Hot Rods Creative Roadside Repair Stories - Post Yours Here-

Im sure that anyone who has an Oldcar can tell you many a story about some sort of invention or way they were able to repair when all was lost, i know i have quite a few of them, some i can laugh at now because when they happen it's not a happy moment for anyone. This week i had just one of those experience's , I was driving to go work at the museum listening to the sound of the half dozen buzzin away enjoying the highway ride before i get into the City where the traffic pattern turns to crazy at best. Take a look as the fuel ...and she looks a little low so decide to do the smart thing..fill up..so i pull up to the pumps go and prepay "That will be 13 bones on 7".. filler up ..wow a whopping 4.6 gallons..so i pull out make it down a block where i can get on I-70 and all of a sudden the motor starts cuttin out, When that happens i always feel very whiteknukle like an old airplane that has lost all power and you have to guide it back down to a safe landing area. I only had to dodge one car and run one stop light to accomplish this feat lucky for me it wasnt bumper to bumper traffic. So i coast into the shoulder right before she loses all momentum. Yep so i have a pretty good clue why she died and know it is a case of Vapor lock. I think a friend of mine said it best when someone complemented his car and he said "Doesnt look so good when you sitting there vapor locked" and its true you dont have to many options. Option 1 sit there for a few hours and pray.(lazy fix) Option 2 Call a tow truck (rich guy fix) Or Option 3 (Get out and fix it.) So being the peson that i am .....no towing or sitting was involved at all... i pop the hood knowning what i must do ...i somehow need to feed the carb fuel and be at the driver seat turning over the starter and working the gas pedal at the same time so i can prime the fuel pump get her running again and be on my way, but the last time i check there was only one of me. So i can remember it was hot enough the homeless people on the otherside of the highway with signs that said things like"Visions of a hamburger" were hiding in the shade only coming out for a few minutes at a time to get donations for there next bottle and i was there looking for anything i could use to solve the complex problem of being in two place's at once. So i take a walk and try round up a few thing's that might work, I was able to round up a gatorade bottle,red straw, in the car i was lucky and had my tool box ,12 volt fuel pump for the 1959 Edsel i am workin on and a red rag for checking oil and such. I am sitting there not feeling to bad because i have something to work with now. So i take the gatorade bottle cut a hole in the cap, Take a fitting off the fuel pump because the desoto is six volt and i dont have wire. Screw the fitting into the cap of the bottle,Cut the bottom off ,stick the red rag inside and turn it upside down like a funnel ...yes i threw the straw away. So i pour fuel into it and at first it gushes out onto the ground then little by little the rag soaks up the gasoline and does just what i need it to starts dripping at a good rate. I put my homemade roadside contraption into the mouth of the carb and jump into the drivers seat it, I pet the dash and give the starter its first crank after being stuck for an hour or so ....fingers crossed...i can hear her coughing and YES.. "we have IGNITION..so i jump out gather my tools and odds and ends quickly put them into the trunk so she doesnt die and back buzzin down the road i went! People giving me the thumbs up wondering why i had such a worried and serious look on my face...petting the dash "you can make it home baby..

 

Not an old car story, but cool to me none the less.

A couple of my hot rodding buddies were driving back from indy after visiting some of the fuel guys when the Pontiac Grand Am we were driving started to automatically cut power from all things unneeded, like the A/C, radio, interior light, and we were like what the hell. So all of us alert start to notice the headlights getting dimmer. So we decide to try and make it to the next exit cuz we are sure the alternator is shot. Long story short we end up coasting into an Arbys parking lot only to find the serpentine belt is shredded. So as we are looking around my buddy finds a slivver of the belt that was about 1/4" wide. So being the curious gearheads we are we decide to try it to see how far we can make it. "Now only if we had tools to get the rubberband back on". I ended up finding a peice of rebar in the weeds and we were able to pry on the tensioner to get the belt back on. We ended up making it a little over 100 miles to home on that little belt and we were all damn proud of ourselves and that worn out rubberband.

