Craziest thing you've done to "just get home"

[2ndCIB]

I was driving my family out to dinner in an 85 chevy with an elderbrock carb when the fuel pump went out. Family instantly mad. My wife and daughter took off walking to the nearest store, about a mile and a half away, to call a friend of mine to pick us up. I got he bright idea to take the wiper fluid jug off, pour out the windshield wiper fluid, disconect the fuel line at the pump and let gravity fill the washer jug then bolt it back up. I disconnected the washer hose at the windshield and shoved the end in the carb bowl inlet, electrical taped it in and hit the windshield squirter. The truck fired up right away. I could get about a half mile per squirt. Picture this; engine bogs, squirt squirt, wipe wipe, RPM comes back up: Repeat all the way home. I caught up to my wife at the store's driveway with the A/C on high. Wife still mad.

[PanelDeland]

I bought a low milage 74 Monte Carlo,It only had 60K but had a dent in every body panel but the trunk lid and top.The lights worked but wouldn't adjust to spec.The drivers door was so bad,that I just opened the sunroof and walked up the back of it and across theroof to get in.I drove it about 3 months that way until I had enough "Fun Tickets" to swap the engine into my 67 Panel.I paid $600 for it,found $200 worth of old coins under the seat,sold the tranny for $75 after the motor was out and got$200 scrap for it.It's not a getting home story,this was my DD.I'm older wiser and know where to get a bus pass now.

[jchav62]

Some crazy stories on here. Mine's not as crazy the one's I'm reading on here, but I've also had to pull some tricks out of my sleeve to get home in the past. More than once, but the one that's coming to mind is:

I had one of those cheap chome altenator brackets on my truck... the lower one broke on me, belt went loose and pulleys stopped turning. Didn't have any tools but luckily I was right across the street from Homes Depot. I went in and bought a roll of wire (I was running low on that anyway) and a cheap tool set (wrenches and pliers). I just had to pull the lower part of the altenator tight enough so the belt would turn the water pump. I found two holes on the inner fender, wrapped the wire around and strung it the lower part of the alt. Fired in up, pump was turning... Limped in home and went to the junkyard for some genuine GM brackets.

[pritch]

When I bought my Panel, it was in Phoenix. I drove all night from Salt Lake with a trailer to pick it up. On the way back, literally on top of Hoover Dam the fuel pump went out on my tow vehicle. This was a Ford F-250, and I've had this happen on 2 different Fords, when the fuel pump goes out, you can still make about 10 MPH. So I limped up out of the canyon and down into Vegas. I hoped against hope that it was just a clogged fuel filter, so I changed that in the parking lot of the local Checkers and got a room for the night. Next morning, it started up and ran great, so off I went. I don't know why it worked again that morning, but I made about 150 miles before it went out again and I was back to 10 MPH, with 200 miles left to go. I called a buddy of mine to come get me, and I got off the freeway in Beaver, Utah and waited about 4 or 5 hours for him to get there. We put the F-250 on the trailer and I drove the Panel. I had no idea how it would run or if anything even worked on it, but it did fine.

[michael bustamante]

The things ive done are, shameful......just awful.... I cant......

[richard2717]

