Quote:
Originally Posted by Finnegan
A buddy in HS bought an old Chevy Malibu and thrashed the hell out of it. When something broke, or started to break, he 'fixed' it with epoxy.
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Necessity is the mother of invention.
When I was first married and putting my wife through the most expensive college in the state, I was swinging a hammer for a living. that meant my daily-driver needed to be, well, driven daily, and able to haul my tools back-n-forth to and from projects.
I had a 1982 Datsun B2000 pickup truck for this duty. One day coming home it tossed a rod through the block. I could not afford a motor for the truck, but I couldn't afford for it to not run. So what'd I do? I pulled the motor and laid it on its side in the driveway. I cut two 6"x6" square plates from some 1/4" steel I harvested from a jobsite. I put one plate on each side of the hole in the block and then put a bolt through it, effectively sandwiching the block between them. Then lots of RTV to seal it up. Then I cut the rocker-arms on the cylinder now missing a rod (the piston was good-n-wedged into the cylinder but I added some jb weld to keep it from being able to slip down into the reciprocating assembly). And then I drove it that way.
Craziest part? I drove it that way for almost 6 months! (I lived on a hill that the truck would no longer climb, so I had to enter from above.
) Eventually we scraped-together some cash and I bought an $800 IH Scout ii that was mostly gone from rust, but had a solid powertrain. (Gas was like $0.85/gal at the time....)