The Urban Dictionary defines bodge as a quick and dirty job, something done very hastily. Make it look good for the next day or two and if it falls down after that, it’s alright. I have to say it is one of my favorite words and coming across a bodged up beater always brings a smile to my face. A duct taped mirror is a classic but follow along for some other more questionable and inventive repairs.
Sometimes the proper factory parts cannot be sourced or the owner feels it isn’t economically justifiable to properly repair the old hack so the results of these can be quite interesting. Take for example the Mercedes above which features a two for one hack repair. First is the classic colored tape repairing a turn signal lens but with a twist as the owner make it extra cheap by using a company’s logo tape rather than buying some plain stuff. For the inventive nature of the second fix he deserves admission to the space program. This particular car had the European headlights which aren’t easy or cheap to obtain here so he managed to find a clear serving dish that fits. I’m not sure how the resulting light quality would be on a dark secondary road but you have to get close to notice anything is amiss.
Stock rear glass too expensive for your Bronco? How about some wood and plexiglass?
Duct tape isn’t just for securing broken mirrors. Does your can have body damaged but you can’t weld? No problem as duct tape also makes a for fine body panel patch as modeled by this Plymouth Caravelle. Painting is an optional, additional step for those not lucky enough to own a silver car.
An old t-shirt wrapped in a plastic bag make a fine rear windshield wiper replacement for those vehicles that don’t warrant the $5.99 to buy the stock item.
Here is one that came with a Chrysler LeBaron I bought. The previous owner told me he had unsuccessfully attempted to repair the inert passenger side window and the rubber weather stripping had come off the door as a result. Rather than repairing it he lassoed it with a length of wire. This lasted exactly one trip under my ownership before one of my boys ripped it off. A quick application of super glue and it was correctly rectified. I never did repair the window but when the exterior door handle broke I did discover a further bodge …
The reason the window glass didn’t move up and down was that someone had elaborately placed several bungee cords to hold it in place. Rather than disturb the delicate balance I elected to keep this bodge in place.
If I am poking fun at others for their repairs I better at least own up to one of my own. I’d traded the aforementioned LeBaron for a very rough Lada Niva. The worst bit was an extremely damaged dashboard which had been salvaged hacked at by a stereo thief. Not wanting to spend much (any) money on it I embarked on a bodge of my own.
I had a random selection switches left over over from a previous project which I pressed into service. The metal surround was cut from panel off a scrap furnace. See that panel below the heater controls? I created that with some miscellaneous Niva interior plastic, some wood wall paneling and the random switches.
Have any bodges you’ve done or come across to share?
Rather than buy a new top for my $450. -86 Lebaron , I just kept it dry inside by adding more duct tape as I had 1000s of feet of that paid for. It Was Silver, Did not Have Black, as i think the silver sticks best.
I would use Gorilla Tape over duct tape for the rear view mirror repair and perhaps make it look nicer.
The baking dish light repair is clever, but not the tape, they should have gotten a light assembly repair kit from a parts store.
I used a sponge once to protect my windshield after I broke a wiper that was frozen to the glass.
Are these photos from the Yukon because that is the plate on the 4Runner, but the Bronco is too dirty to tell.
Using Gorilla Tape in leu of Duct Tape to “make the repair look better” is a perfect case of trying to polish a turd.
My Dad used Gorilla tape on the side mirror of my Mom’s Quest when it broke. Looked perfectly fine on that POS and lasted like that for years.
All photos are in Alberta. The Yukon 4Runner must have visiting or just moved here.
JB Weld can fix most anything. 🙂
I’ve done the t-shirt on the wiper arm to protect the windshield before. But I also got a new wiper blade the same day.
However, I’ve seen my share of duct tape and plexiglass all the way to capping off brake lines and a car riding on 4 donut spare tires.
I especially like the mirror wrapped in duct tape. It looks like somebody hit a mummy on the highway and part of it got lodged in the door.
When my youngest brother rear-ended an Expedition in the ’90 Honda Civic we had sold him (at 165,000 miles), it naturally tore up the front end pretty thoroughly, including mangling the radiator.
We towed the car to my house and used a come-a-long and large pine tree to pull the front frame back into place, after which a junkyard radiator was fitted successfully. I had my then 7 and 9 year-old sons jump up and down on the hood to flatten it back out, and with some creative panel bashing, we got it to latch properly.