This is probably one of those, "Guess you had to be there stories", but o well.

 

Not an old vehicle, but while on a call with my '85 chevy wrecker, the top rad hose split....i'm 20 miles from the home base, dont have a clue where the closest parts store is...rummaging around, i found two radiator hose clamps.....what to do? I then noticed my chrome exhaust tip poking from the side of the bed....i grabbed the saw from the tool box, cut off the tip , cut down the hose, slipped the chrome tip in the hose, clamped it together and reinstalled the makeshift hose....borrowed water from a neighbor....off we go! Damn Macgyver rig held till i replaced it two days later.

 

-My dad used to tow his old '54 Ford circle track car to the track with a '58 Chevy pickup that had a 283.
-On the way to the track in Las Cruces, NM. one nite, one of the freeze plugs started leaking on the 283.
-They had some Tecate beers for the party after the races in an ice chest.
-Anyone who has ever drank Tecate knows that you drink it with lime and salt.
-They had a wooden salt shaker that just happened to be the same size as the freeze plug.
- The salt shaker was hammered in the hole and they were on their way.
- The salt shaker stayed in there for three years until it finally rotted.
-As my dad installed a new freeze plug, he was muttering about how they didn't make salt shakers like they used to!!!!!!!

 

in 1964 had 55 chevy 327 4 speed. nailed it at light,went for second it stayed in first. pulled over and had a look. clevis pin on linkage gone.my wife had what they called a bobby pin holding up her hair. did the trick made it home.

 

In the early 70's I had a t-bucket with an early model Rochester FI unit on it. My wife and I were going with DannyG here on the HAMB and his wife to the NSRA mini-nationals in Dallas I beleive. Danny was following me and started noticing something on his windshield and signaled us to pull over. Discovered I had broke off one of the tiny (1/8" or so) copper lines that went from the spider under the doghouse to the fuel injector nozzle at the nozzle. The top of the motor was covered with gas. We were in a roadside park and dissassembled the FI unit and with a nail was able to drive the broken part of the copper tube out of the ferrule. No easy feat. Then used my wife's finger nail file to file down the copper tube enough to get the ferrule back on the tubing. Reassembled everything and went on our way. Never had another problem with it.

 

My old '63 Chevy truck had a cast iron spacer between the clutch linkage and the throw out arm. One day, stuck in bumper to bumper traffic on 101, the spacer decided it was outta life. With no clutch action at all I was holding up traffic until someone nice pushed me over to the shoulder. Then commenced the familiar action all roadside repair veterans are familiar with, the road shoulder scrounge. Hmm, what can I use to make another spacer? Believe it or don't I found a fresh and complete newspaper (this was many years ago, people still read those things back then LOL). So I always carried a folding knife back then. I tore off a small but thick chunk, punched a hole in it for the linkage and voila, it worked...for awhile. I got onto the city streets before the paper compressed enough that I lost action again and then I just stuffed more paper in there. My roadside adventure as a kid.

Joe

 

Last summer my buddy and I were on our way home when we noticed the dash lights were not working. It was 8:00 at night and just north of Maryville PA. on 15 when we pulled over. The running light fuse was blown and after sticking in a new one I found there was a dead short. We still had headlights so we decided that if we drive fast enough no one will need to see our tail lights. It worked great until the turnpike in Rochester NY. The Trooper did not like our excessive speed or the lack of lights. After accepting the speeding fine he aloud us to go to the next exit to fix the problem. He followed us there so we could not just motor on. I purchased 2 flashlights, duct tape and tore the plastic wrapper off a coke case. Taped the plastic over the lenses, taped the flashlights to the rear quarters and with a flick of the switches, tail lights. Made it another 4 hours home and they were still on at noon when I went to the shop.

 

Not so exciting as the above, but - I love rural Texas-going to Abilene thru Coleman. My 48 chevy (216) just falls on it's face. No gas pedal, engine still idles. I coast over to the side of the road and start walking down the barbed wire fence. Sure enough, only a few fence posts down the row, there is some baling wire. (why wasn't I carrying some in the first place?) Get the wire, go to the car, open the hood-cuz we all know what happened, don't we, put the throttle linkage back in place. stuck a piece of wire where the cotter pin used to be, and went on my way. It was still that way when the 216 went to Heaven. Best road side fix ever.

