Quote:
Originally Posted by maytag
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....) |
Amazing story. I can see the poor Datsun spending its last 6 months crawling half-way up on a hill every day with 3 cylinders. What a heroic struggle. I hope you have it on pedestal in your living room
This reminds me a story I just have read on the 50th anniversary of the Russian car, Zhiguli, a.k.a. LADA. LADA was the best available car in the communist Eastern European countries, and people had to wait 5-6 years after they paid, to get the car. So by the time they were able to put their hands on it, it was already obsolete. Anyways, there`s this fella, who finally gets his brand new car after waiting so long, yet, he`s disappointed, because the car does not pull as strong as he thinks it should. So he takes it back to the shop. They check the spark plugs, all fine, so they go ahead and measure the compression. One cylinder reads zero. They pull the head off to realize the piston with the rod is completely missing, the oil channel on the crank journal is plugged so the oil pressure remained intact.. so apparently somebody at the assembly line converted the car to a 3 cylinder like yours and perhaps sold the internals on the black market? Who knows...
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