out of the ignition without turning off the engine. I locked the car (still running), went inside, bought a battery, and drove home and installed it.

18

A borrowed (and rather ancient) BMW was not happy about the hot weather - it would vapor lock under load, even on a moderate hill. The solution was to wrap the intake manifold just downstream of the carburetor with an old T-shirt (tied with strips torn from the same shirt), and route the windshield washer hose under it.

At the first sign of vapor lock, a few tugs on the windshield washer lever generated enough cooling to make the engine happy. In average terrain, we were able to get about 45 miles per gallon of water. Tank capacity (a bit less than a gallon) was an issue, but you can’t have everything.

19

I was driving home from Montreal with a friend in a downpour when the wiper blade on the driver’s side stopped working. The blade would lower across the window fine, but the motor wouldn’t pull the blade back up again. So, off came the shoelaces. I tied them together and then one end to the top of the wiper, and proceeded to drive while periodically pulling on the lace through the half-opened window to manually lift the blade the whole way home.

20

I’m embarrassed that my efforts only stretched to repair of a rusted-through exhaust pipe with a baked bean tin and two jubilee clips.