 

My Chevy has broken down so many times I have named her the Hell Bitch. The most startling happened on a <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com</st1:time>midnight ride home. I had just driven under the 6-lane I-35 over p<ST1<st1laceType>ass</st1laceType> b<st1laceType>ridge</st1laceType> on Business 121 when the battery lead to the starter decided fall on and melt on the number 6 header tube. Once the red starter cable’s plastic coating melted away, it hit metal to metal. The direct short exploded half the positive lug off the positive side post of the battery.

The flash, sparks and bang of the popping lug echoing under the bridge startling me so much that I missed the brake and was pumping on the clutch peddle trying to, in my mind, stop this Damm exploding car, so I can get out and run for my life.

<O</O
After I rolled through a red light, I came to my senses and found the brake peddle.

<O</O
Using only my cell phone for light, I looked under the hood at the smoking recesses of the engine bay. I would like to brag about my mechanical ability of diagnosing the problem, however it was not that hard to see what the problem was by looking at the burning cable end and lead splattered all over the inner fender.
<O</O
All in all an easy fix. I took my vice grips and wrenched off the remaining lead lug on the battery post. Took my pocketknife and cleaned off the end to the starter cable. To connect the cable back the battery I used the same vice grips along with some duct tape to hold the wire off the header.

Worked great, started up and went on my way. I even drove it that way for over a month with no problems.<O</O
<O</O


The above photo is of another time when the whole ignition system decided to burn up. I had to hot wire the old girl and jump starter her with a screw driver, of course all by myself.

 

The wife and I were driving in her 95 Cavalier and we could smell antifreeze. I found a pinhole leak in the radiator hose and pulled into a shopping center and found a pharmacy. Picked up a roll of first aid tape and a bottle or two of water wrapped the tap around the hole and poured some water into the radiator, problem fixed.

Few weeks later the radiator sprung a leak and I swear to you know who we picked up a pack of gum started chewing and jammed it into the offendeding leaking fins and once she warmed up the gum got solid and the leaked stopped. I did that a few times until I realized it was a loosing battle and threw in a new radiator.

 

My first flathead lesson!!
1957 Daddy had a 36 Ford pickup. I was 10 years old and rode along with he and uncle lou about 30 miles away to haul a piano. On the way home the feul pump gave out on the old Ford. A quick pit stop alongside the road where they pulled the feul pump and stuck a nut up in the cup at the end of the lever. Put it back together and off we went.

 

My F100 shit the fan through the radiator core on the way back from the Lone Star Roundup this past year in Fort Stockton, TX... two and a half hours outside of Austin, three hours from San Antonio... which equals the middle of fucking nowhere.

I backed the damn thing a mile and a half up the 10 to get to the last on ramp, ran it for 10 seconds at a time back into Ft. Stockton, and thanks to advice from El Polacko, ended up crimping the busted radiator tubes like tooth-paste tubes so they would seal, pulling the shredded fan, ran pepper as a stop-leak, and drove the remaining 900 miles back to Phoenix without a problem!

 

Good thread!

Reminds me of one such story.

Short version, my buddy and I were cruisin across the state of Oregon. I was snoozin and was awakend by the feel of a miss. Slowing down to my buddies amazement and doubt at first, sure enough one hole was out. Turne out to be a broke spring on the drivers side on the sbc in the caprice. No problem. We were close to a town that had a Schucks and a NAPA store right next to each other. Tools cheap from Schmucks and valve spring cheap from NAPA. 20 mins later we were on the road and returned all the tools to Schmucks in the next town.

Used a radiator pick with the tip broke off through the sparky plug hole to hold the valve up with one hand and used one of them spring compressors with the other. Handed the compressor off to my buddy and he changed the spring and precompressed the new one for me. Blam back on and keepers too. Buttoned it back up after adjusting the lash.

