Another fuel pump issue Back in the day I-5 from the grape vine to Stockton was pretty much empty road with no services for miles. Had a Ford Courier with construction shit in the back. Electric fuel pump died with no intention of repairing itself. Managed to pull one gallon gas tank from a generator and duct tape it to drivers side mirror with a hose running to the carb. Had to stop and refill from a jeep can every twenty miles or so but made it home. Had a cop parallel me for miles (probably trying to figure out what the hell I was doing) but he gave up and went on his way
I had to run into the city one day to get some school bus parts. The accelerator pedal cable broke on my Ford company truck merging onto the freeway bridge over the Mississippi River. I coasted off the bridge, and used the manual choke cable to act as a throttle cable. Long ride back home while pulling on a cable to make the truck move. This was in the days before cell phones and I was too far from base to use the two way radio. Sent from my iPhone using The H.A.M.B. mobile app
I was on a trip with some friends . On the way back I noticed the charging light was starting to come on. This was a ot 2.3 turbo ford. Pulled over to check and found the alternator bracket was broken making the belt loose. Pulled over at the next truck stop. Got several bungee cords and wrapped the bracket and alternator until the belt was tight. Drove 4 hours home with no issues. CN
Just one of many. LOL Off-topic Javelin. Raining, and the windshield wipers came undone from the motor. I was lucky to have a piece of insulated wire that I attached to one wiper, brought it in through the vent window, through the car, out the other vent window and attached to the other wiper. Manual wipers! Worked great. Must say, it looked great, too... ... heavy gauge and bright red. And I looked super cool, pulling a big red wire left right left right left right... I actually had to give my dad a ride to work one morning in that car with that setup. He was like... "Jeez, Rick." LOL... that wasn't the only time he said that while riding in one of my cars. But come to think of it now as I'm writing this, he was good enough to offer to yank on the stupid wire when I was busy at an intersection with the steering wheel, turn signal lever and the stick shift.
A group of us made the trip from IL to Back To The Fifties, my 16 year old at the time son being one of the group driving his 56 Dodge panel van. As we were leaving to start the ride back home, just as we entered the Interstate, my son suddenly fell way behind. We all regrouped and discovered his throttle cable had broken. One of the guys with us offered to unload his high dollar ride and load up the panel and haul it home for us, and he would just drive his car home. We elected to see if we could cobble something together. The only option we could come up with was to take one of his speaker wires off his stereo and use it as a throttle cable. I removed the original throttle cable and fed the speaker wire through the hole in the firewall, and we used a few electrical connectors to connect the speaker wire to both the gas pedal and to the throttle arm on the carb. It actually worked well. After we got home, he actually drove the panel another week before he got a new throttle cable. It was a good thing we got the panel going, about 100 miles down the road, one of the other cars with us lost the auto trans, and we had to load that onto the guys trailer. There wasn't any fixing the dead auto trans on the road. Another time, right after we joined a new to us car club, the club was going to a weekend show. We had 3 groups going to that show, one left Friday night, one left Sat morning, and the last group was coming up later Sat afternoon. My family and I was with the group that went to the show Friday evening. We were on the road about a hour, and one of the guys had a problem with his car, it acted like it ran out of fuel, but the tank was full. It became pretty obvious pretty quickly, there wasn't any qualified mechanics other then myself with that group. Because I was the "new guy" in the group, I was a bit leery of getting involved. These were pretty much nice cars, and the one I was driving was not. I decided I needed to get involved and discovered the fuel pump on the sbc had fallen off the block in the guys 64 Chevy II. Fortunately, the push rod was still there, as was one of the two mounting bolts. I had some tools, but not many, and no one had a jack. e were able to push the car up on an embankment enough for me to wiggle under the car to get at the fuel pump. One of the guys with us had some extra bolts, so I went through his collection and found one I thought wold work, it was too long, but he also had a few larger sized nuts that could take up the space. I was able to get the push rod to stay up with a dab of grease off a tie rod end, and got the fuel pump back into the hole. I was able to get the bolts tight enough to stay put. While I was working on the car, one of the guys had called the primary mechanic for the group and was talking with him while I was working on the car. I talked with him, and told him what the problem was, and what I was going to be able to do on the road side. He was planning on coming up Sat morning, and would bring a jack, fuel pump, a couple quarts of oil (in case we lost some without a gasket in place), and two bolts if I could get it going long enough to make it to the motel. After I got it back together, we called the mechanic and told him we were hitting the road and would let him know if we ran into any more trouble. We made it to the motel without another issue. The next morning, a new fuel pump was installed properly. I guess I did OK, because those guys all let me cruise with them for many years, even if my car wasn't nearly as nice as theirs were. Gene
Quick roadside fix on trailer, towing my Midget, open single axle trailer, main leaf spring breaks, drops the trailer, fender on tire, saw in my drivers side mirror, smoke off tire. Pull over, look see, dig through junk we hauled along, find wood 2x4 pieces we used for blocking race car, jack trailer up, install with standard race repair tools, 100 MPH tape, afew zip ties and back on road again, only a 15/20 minute delay.
The Jalopy Journal