Years back my buddy talked me into getting a beach pass for my 79' toyota 4x4. We go into the guard shack I pay the fifty bucks and get the sticker. He puts his on his Bronco II and I put mine on the yoda. Jump in truck and key wont go in ignition. Messed with it for 20 minutes. Had some tools and a bfh. Used BFH to bust column apart so I could remove key side of ignition. Then took switch side of ignition out and used flat blade screwdriver to start truck. Looks real nasty, I am mad but truck starts so we go on to the beach. Go several miles down the beach ( almost to VA line)and park both trucks. Get out and spend day enjoying the beach. Later in the afternoon we decide to leave, I break out trusty screwdriver to start truck and NOTHING. No electrical just NOTHING. I get out of truck look under hood, don't see anything obvious at first, then notice that the starter is hanging under the truck by the cables. walk several hundred feet tracing tracks and find one nut and one bolt. Realize threads are stripped in aluminum bell housing so bolt wont go back in. Stud for the nut has crushed threads from starter rubbing back and forth so nut wont go back on. Find pair of vice grips and clamp starter to bell housing. Truck fires up and away we go. couple hundred yards later truck shuts down. Vice grips apparently not tight enough. Cant find vice grips. Search for 20 minutes told my buddy to stop laughing and back his truck up. Vice grips were under his tire. Get vice grips back on and use several wire ties to secure them to the firewall so I dont have buddy running over them again. Vice grips don't seem to like the curvature of bell housing, a mile later they fall off again. I figure no big deal at least I know where they are Go to push clutch in to bring truck to stop and pedal falls to floor and stays there. Look under truck and fluid everywhere. When starter fell positve post shorted out on hyd. clutch line. Now really mad. still have two miles of beach to cover and more people are laying out on beach in way. No clutch now so have to start out in low 1 to get truck moving. Sand dead enough cant shift before truck comes to stop. Labor engine for next mile of beach. Get bright idea to got off main beach and take access road behind dunes to avoid people on beach. Bad idea. deeper sand made for harder labor of engine and wild horses standing in road way. No stopping for horses just blow the horn.Then we come up on riders on horseback. Tell buddy to go around me since he had a pa on his cb and I didnt. Told them to clear out cause I could not stop. Looked like Moses parting the red sea . Finally get to blacktop and while waiting for truck to cool down some and buddy to fill air in his tires I notice I had some new brake lines laying in the back of the truck from something else I had been working on. Crawl under truck on hot blacktop and remove remenants of line. Lines in back of truck look right so I proceeded to bend new one to similar coils of existing one. I was proud for a short moment until I crawl back under truck on hot blacktop again and realize toyota metric/ old chevy standard thread. Crawl back out from under truck go to front bumper walk over to guard house tell them where they can place sticker. Get in truck and tell buddy that I will drive to Napa a few miles away and get metric line and more fluid. Pull up to Napa to find out they close at noon on Sunday. Drive truck 35 miles home no clutch. Drove truck like that for two more weeks until I got my 69 chevy back on the road. Me and my buddy dont talk much anymore. Never have been back to the beach either

[hugger6933]

I put in a breif rundown of what I did to get my wife and myself home from the other side of the state several years ago. I know how ya'll love pic so I dug one out . This is what we ended up with this was taken at my shop right after we took the straps off that held the doors shut ,if you look you can see one hanging by the drivers door. By the way the man that got this sub from me still drives it every day , he live about 4 blocks down the street from me

[bigkountry]

Lost the brakes in my old 81 K10 and was 30 miles from home. I was able to take backroads most of the way home, slow speeds and using the e-brake to stop when needed got me back.

[Scott Webster]

I had an 85 chevy spectrum. This pos was what I drove in high school while I was fixing up my 72 C10. Now picture a car with a couple tubs of bondo in the hood and fenders because wind would catch the hood after hitting a few deer. Headlights screwed to straps. no door handles. Hit a bump and the trunk would open. This thing looked like someone put plates on an abandoned car. Anyways, I spent a fair length of time using the parking brake because the regular lines rotted out. After a few weeks, the clutch cable snaps in the parking lot. My friends say that pos is toast. You'll never drive it home. I hopped in and said I'll see ya tomorrow. Started it in gear and speed shifted it home. As soon as I could afford to, it got recycled to put my truck on the road.

[y5mgisi]

Good storys!

[tobytuttle]

this is not about me... but its one of the crazys that live around here ..while driving sitting at a stop light i pulled up next to a guy and noticed that he had a generator running, in the bed, plugged in to a battery charger, and hooked to the battery with the hood slightly ajar....obviously he had a bad alternator...priceless ......i still tell that story to this day...i laughed for days after that

[MikeyMan]

Another one in the 74 Malibu -

About 25 years ago, I leave a friends' house way out in the country at 4am. A few miles down the road the alt/gen light comes on. A few more miles, the temp light comes on. I figure I lost the belt. It's late, the middle of nowhere, in winter, screw it I'm pushing on! Make another 20 miles and get pulled over by the cops. I get out pleading to let me go, my car is dying and I'm only 5 miles from home. No dice, so I shut the car off. I find the belt intact hanging on the water pump. So I start wrenching while the cop is writing. He hands me a speeding ticket, and I say I might need a jump. He says tough, and leaves me! I tightened up the belt and it fired right up and drove it home.

