Makeshift repairs to get it home

Lamar Wadsworth

Lamar Wadsworth

Senior Member
All of us who wrench on these nearly 70 year old cars have run into some less than professional repairs somebody in the distant past made to get the thing home. It worked, so they left it like that instead of fixing it right. I recently bought a good running '56 292 that I swapped into Ozelle the '55 Ford. Happy to get it since Y blocks are not cheap to rebuild, but I couldn't help but laught when I saw a screen door spring anchored to a water pump bolt serving as a throttle return spring, Tempted to leave that as a conversation piece at the cruise in, but I think I'll fix it right. Any more stories about laughable solutions that worked to get it home and kept working?
 
Sort of similar story: my '63 Falcon exhaust pipe support bracket broke, under the middle of the car, running over some root or something, and I "fixed" it by bending a wire coat hanger around the pipe and wrapping it around the drive shaft. Made a nice sounding whirr noise, kind of screeching. I drove it like that from N. Hampshire, where it happened, back to Pittsburgh, Pa. That was back in '68. Those were the days, my friend.
 
Old brass beds made for a great exhaust system. I even had "stacks" up the side of an old 50's Ford truck. The sound drove my father wild.
Today those same beds are ,most likely worth a small fortune
 
Many years ago I was hunting in Idaho with several of my friends, one of which had a '75/76 Bronco. We were quite a ways out in the mountains, over fifty miles from the closest town and at least twenty miles from the nearest phone.
The fuel pump on my friends Bronco quit, time for some shade-tree mechanical repairs.
I tied a five gallon can to the roof of the Bronco, stripped some rubber hose from the windshield washers, disconnected the fuel line from the carb rigged up the rubber hose to the carb put the other end into the can of gas, got a siphon going and my friend drove the Bronco to town with me following. Had to keep the Bronco under 20 miles per hour due to the limited supply of gravity fed fuel.
Larger hose would have worked better, the old rule "run what brung" applied.
 
In the 1950's, my Grandpa used to replace bad spark plug cables with baling wire on a flathead Ford and he would just leave it like that.
 
When I was a teenager I can remember thinking: Why would anyone spend good money on exhaust pipe hangers when you can get perfectly good wire coat hangers for free?!

:o:o Oh my....
 
JimNNN said:
When I was a teenager I can remember thinking: Why would anyone spend good money on exhaust pipe hangers when you can get perfectly good wire coat hangers for free?!

:o:o Oh my....
Click to expand...

Guilty as charged. All of my exhaust hangers and gas welding rods came from Brackett's Cleaners in Rockmart GA.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top