what strange things have you done to keep a car running when it broke down?

Question

i was reading others answer it reminded me of when we had a fuel pump go out we were 20 miles from town we filled the windshield washer resivor with gas and put the hose down the vent on the carb when the car started to sputter we hit the wash button and filled the carb up we went 35 miles like this without a fire and no lid on the wash resivor

Answer 1

Well, I had a friend who had his floor pan rails and part of the floor pan rust out on an old VW beetle, and we made new rails and pan pieces out of galvanized sheet metal we got from an HVAC shop's scrap bin and then glued them into place with gobs and gobs of liquid nails. Actually it turned out to be very structurally sound and pretty close in appearance to the original underside when we were done and he drove the car for three or four more years until a truck hit it in a parking lot and totalled it. Surprisingly, the floor remained in tact even after the accident.

Once on an old VW Rabbit I had with about 160,000 miles the spark plug hole got stripped out and I did not think the car was worth pulling the head to make a proper heliocoil repair, so I replaced the plugs with platinum ones for the longest possible life, and then glued that one in place in the remaining threads and it held for about 20,000 more miles.

One evening when I was driving an old Mercedes 219 (1959) home from South Carolina in a freak snowstorm the exhaust the snow got so deep on 95 in NC that it dragged the exhaust system back off of the collector pipe. None of the exit ramps had been plowed and you could not get off the highway, but I did not want to lose the exhaust system as it was quite expensive. Finally traffic stopped right on 95 and i got out, and reached under the car and cut the remaining rubber hangers with some tin snips I had in the tool kit in the trunk. Then I took the system apart at the sleeves and tossed the pieces in the back seat and drove home with just the exhaust manifold and the collector still connected. In the snow it was 18 hours home and loud as hell, and of course I had to keep the windows partly open to keep the exhaust from killing me. That was a pretty long day, but all I lost were the hangers I had to cut.

Answer 2

My '89 Volvo 740 turbo sprung a really big coolant leak from a $90 hose. To make it back we used a lot of duct tape and we made it 40 or so miles back home without a hitch.

I bought a 1993 Volvo 940 at an auto auction and had to drive it about 40 miles back home. It had a faulty load sensor and stalled randomly about every 5 min. So every few minutes, I'd have to coast to the side of the road, put it in Park, restart and floor it to highway speed until it died again, repeating the process. That was the longest 40 miles drive of my life!

Answer 3

I fixed the intake of the carb of my old Saab with some parts off of my drumset when it left me on the side of the road to an out of town performance...my mechanic couldn't believe it, nor my drum roadie who had to improvise parts again for the drum kit....happy ending thankfully

wOrd

Answer 4

my right shock absorber broke and it ended up against the rubber on my tire, it would burn the rubber when tire spin so i had to drive slow and keep pouring oil on the tire to smooth out the metal vs rubber. i got home.

Answer 5

put an egg in the radiator when i had a hole in it and it worked

Answer 6

I have had to flintstone it a time or two...seriously