(first posted 2/5/2012) The human being is infinitely resourceful; how else would we have gotten this far? And when budgetary constraints confront the overwhelming desire to maintain our mobility, the results can be truly mind boggling. CC reader AmazonRay forwarded me a batch of photos (from the web) that vividly display these talents in real-world application. There must be an award of some sort; well, the first step is to pick a winner. Which one in this first batch advances to the finals?
The headlamp is the one I like best, just for the absurb creativity of it.
Zip ties are the new #8 wire.
Not sure I’d like to rely on them to hold a suspension arm together though!
Or be behind it when they give up…
The Subaru` owner definitely deserves the final. A really brilliant idea of using renewable material – Al Gore would be proud.
Hey, it’s Jeremy Clarkson!
Wagon- Check. Log Parking Brake- Check. The Colorado plates aren’t right, though….
I once owned a 504. This guy has the right idea. Screw Peugeot!
The one that looks quite appropriate is the Outback Timber Edition. Wouldn’t turn many heads here in the Northwest.
Electrical Tie/Leather Belt should advance to the finals (in the “Boundless Optimism” category).
My father had a bunch of Fords in the mid 60s to early 70s that he bought off his sister. She’d want something new every 2 years or so, and he’d give her more than trade in.
By the 3rd year (from new) it always seemed if the drivers side sheet metal behind the rear wheel would start rusting through.
His fix was beer cans (when cans were steel) cut and flattened out, pop riveted into place and hit with a quick shot of Duplicolor.
Steel beer cans were also good for a rotting exhaust pipe. I forget the exact attachment method. I imagine hose clamps were involved.
If its online watch the ABC Australian Broadcasting show Bush Mechanics its shot in the outback desert see Aboriginals installing carved hardwood clutch plates boiling a battery to charge it welding with jumpercables using mulga log springs it brings a new meaning to DIY repairs
I’d guess that’s a case of using what you’ve got around you. MacGuyver would be proud.
If you’ve never seen “Yank Tanks”, a documentary about the ingenuity of Cuban mechanics in keeping ancient American cars on the road, definitely add it to your list…backyard-fabricated asbestos brake pads! (And lung cancer, too, I’m sure…but still! Homemade brake pads!)
The Aboriginies used harwood brake pads no asbestos eco friendly
As a former driver of an E250 (owned by the shop, not me) that had it’s starter held on and grille held in by Panduit ties I have to vote for #7.
The Subie would take a close 2nd just because it almost looks “right”
Personally, I’d like to know how the rope tied to the windshield wiper works. The dolly for a left rear tire is downright scary.
The windshield wiper rope trick actually works pretty well. In my case it was shoelaces on a 1959 Beetle when the wiper motor packed it in during a snowstorm in 1972. We had to disconnect the main linkage under the hood, and then the two wiper arms moved easily. My passenger would pull through the vent window, and then I’d pull the other way. Worked fine… and it was the only solution we had at the time.
Edit: I see Little Jon below had a very similar experience in a Beetle! 🙂
I had to do that once in a 1992 Dakota. After about 5 tugs, the wipers started working again.
They’ve worked since, but that got me out of a tough spot.
+1 on the Subie
I vote for the rope wiper. Such complicated simplicity.
I had a rope wipermotor on a Humber 80 years ago they work ok
But wouldn’t you get very wet? Seems the windows would have to be down slightly.
1/4 light vents no problem
I also cast a vote for the rope wipers..they are all very funny, though.
Well, this is a picture re-post from my Gen IV Honda post comment a day or so ago (my brother ran into the back end of an Expedition), but it fits here, too… the junkyard wanted $100+ for gen-u-ine Honda headlights—we got some off an S-10 for $10 instead.
Don’t have a photo, but I recently also “repaired” the inside driver’s door handle on my ’95 F-150 farm truck, and rather than tracking down the replacement plastic handle, I fabricated a new one from an old farm fence gate hasp. Works great.
When in Haiti last year on a missions trip, the bus that took us to the very remote NW part of the island had cracked plastic body panels at the rear end that had been repaired much like the steering wheel cover above – they had drilled holes along either side of the cracks and had stitched them together with wire or heavy cord. We saw a lot of DIY repair work on pretty much everything there…
I like that Honda…sort of looks like it has glasses on.
Hi, folks!
I’ve been a browser on this site for quite a while now (LOVE it, by the way!) and I just coughed a mouth full of soda out my nose when I saw the “String” wiper motor.
Had this same set-up on my first car, a 1973 Volkswagen Bug…
It started out as a quick-fix one rainy night as I was taking my girlfriend home from a party and a connection in the old Bug’s wiper mechanism crapped out. At the time (late ’80’s) it was the style around here to wear two contrasting sets of tennis-shoe lace in each sneaker and I quickly removed my extra pair of laces, tied one set of ends together inside the car, ran the loose ends of the strings through the vent windows and then tied each one of the loose ends to the individual wiper arms….
By giving the laces a quick “Left-RIght” tug, the wipers would function, after a fashion.
My girlfriend, impressed, duely rewarded me with one of the most memorable kisses of my life and I ended up leaving the strings attached to the wipers for over a year afterwards.
Great memories! Thanks for bringing them back and keep up the great work guys!
Thanks; and welcome! Great story too.
Did the rope wiper bit on my ’69 Bronco (vacuum wipers) while attempting to cross the Continental Divide in the middle of what seemed to be a raging blizzard. It worked and we made it up and over! Gotta go with the bottle opener door handle for two reasons:
1- Attached with actual screws!