[Indyuke]

When i was a kid, the family decided to move across the country. 3,000 miles, and during that time two valve springs broke on the old 292 in the '65 chevy truck we where driving. we had a box of simple tools, so we pulled into a theater parking lot and parked under an overhang in the pouring rain while my dad changed out the spring.

he couldn't figure out a way to keep the valve from dropping into the cylinder while changing the spring out until my mom give him one of her knitting needles to bend into this wierd contorted form so it would fit through the spark plug hole and my mom could hold up the valve while my dad tried to compress the spring enough to get the new one on. we did that twice on that trip. he kept valve springs in his toolbox for many years after that, long after we got rid of that truck.

a couple years back, we had a really hot day (103F) here and the truck overheated on the way into seattle 30 some miles away. Pretty soon coolant and trans fluid was pouring onto the ground and i parked the truck a couple miles from where i needed to be, told the wife to guard the truck and i would be back.

i sweated several miles to my destination, then several miles back, hopped in the truck hoping it was cooled down enough and headed home. 5 miles down the road, steam starting coming from under the hood and sure enough, trans fluid starting pouring onto the ground. so we whipped into a 7 eleven, got 10 quarts of trans fluid, filled up the radiator with a hose and jetted out of there. we made it the remaining 25 miles home, stopping every couple of miles to put another quart in the trans. There was a very nice trail of trans fluid and antifreeze behind us the entire way. by the time we got home, the trans wasn't shifting right and i had pretty much resigned myself to it being destroyed. I wasn't worried about the motor, it had seen worse.

The next day i went out, fixed the overheat issue, fired it up and still drive the truck to this day. Never a problem with either engine or trans since then.

[treveiger]

Well I didn't know it at the time but I drove close to 400 miles home going on average over 80mph with only one bolted in motor mount and no seat belts. Had a radio though so its all good

[Dunenutt]

My list of "fixes" is very long...

40 years of four wheeling in Arizona breaks ALOT of parts!

My most proud "fix" was on my CJ5. I broke a rear spring about 30 miles off of the highway. Most of the trail was 4 low, and very rocky. I chopped a nice sized tree into a 2' long log, with a small hatchet. I then " borrowed" about 20' of barbed wire from the top of a fence. Strapped the log to the frame with the wire, so that the axle would rest on it ( doing this will result in looking like you were in a fight with a badger). Wheeled the 30 miles back to the highway, and drove the 120 miles home with no issues. The next day, the log was worn about 1/2 way through, and so was the U bolts that hold the axle on.

[Legolas894]

Originally Posted by jocko

thought I'd look cool doing a burnout in the ol 57 chev in the conga line leaving after a high school football game... (yes, this is an OLD story). Promptly sharted my rear's spider gears out all over the tarmac (I was young and dumb, what can I say), anyway - no more forward gear transportation that night. But I noticed there were still enough nubs left on the teeth such that reverse still worked at least. And it worked ALL the way home ~15 miles. In reverse. Drove backwards on the WRONG side of the road because it was night time - that way, if anyone was coming the other direction, we'd see the headlights miles away (and they'd just see my taillights...) and so we'd just scoot off to the side of the road pointing the "right" direction - i.e. looking like we were going the other way, but just pulled over to the side of the road for a second... Worked like a champ. Took a while, but worked like a champ... I gave up dropping the clutch "for show" right then and there.

I like your logic -Drive on the wrong side and pull over to the side if you get caught!!