Car still purrs....

 

my friend had a carb take a crap on his dual carb intake. so we disconnected the gas line, put a bolt in the hose. then took the linkage off, shut the choke, duct taped the top a bunch. limped it home on one carb.

 

Well this scares me when I really look at the safety of it, but if I was interested in safety I guess I wouldnt drive 50 year old cars!
My 34 Ford truck had running boards and the drivers door was suicided badly when I got it. After I got it going, I drove it around for a while before tearing it apart. One night about 20 miles from home my throttle cable broke and I lost throttle. Well I had just tuned the thing and went for a drive without my phone or anything. Then the idea hit me!!! I opened the drivers door, crouched on the running board and worked the carb with my left hand while steering with the right from pretty much outside the cab. I was just waiting for a cop to see that. Another stupid move rewarded with success

 

In the early sixties, I was going to the University of Minnesota driving a '61 Corvair Monza. I was coming home right through downtown Minneapolis, and I heard a horrible noise and the car ground to a halt. I got out and looked at it, and the back of the engine was literally lying on the street; the real wheels had a funny camber to them too. Turns out, the engine in a corvair is suspended from the car at three points, two on each side in the front, and one in the middle in the rear. The nut had worked off of the rear bolt, allowing the engine (which was put in from the bottom), to fall down. After looking at it, there didn't appear to be anything else wrong, so off I go, walking back a couple of blocks, trying to find the missing nut. As you would expect, I couldn't find it. When I got back to the car, there was a crowd of 6 or 7 people standing there looking at it and commenting that it couldn't be fixed. After looking at it for a while, I got an idea. I removed one of the lug nuts and lo and behold, it was the same size as the missing nut. Luckily, the Corvair had a scissors jack, and I was able to get it under the engine. I jacked it up, and the hole in the mount went right over the stud. Once it was jacked up all the way, I put the lug nut on flat side up, tightened it up with the jack handle, made sure the 3 lug nuts on the wheel I robbed were tight, and put the jack and handle away. I started the car, checked everything which seemed OK, got in the car and drove away, much to the amazement of the crowd that had gathered. It was to my amazment as well.

You may think that this story is not HAMB friendly, but it kinda is. At that time, I owned a '51 ford that I was working on. When I got home, I put the jack under the engine again, removed the lug nut and put it back on the wheel. I then went through the extra nuts and polts from the Ford I had in a coffee can, found a 7/16" fine thread nut, and put it on the engine mount and tightened it up (with a lock washer). That was probably the only Corvair in history with flathead Ford parts on it.

 

In high school a budy of mine had a 68 impala fastback that he blew up the 327 in so we put a 396 in it. We didn't change the front springs to compensate for the extra weight so it sat a bit lower.
We went to my cousins lake place with four of us piled in the car for the weekend.
He had just redone his road and it had some rather large and jagged gravel as a topper.
So on our way out on sunday evening the car bottoms out puncturing the oil pan.
Of course very little open on sunday so we buy some seal all glue,duct tape and oil at the local grocery store.
We cleaned the hole in the pan then put seal all on a piece of a towel and pushed it into the hole then apllied large amount of glue all around hole and let set up for a while.
Then we put duct tape over and more seal all then let set again and put oil and hoped that it it would just get us home(90 miles).
It not only got us home he drove it like that for a couple of weeks before putting a new oil pan on it.

 

I had to tape up a radiator hose once.

I was driving thru some little town in North Texas and steam started rolling out from under the hood. I pulled over, checked it out, and found a 1" split in the upper hose. Digging around in my trunk, I found a roll of duct tape and a roll of masking tape. I wiped the hose down and started wrapping it with tape. Taking no chances, I used every bit of the tape. It not only got me home, but I drove it like that for the next two weeks until I got paid. And it never leaked a drop of water the whole time.....

I also had to hot wire my car one time when the ignition switch locked up internally, and wouldn't turn to start the car.