Replacement headlights from the junkyard were over $60 each, so brother picked up a pair of S10 headlights, and we installed them with sheet metal screws. Worked fine.
He kept driving the car and eventually sold it at 220,000 for exactly what he paid us for it ($500).
I looked at the picture first and thought the lights were off a 2nd. gen Accord. Never would’ve guessed they were off a S-10.
Very effective beater repair. I’ve seen sealed beams replacing molded plastic lens before. The results are uneven. That would looks better than I would have thought.
Does anyone remember the name of the website that features redneck engineering. This stuff belongs there.
BTW duct tape is stronger for holding in place but the foil silver tape that we use on furnaces is best. Some of the stuff even has stitching/threads to make it stronger.
There I Fixed It?
http://failblog.cheezburger.com/thereifixedit?ref=navbar
No juice to my nephew in-law’s Grand Marquis’s taillights. Rear wiring was a mess. Ran a wire from the rear defroster terminal through a hole in the package shelf to the left taillight. He then had taillights and one tag light. His beaters never last more than 2 months anyway.
100mph or race tape is the go duct tape is crap and falls off race tape stays on a V8 Supercar at 250kmh so regular cars wont tear it off at traffic speeds.
It should also be noted that there is a wide variation in duct tape quality. If you go with the absolute, cheapest stuff you can find from, say, a place like Big Lots, it doesn’t stick very well or last very long.
Use some pieces of an extension cord, to repair some burn out cables in the fuse box of my first car.
On my Toyota Tercel:
One time driving back home from work, the plastic bracket where the accelerator pedal attach to the car, broke. I used some tie wraps that I had in my car and attached them to the accelerator cable and with that I was able to accelerate the car by hand. Later that night I managed to make a temporary fix to attach the pedal to the floor until my father in law found a good one in a junk yard and replaced it.
Another time one of the two bolts that hold the brake caliper in place came loose and I lost it. I searched for another one in many places but I couldn’t find one that I could use so I used some very hard construction wire that I had at home and used a piece to held the caliper in place until I finally was able to find an appropriate bolt to replace the lost one.
Just the other weekend, in lieu of replacing the cheap knock-off left headlamp because the brittle plastic post on the aiming screw broke on my ’91 240, I just stuffed a plastic bag full of wadded-up paper behind it. Problem of loose flopping headlamp solved, for awhile anyway. Saving up for a set of E-codes, some day.
A little background: My Cougar has a second hand custom dual exhaust with a Magnaflow midmount muffler with gasket clamps just ahead of it separating the front half from the back half…
Well the flanges have corroded and warped over the years and after I did the PI swap the gaskets leaked, badly. So I ordered new gaskets, installed them and still leaked. It was so bad that you could feel the pulses in the center of each flange with the engine running.
So cash strapped, frustrated, and tired I very liberally applied RTV to the effected area, placed old gasket material over that, put a big piece of rubber exhaust patch over that and clamped two hose clamps in an interlocking X configuration over each flange to hold it all together. I can’t say the leak is completely gone but it’s not nearly as noticeable as it was and it’s held up to this day. Funny how half assed fixes turn permanent.
Oh, I’ve done loads of hack repairs. Pedestal truck turn signals to replace faired-in units that don’t work…front or rear. Could be the wiring; or broken lenses…I ain’t got the time for that. Put in a new unit, hole in fender or bumper…run fresh wires to the junction at the steering column.
Then, the time I tried to bring a 1971 Econoline up from Atlanta to Cleveland…just bought it, a $500 runner…and the throttle cable snapped. Right at the lead-cast fixture at the end…what do you think the odds are that a parts store in 1991 is going to have a throttle cable in stock? More to the point, how the fark am I going to DRIVE it there?
I was two blocks from an Advance Auto Parts. I bought two u-bolt clamps, and managed to rig enough slack to clamp together a half-inch of cable. The linkage would sometimes bind; and I lost full throttle; and I had to run the whole way with the doghouse cover off…but I made it home. Helped that I had three-on-the-tree and wouldn’t have a crisis if/when the throttle stuck open.
AND THEN…my Yugo. Y-don’t-go. It had a relay, I’m not sure the intended function of it…but when it would half-fail, every electrical circuit in the whole car would go to one-third voltage. And, of course, the starter wouldn’t crank. Yanking the ground off the battery terminal and waiting one minute would restore the relay to health, for a few weeks.