2-Can still be used as a bottle opener.
Some people’s children………..
Beer bottles do not open well horizontally….
Back in the 90’s, I had a friend with an 80’s Mitsubishi truck with bad door latches. In order to keep the doors closed, he installed those sliding door locks, kind of like you see in a restroom stall. The no named storm of march 93 blew those doors off his truck finally. We finally got his dad to give him a early 70s BMW. Just as junky. He had a wine cork somewhere in the manifold to block a hole.
The first of three of my Pintos…I was en route to Houston from the Buffalo area, in search of work and better resources than the last $100 in my pocket. Making a final stop before leaving at the Big N (sort of a prototype Wal-Mart), some bozo snagged the passenger door with his bumper while my two boom-companions were getting in. Yanked it all the way around, and sprung it. It would close, but wouldn’t line up the latch
Since the plates on the car were no good, and I had no insurance (both BIG-TIME violations in N.Y.S) I shined the butt-head on. We went to a friend-of-a-friend, who had a welder (not as common then as now) and he just welded a couple of half-inch bars to the sheet metal, to keep the door closed. Which it did, for the rest of that rust-bucket’s time on Earth.
As to the wipers: I remember as a kid, sitting in Army jeeps (M151s) on display…they had cranks on their wipers to work them manually. They were powered by vacuum motors, so I’m sure those cranks were well-used.
Locomotives, up until just a few years ago, used to have cranks on their wipers as well. That’s fallen out of fashion, and it’s a shame – the motors are air-powered and when not maintained (and they’re not) fall prey to all sorts of problems.
Would that cars had some similar sort of emergency fallback…
Never used strings for a wiper, though once the driver’s side door latch on my car gave way, and I had to secure the door by tying it with string! It was a four-door saloon, so with the windows on both the front and rear door partially wound down, a loop could be passed around the door frames and the B pillar, while sitting inside the car and driving. If it had been a hardtop, well… Unfortunately there was no girlfriend around for a kiss. Such is life.
Well, the best I can contribute is that when a small rust hole appeared in the floor behind the accelerator pedal on my Dart ex-cop car, I slipped an old steel California license plate under the floor mat. Problem solved!
When my parents were first married, my dad had a Porsche 356. One time they were driving in a storm – rain or snow, not sure which. Since it had vacuum wipers, they had to drive faster. If they slowed down, so would the wipers! They got to their destination okay and fortunately were not pulled over for speeding.
No Porsche 356 ever had vacuum wipers .
-Nate
The Nissan pickup with the hand-truck left rear wheel must have had a limited-slip diff. Can’t see how this set-up wouldn’t have been VERY hard on the limited-slip mechanism.
A friend of a friend of a friend once told me that aluminum real-estate “for sale” signs can work very well to cover up big rust holes in your floor/trunk.
Clever pictures–thanks!
That Accord airbag is scary! My face is wincing at the thought of getting into another accident with that car…
Chevy cobalt, 2007. Drivers side door handle stayed in me hand while door stayed shut. Chevy wanted 200$ for new painted handle to match car. Spent 3 pennies at the hardware store and got a nice 2 inch wood screw to secure it. A bit of black nail polish I borrowed from ex wife to black out the head and it did the trick…
My sister was trying to get back to Chicago during the Thanksgiving blizzard in ’74. 4×4 on I-94 blew by her ’67 Beetle and flung 5 pounds of slush on her windshield, which promptly broke the gears in the wiper motor. She got off the freeway and found a motel.
When I pulled the wiper motor and found the two broken gears, went to the local VW dealer and they actually sold just the parts; a new motor was about $200. I doubt you can do that today. The rope wipers or the bottle headlight get my vote.
Just do the googly-woogly on either “redneck car repairs” or “third world car repairs”. There’s tons of this stuff out there, much of it hilarious.
How many of these are legal?
I vote for the Subaru with the log bumper. At least it won’t bend.
Yeah, but too bad it’s not unique. This example is regularly parked in front of my house.
On my ’76 Corolla, the windshield wiper arms were held on by a large screw and nut at the base. Not infrequently, one of them would come loose during a rainstorm. It would get caught up with the other wiper, and they’d start fighting it out as I drove down the road. I’d always managed to get out and untangle them before any more damage was done.
One weekend, I needed to drive with a friend from Massachusetts to Pennsylvania. The night before we were to leave, I realized that my Mass plates had expired. So we decided to leave at 3am; by the time daylight arrived we’d be in PA where we’d ostensibly be beyond the arm of the law.
Well it rained and slushed from the beginning, and somewhere on the Mass Pike my wipers started tangling and duking it out. Before I could stop and referee the situation, my driver side wiper blade was flung to the side of the road. I quickly stopped under an overpass, switched the passenger blade to the driver’s side, flipped the passenger wiper arm out, and drove on with one working wiper and one wiper sticking straight out with a full erection.
After a later rest stop, we were driving down the road and I noticed something waving in the air just above us. My “friend” had put one of my gloves on the end of the “erect” wiper. The rotation of the extended wiper arm made it wave in the style of English royalty. In retrospect it was a good prank, but I was almost mad enough to make him walk the rest of the way to PA.
Steering wheel. Makes me think of a horror movie
In college,some friends did the string to the wiper trick for a ’70 Maverick while on a beer run.