My friend told me to run a wire to the positive terminal of the coil off the battery and jump the solenoid on the starter. I made it a couple of miles down the road to my friend's house (barely) before it started missing and died. I thought I had probably killed the entire ignition system with the dumbass "hot wire" idea. It turned out that a continuous 12 volts to the coil had caused a thermonuclear meltdown of the points in the distributor. Although a new ignition switch and set of points had me on the road again in an hour, I don't really classify that incident as a roadside "fix".

 

My old shovelhead was a jockey shift and foot clutch. Driving through downtown DC on my way home from VA(12:30am) the clutch linkage commited suicide. No idea where it went.....but I think it may have been a combination of leaky HD and the rigids vibration. Got it to the edge of a road(no shoulder) in the hood. Leaving it to call for a pickup wasn't an option and walking definitely wasn't. I did have my harley tool(vise grips) so I tried to very quickly do the scrounge. Nothing useful(crack vials didn't count as useful and neither do used condoms) so I used the visegrips to cut a strand of chainlink fence from around the unused trashcan(no idea why it was fenced). Worked it into some semblance of linkage and with a few prayers off I went.

 

I-57 southbound from Mattoon IL, going to Effingham to cruise, riding in my buddy's Pinto Delivery. We were swinging off the exit to Hwy 45 when all of a sudden, WHAM and the car heads for the markers on the left. We stop and see the left front wheel maxxed out, the tie rod had dropped out. I took apart my key ring, put the ring thru the cotter pin hole to limp into town. We had been rolling 90 mph a few miles before.

 

http://www.classicalpontiac.com/articles/99poci/tony.html

 

4 o'clock traffic, on my way to the bank to cash my check, so I can get to the power company before they close and they turn off my power (and consequently, the A/C), middle of summer in FL.

Clutch cable snaps on my Corvair while pushing in the clutch to take off from a light... Put car in first, crank starter and the car catches and I take off... I pull I out of what ever gear its in when I see brake lights, and hope that I can use the synchros to ease it in the closest gear until I get to the bank and the power company.

I end up having to do the starter push start trick about 5 times...

I make it to the hardware store, get me 4 wire rope clamps, and an open end wrench that fits them, in the ground in the Hardware store parking lot, I adjust the clutch cable so I can put two on the clutch cable frayed ends and throw the two extra in the glove box in case it happens again. never replaced the clutch cable, went another 2 years until I stopped driving it.

Same car, took a date to a car show/Drive-in movie thing on the other side of the bay, in Ruskin... 50 miles away, a long bridge no matter what to get home. Car dies on the way from the Drive-in after the movie on the road to the interstate... I grabbed a flashlight and open the deck lid and one of the battery cables is smoking... it was frayed at the battery terminal end and arcing... I hooked up one of the jumper cables to the battery, and the other to the starter selenoid (Is that spelled right? looks wrong) and jump in and take off, get home and fix it the next day.

 

About 15 years ago, two buddies and I are in my 1937 Buick, bone stock car. We were just out for a day cruise, hitting any old salvage yards we could track down just to see what we might find. Somewhere north of Chanute, KS the old girl starts to falter, and within about 20 miles it was completely gone, fuel pump said "I'm done!" After scrounging through the trunk, couldn't find anything that might get us fixed. A 1/4 mile hike to Mr. Friendly Farmer's house netted me a length of garden hose and a half-roll of duct tape. Back at the car, we bypassed the fuel pump with a short piece of fuel line, stuck one end of the garden hose in the fuel filler, and duct-taped the connection to get it as airtight as possible. The other end of the hose went into the passenger compartment. Using a channel-lock pliers as an air valve by pinching the hose, and carefully choreographed blowing and pinching, my two buddies took turns pressurizing the fuel tank, and that exercise got us to a little town with an auto parts store, where we bought some fuel line and a two-gallon gas can. We rigged that on the passenger-side cowl, and had a gravity-fed carburetor for the rest of the trip home.