Except…the time that did it for me, was in the middle of a busy six-way intersection. I had crazies on my on ALL SIDES…no wrench that morning. All the roads were curbed, so I couldn’t even push it onto the shoulder.
I got out of it alive. Then, with the relay working right again…I got creative. Not doing anything else, I ran a 12-ga wire from the hot terminal at the battery, through a fusible link, and on to a spare terminal on the fusebox. Put a 40-amp fuse in there…what I’d done was put current on the OTHER side of that G.D. relay!
And, you know? It worked like magic. I don’t know if that relay ever failed again, because it was paralleled. I ran the car for four months this way…and what killed it was a thrown water-pump belt….which took out the timing belt…which killed the engine…
Yugo… heh…
My first one (red car) was a relatively well taken car of car, but some things still went wrong. The engine was developing a fair amount of blow by, so much that extended freeway driving caused it to push oil through the PCV system into the throat of the carb and cause it to stall. And nearly impossible to restart until it was drained (or flushed out). In rush hour Atlanta traffic. Nothing says you’ve made your mark like being called out by the traffic helicopter on the radio. It was a very strange feeling for me, because I KNEW how many people wanted to kill me for holding up traffic.
That particular time was so bad that I had the car towed home. When I got home, I cut the PCV hose (it was the same diameter as a 5/8″ heater hose), installed one of those old anti-freeze flushing ports in the middle of it. I then found an old empty can of gasket glue, attached it to the flushing port and it functioned like a moisture trap, catching the oil before it ever made it to the air box and carb again. I also was told about Restore oil additive and have been a fan of it ever since…
I accidentally struck the plastic brake fluid reservoir and popped it off the master cylinder assembly one day while removing a bolt (or something else) underhood… I jammed it back on there, but it was not remaining in place. So, I took a couple of zip ties and tied it on top of the master cylinder. Problem solved.
My second one (blue car) had been abused horribly. I’d gotten my blue one after the red one was destroyed in a traffic accident. The blue one had all kinds of electrical issues, but easily solved ones… Crumbling electrical connectors that were easily replaced or paralleled, but due to the abuse the car had taken, there were some components that I could not jury rig and they were replaced the regular way. I drove that car for four years (about 50K miles) and then sold it to a guy who was really down on his luck. By the time I moved from Atlanta in 1998, he STILL was driving the car. It had to have well over 150K on it… I don’t know what ever became of it, as I didn’t keep in contact with him.
I actually enjoyed those cars, they were supremely cheap to buy, to fix (with a few exceptions) and to operate. I liked the fact that you only needed a very small tool kit to do most of the maintenance yourself (which came with the cars), as many of the parts (like plugs, oil and air filters) were rather common (I used the same oil filter on my Yugo as I did my Dodge Lancer!). They were very light, and actually had a pretty decent volume on the inside, and they could carry far more than I ever imagined (ask me how I know…).
In some ways, the Serbian son of the BMC Mini. Via Fiat.
No8 wire will repair most things A set of fencing pliers was considered a toolkit in the days of Model As, you got your own wire from a handy fence at your breakdown site.
Rust hole below the right-rear door window in my 1984 Ford Sierra. It was back in 1994, was 20, cheap and broke. I wouldn’t have fixed the hole but it really stood out on a red car and the water leaked inside. So from inside the door I duct-taped stiff cardboard over the hole. I filled the hole from the outside with silicon sealer which I smoothed off. As soon as it was dry, ‘painted’ it with a red vivid permanent marker pen. Worked a treat! Sadly I decided not to pursue a career in rust repair…
I saw this in a Lowe’s parking lot in Nashville. Had to take a picture of it. My question is, was it really that much cheaper for that mirror that an aftermarket something else? It does make the K-Car a bit more menacing though.
When I was in high school I bought a ’73 Polara wagon for the princely sum of $80.00, which left me with $00.00 to repair the dragging exhaust system. Took several empty Chef Boy-R-Dee ravioli cans and wrapped them around various leaking joints and holes, held them in place with hose clamps. Worked OK until the bitch backfired…
Those are great. Funny, that Bronco looks pretty good. The repair did not stand out to me – had to read the text. Love the Civic repair – looks like a mini-Accord. A friend had a white VW bus, rust on rear quarter – sure looked ugly with rust against the white body. Solution? Some brilliant white aluminum siding and sheet metal screws. Rust gone!