When I were but a lad...........

That’s absolutely nothing compared to the lightweight race-spec steering wheel shims* ThePollitt found on his deathtrap of an olds.

Whilst in a field at the gathering 😂

My mate had a rotten old death trap of a mini, with one of those terrible fibreglass fronts on. But as you do at 17 he wanted some Carlos Fandango’s on it & was skint. So he just took the wheels off & turned them around 🤣🤦🏼‍♂️

On the subject of steering wheels, many years ago I bought a new wheel and boss but could not remove the old wheel, Haynes said remove nut and hit firmly from behind, didn’t work, so left it forgetting to put the nut back on.
Several days later the wheel did come away, just as I was going round a junction in town, managed to get it back on the splines and get round the corner, just lucky it was slow speed and not out on the open road…

A mate of mine ‘thumbed a lift’ & the guy pulled up in a Zodiac. He jumped in & said the bloke had mole grips clamped on the column splines 🤦🏼‍♂️
Can you imagine clipping the curb, it would break your thumbs, never mind what would follow

Didn't we all mate. I was once a party to "repairing" a Ford Falcon six that had thrown a rod. We dropped the sump and cleaned out all the broken bits (I still have the horribly damaged big end bearing shell somewhere), removed the offending conrod and piston along with the corresponding pushrods, then slapped the head back on. In the absence of a new head gasket we improvised by painting both sides of the old gasket and torquing the head down before the paint dried. A hay mower blade roughly welded over the jagged hole in the side of the block (with a farmer spec arc welder) served to contain most of the oil. This engine did run but not well and after it threw another rod to balance itself the owner declared it dead.

Aha, You " had mates" who did so.

This is the place for the tale of a mate's Mk2 Escort. it was a base 1300 2 door. What it would be worth today! What it was worth then = nothing.

So the front valance was all but gone and he wanted to sell the car. he had picked up a tidy Opel Kadett (the Chevette type) and needed to get like £200 back off this Escort.

So I said I would sort the mess at the front end out for him

Round at my parents I carefully made a lovely front valance out of cardboard, using old cerial packets. These I then "reinfoced" with a smear of P38 and then finshed the lot off nicely with black Hammerite. I used some garden canes to keep it all rigid. Man that was a mornning's work well done.

So we put the car in the local paper and this fella comes to see it. he looks round it, inside it, starts the engine. Then he looks up inside each wheel arch. He gets to the front driver side and then he just stops, stands up and walks away without a word to either of us, gets in his car and drives away.

"odd!" we thought. So I looked up in the arch to see what could have upset him so, and there is Tony The Tiger's face grinning back at me. "Grrrrrrreat" it certainly was not

I think he sold the car to the scrappies in the end

After paying £40 for an Anglia estate and using it for a year it was showing signs of rusty sills both sides and having just finishing some plastering on a new wall in the house decided to fill the sills with " browning" and smoothing to the original shape and a coat of paint it passed the the MOT. WOW

Then after fitting a 4 branch exhaust to my old 100e found the existing pipe didn't match up but a SCAFFOLD POLE was just the correct diameter and held on with some wire pinched from a handy fence worked wonders. I got tugged by the local speed cops ( two months later) who suggested I got it sorted.!
Then there was the rear wheel cylinder leaking , so a pair of handy mole grips on the flexy hose sorted that.
Then failing the MOT for brakes pulling to one side, simply apply some oil the the shoes on the good side and after a retest using the "swing ometer" yes it pulled up straight and passed.
Another Anglia on a tight left hand turn the drivers door would fly open so a length of rope tied around the door handle and drivers seat sorted that, but I had to use the passenger door to get in and out.
Then a Volvo 240 sprung a leak from the bottom of the radiator when miles from home on the M3 Motorway so popped into the nearest services and rotated the rad so the hole was now at the top. Left the rad cap loose and continued using that for over a year. Then the fuel pump relay packed up so ran a supply wire from the rear light to get home.
And I seem to remember shimming the crankshaft thrust bearing on a Beetle engine with a piece cut from a lager can for some reason.
Filled some corrosion on a rover v8 cylinder head with plumbers "Boss White" and fixed a few cylinder heads with two pack metalized epoxy. That works very well.
All these bodges were at a time when things were very tight and we had to make ends meet, wouldn't think of doing anything like those now, of course.

Yeah! I make you right! Being tough was what it was all about! I done the mole grip trick once............. But I broke a nail.........