 

This is near perfect timing. Just last month at the Nat's in Louisville, I had a roadside breakdown, INSIDE the fairgrounds! We were on the outer loop headed towards the swap meet area and I was just going into second gear. When I went to release the clutch, I got my foot about halfway from the follr and something snapped and my foot went straight back to the floor. And the panic ensued. What happened? How did this happen? Am I gonna be stranded for hours on end and so on... We found out what happened alright. I'm running a Pete & Jake's clutch/brake pedal assembly with a hydro clutch set-up. Back when I put it all together, I made a bracket to connect the slave cylinder to the clutch fork and due to my horrible memory, it broke on that Saturday afternoon as we were leaving the grounds.

What exactly happened was that I had two pieces of steel that I had tacked together to do a dry fit. Apparently if fit and I forgot to go back and run a finish weld. So that Saturday, those two little tack welds had enough.

Now for the funny part. When we determined what happened, we, I should say my brother John, tried to fab a makeshift bracket that would be able to get me back to my sis' house there in L'ville as there is a welder there that I could use to fix my bracket. Well, after several attempts, this wasn't gonna work. So we discussed the next step. I told John that all we had to do is make a new bracket. He looked at me like I was crazy and quipped, 'So what you're saying is we need a piece of metal, cut it to length, drill it and bend it in a 90 degree bend.' I said 'Yup, I have a drill. All we need is the metal and a saw.' I then got the same look form him as he asked 'You brought a drill to the Nationals?' Yeah, I brought a drill... and my bits case. It's a Boy Scout . Our dad was a Scout leader and it rubbed off on me BIG TIME. So with that, he was off to the local hardware store to buy some metal stick and a hacksaw. When he got back, we measured the old bracket, drilled it, cut to length and bent it. While all this was going on, I had fellow rodder after rodder stop by with offers of help and wishes of good luck. Even our own fellow HAMBers JimA and the-rodster stopped by with kind offers.

So in a little over an hour and a half, I was back up and running with what turns out to be a better bracket! and the fairgrounds fence out there by the swap meet area has a good sized hole, courtesy of my drill!

 

Not really a mechanical fix, but the weather was bad, and i wasn't gonna get stranded. I was in Boone, NC skiing with some friends and my old Scout Terra pick-up's wiper motor went out...not that bad, but the blower motor for the defrost had given up a week earlier and it was getting frosted up real quick. So I take the leather shoestrings out of my L.L. Bean's and run each one out the little corner glass on both doors and tied them to the wiper blades.Drive a min or two, pull one side, drive a little more, pull the other. It worked, and about 30 min later it started snowing and spittin' freezin' rain really bad. It got me home....

 

MC ride to South Padre from Houston in a group, in the middle of the King Ranch (nowhere USA), total electrical failure, dead bike. the fix wasn't huge but the diagnosis was the problem. Found a headlight wire had rubbed off the insulation inside the headlight housing, shorting the electrical system. Tape and go. It's still like that.

Another trip, riding back from somewhere...dead bike, no electrical (no juice this time), bolts had vibrated out of the voltage regulator (frame is the ground) and it was flopping around. A little roadside wire twisting it, running push start and we're back on the road.

Another rally, blow the clutch plates practicing for slow ride, ride the rest of the day and all the way home without a clutch...red lights were interesting.

Ford truck dies on 45...bolts dropped out of fuel pump. Sticks stuffed in the holes held it in until I could replace the bolts.

59 Apache had a leaky master cylinder and leaky vacuum wiper "motor". Forgot to fill the reservoir on the same day it was foggy and rainy when the brakes left coming down the bridge over Lake Charles in Louisiana going to work in traffic. Good thing there was no huge traffic, emergency braked to work and still could only barely see due to wipers going so slowly due to leak.

 

Using the metal push button and spring to replace the rotor contact in the distributor cap of a 36 horse VW. The car made at least two trips to Colorado with that set up that I know of.

 

Flat tires and misfires all in a days work for a HAMBer...some great stories here keep em coming!!

 

This story is the greatest its been a week and i am still laughing to myself!!! Thanks for the post really...LOL