Fixes that shouldn't have worked but did!

Or, Somebody told me I can't do that to fix my vehicle, but I did it anyway and it worked so well I never changed it out for the "correct" fix.

I had this 94 nissan altima that needed a new inner cv boot before all the grease leaked out of the torn one. Since I was young and had only done minor maintenance to the car and also poor I was not getting and installing a standard boot myself and I also was hoping not to pay someone else to do it. So I bought the split boot with the little screws to hold it together from autozone where the guy told me it would never work for long and he always had people returning these because they NEVER worked. It was my only option at the time. I got it installed with only one hiccup. I got the clamp properly tightened one the small end but destroyed the large clamp trying to get it on. rather than buy another correct clamp, I found that I had a very large hose clamp from somewhere that fit that side. Also the screw part cleared the car when it rotated by about a 1/4 inch. Not only did it work, it was still on there and working properly when I sold it three years later, then a year later the cpu went bad and they junked the car, with that boot still attached and the hose clamp still doing its job.

I refused to buy a "Z-Link" drag link for my Samurai. A friend and I (who built custom gym equipment) built one out of... Surplus gym equipment!

Homemade dropped drag links were very much frowned upon at the time. Lasted for years without issue. And it was free!

We bought a $600 1994 Ford Escort wagon with 210,000 miles on it just after college. It had a couple (radiator, head gasket) of coolant leaks. Poured a bottle of one of the parts store radiator and head gasket sealer things in and proceeded to put EIGHTEEN THOUSAND miles on it in 11 months. It was still holding when we sold it because there is absolutely no way it would go through inspection with that amount of rust. The same guy who sold it to us bought it back for $400 and put it back into service as an RV dinghy.

A young fellow I worked with had a Cavalier that had about 250,000 miles on it and was leaking coolant, running like crap, smoking...I diagnosed it with a blown head gasket. He retorqued the head bolts to "As tight as my skinny but can". Drove at least a year (Pizza delivery)seemingly totally cured!

Bruce

I tried one of those split CV boots in my youth -- the thing didn't survive even one RallyX :P $40 seemed like a lot for the proper crimping tool but it was worth it in the end.

Tree branch punctured my radiator at PBX one year and I lost most of my coolant on a stage in the middle of the night. Got the car back to Rally HQ and smeared some JB Weld on the damaged area without any kind cleanup or drying in the near freezing weather. Filled the radiator up in the morning and it never leaked in the next 5 years.

I drove over 10k miles on a CV boot composed primarily of electrical tape.

My open CV joints.

CV Joints have to be lubricated and sealed, or they fail catastrophically.

I have run numerous CV joints without boots or lubrication for years on end, hundreds of thousands of miles, without failure or incident.

While I do not particularly recommend this to people, and I have indeed had CV joints fail (including several well sealed and lubricated), I have learned that indeed neither the world nor the CV joint has to end because it is dry and dirty.

I repaired a rusted out exhaust with aluminum foil and hose clamps. The cat of my old 95 9C1 rusted out right at the inlet. I made a thick mat of doubled over foil a pulled it over the cat and folded the ends over each other. Hose clamped both ends. Worked for 3 years till I junked the car. The converter looked like a giant silver cough drop.

On my old B13 Sentra, an exhaust flange broke just in front of the cat on my way to a friends house. Went to a local parts store, bought a piece of pipe just small enough to be wedged into the existing pipe to bridge the gap. It was supposed to only get me home to make a proper fix.

When to car was finally driven to the scrap yard three years later (because of termimal rust), that fix was still there and doing a fine job.

And what is this talk of proper CV boot clamps??? You guys never heard of tie wraps?

Honestly, I've done that twice on my beaters, and it worked great.

I had an uncle who many years ago drove his beater (early '70s American iron pig of some sort) to the junk yard since it wouldn't run right and he was tired of it. He decided to blow up the engine one and for all. Shifted it to park, put a brick on the accelerator and stepped back to enjoy the anticipated carnage.

20 minutes later it ran out of gas, he figured it deserved a second chance for that so he gassed it up and drove it another year until it rusted away. He said it never ran better than it did that last year.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ wrote: I drove over 10k miles on a CV boot composed primarily of electrical tape.

I drove 20k with no inner CV boots on my Subaru.

I couldn't even make 15k on my second VW with no outer boot until ice would get into the joint. Made for interesting driving when the joint would bind up on the highway, every few miles the steering would do a quick jerk to the right.

Fix that shouldn't have worked but did:

Fixed an oil leak on a Caddy 4100 by putting a copper washer on one of the exhaust manifold bolts. The oil was coming from there, somehow, and putting a crush washer there made the leak stop...

KyAllroad wrote: I had an uncle who many years ago drove his beater (early '70s American iron pig of some sort) to the junk yard since it wouldn't run right and he was tired of it. He decided to blow up the engine one and for all. Shifted it to park, put a brick on the accelerator and stepped back to enjoy the anticipated carnage. 20 minutes later it ran out of gas, he figured it deserved a second chance for that so he gassed it up and drove it another year until it rusted away. He said it never ran better than it did that last year.

That's an Italian tune up that is easy on the tires!

You guys just reminded me that I have a hasty JB weld radiator fix on my Subaru that I forgot about. I intended to fix it right, instead, in the meantime, I have taken the car on a 1200 mile road trip, (4)more 300-mile round trips to visit family, and commuted in it for 6 months. And my wife is presently using as her daily driver for the past 3 weeks with our toddler while I get around to replacing her car's clutch. Um. Oops.

In reply to Robbie:

I was just going to say that.

When I was in the Wreck Racing leadership, we picked up an old LS400 to use the engine as a spare for the miata. We dragged it back to the shop and I ran a compression test. Had 0 psi on one cylinder, something like 30 on two others and 100-155 on the rest.

Fired it up and revved the crap out of it for 20 minutes. Ran another compression test: perfect factory spec on every cylinder.

My Subaru Loyale developed a crack in the intake runner. Slathered it with Marine JB Weld 3 years ago and it hasn't leaked since.

My Acura Legend had the usual rattly lifters. Tried running a quart of ATF in every oil change, fiddling with oil viscosities, et. and nothing helped. Then when the clutch blew up it sat outside for the winter for 4 months until I got around to fixing it and when I fired it up in the spring, the engine didn't make a peep. Electrical system was still fried though, so come spring it got sold off and bombed around 2 years

Knurled wrote: Fix that shouldn't have worked but did: Fixed an oil leak on a Caddy 4100 by putting a copper washer on one of the exhaust manifold bolts. The oil was coming from there, somehow, and putting a crush washer there made the leak stop...

There was probably an oil return passage where that bolt went in. I know there are some engines that will surprise you with a coolant geyser if you pull certain intake or exhaust bolts without draining it first.

In reply to GameboyRMH:

I have no freakin' idea what was up with it. The oil return passages infamously were channels around the upper head bolt holes, which would plug with goo. Then the engine would leak like a sieve because of the low valve cover rails (the tops of the heads were practically flat) so you had two large bowls of oil with hardened cork gasketing at the bottom edge. GM must have heard about the concept of oil sealing and decided that they wanted nothing to do with it

On that engine (which we completely resealed for oil leaks) we spent far too much time with improvised implements picking and scraping the crud out. Then we heard about some people putting Zerk fittings in the passage and using a high pressure grease gun to blow it through.

Fortunately, I don't think I will ever get the opportunity to try that for myself.

A friend and I in high school fixed his 89 Festiva rusted exhaust(completely broken at a weld where previously repaired).. So we fiberglassed the ever-loving E36 M3 out of it. It actually worked well, until fully cured it flexed and sounded like a kazoo

aluminum foil to fix a front wheel hub. Bearing got toasted, heat expanded hub so much that new bearing race fell in, and out... we used some foil around the outside of the race, and drove the race in, all worked good till the car was scarpped 3 years later

In reply to Knurled:

Those 4100s leaked everywhere. I had a friend who loved his but oil was seeping through the back of the block in s few places. He pulled the transaxle and we ground down the back of the block and troweled on a layer of JB Weld. It worked like a charm and is still going,

fanfoy wrote: On my old B13 Sentra, an exhaust flange broke just in front of the cat on my way to a friends house. Went to a local parts store, bought a piece of pipe just small enough to be wedged into the existing pipe to bridge the gap. It was supposed to only get me home to make a proper fix. When to car was finally driven to the scrap yard three years later (because of termimal rust), that fix was still there and doing a fine job.

Reminds me of a similar fix my old roommate did to his Saab. He bought a metal For Sale sign from the store, wrapped and hose-clamped it around the leak and I think that became a permanent fix.

I had a carburetor on a 79 pinto spit a lead plug once. The only thing I could find in the car to plug it, was a pencil. When I sold that car 3 years later, it still had a pencil plugging the hole. Not the same pencil of course, I had to replace it with Pencil 2.0 after a backfire.

Ran my Austin Cooper with a BSA bike muffler for several years. Just kept adding steel wool.