[old Chevy guy]

Since I first saw this post I knew I had to write something in but cant figure out which adventure to write about,believe me when I tell you theres been a few in 32 years of driving. I should also mention that I can only think of one vehicle Ive had that I paid over $1000 dollars for on the initial purchase and many were $500 and down. So one time me and a buddy were driving my 69 nova about 75 miles into a neighboring state to go to a restoration parts place to pick up parts for our current projects. The nova had a 250 and was going strong but suddenly started to stammer like it was running out of gas,but it was ok if we just went slower,progressivly the problem got worse until we couldnt go any slower and the car just quit on the highway. We sat a minute and tried it and it starts but stalls about 20 seconds later. After a few such attempts we get out to assess the situation. Theres gas clearly visable in the inline filter but not getting into the carb.We start looking for some tools but have none. finaly after a thorugh search the only thing we could turn up was a factory tire iron, like the one you use on a bumper jack. Well it so happend it was in like new pristine shape and I was able to use it as a screwdriver to take the top off the carb. Turns out the seat for the needle had gotton loose and threaded out till the float was pinned on the bottom of the bowl holding the needle valve shut. Tightened it up put the carb back together and was on our way. Another time that same car made a loud bang on the highway Like something came off,followed by a violent shaking that felt like the whole thing was going to come apart. Stopped to discover somehow one blade broke off the fan and went careaning through the engine compartment and was gone. The motor was so out of balance it was undrivable. This time I had a handfull of tools and took the fan off for the ride home. Had that fan trick happen on a 72 nova with a 250 once too,but that time when the blade that came off it cut the top radiator hose,knocked the neck out of the radiator and impaled itself in the side of my almost brand new battery. Had to leave it in a park and ride lot and get a ride that day.

[Chitown_hillbilly]

Here's a different take...

Snapped my Achilles in a Rec league basketball game. Wasn't going to pay for an E-room visit so I had my teammates toss me in the truck and drove home with just my left foot. Wouldn't be such a big deal if the truck wasn't a 4 speed. Which in turn wouldn't have been that bad if I80 wasn't jacked up with a Car Accident and it was bumper to bumper at 10-15 mph. Finally just pulled it into 4 low and crawled at an idle in second gear until I got passed the accident.

[kensousa]

Drove 2 hours away to look at a 57 GMC that I was interested in.
It ran and drove, but barely. There was a lot of chewing gum and coat hangars holding this truck together, but for the most part she was all original and the important parts were there.
Knowing we were asking for trouble we flipped a coin to either attempt to drive it home or go find a U-Haul trailer.
So I'm driving this beast down the highway and it started to rain. Windshield wipers were a couple of those "less than important" parts that were missing.
After a quick stop at the next gas station, some Rain X, and a hand held squeegee like they have at the gas pumps to use while you're filling up, we were on our way again. I'm driving and my buddy is hanging out the passenger window scraping the windshield with that squeegee.
We made it most of the way home, but she over heated and we ended up with the U-Haul trailer anyway.

[aggieguy713]

Used a pen cap for a carter pin on the carb linkage, ran better than it ever had. haha

[screamin_c10]

"Borrowed" my mom's '75 Monte Carlo and a bunch of us decided to play hooky up at Lake Berryessa one spring day 25 years ago. Well we loaded 6 of us in the beasty and away we went haulin a$$ through the mountain pass up to the lake. All the spirited driving and occasional donuts in gravel turnouts along the way took its toll on the radiator and we sprung a leak just as we got to our destination. Being young and way dumb we let the car cool down while we hung out with friends. My buddies put away a 12 pack, while I downed my fair share of Mountain Dews. Even that young and dumb I knew better than to drink and drive.

Once we left I noticed the temp climbing again and realized we needed coolant and a way to patch the leak (tube had cracked). Luckily we had some needle nose pliers in the trunk and I rolled up the tube, crimped nice and tight fixing the leak. Coolant was nowhere to be found.. well kinda. We pondered the situation for a while when my buddy tells me he needs to go take a whiz in the bushes... BINGO!... yup, we all took turns "fillin" the radiator as much as we could topped it off with a beer and 2 Mountain Dews from the cooler and off to town we went.

Being a teenaged boy my mind had two things on it most of the time... girls and their anatomy, so I totally forgot about the "repair" until the heater core went out about 4 months later... Man that car stunk to high heaven for weeks. I only wish I had seen the looks on the mechanics faces as they pulled the core and flushed the system...

[LEEVON]

A couple miles home in reverse. It was pretty smooth sailing except the 4 way stops, that really blew people's minds...

Another time, the windshield on my Festiva (haha I know) was iced and fogged over and the defroster wouldn't work. So the passenger "navigated" for me with his head out the window. Since that was so much fun, I had one of the guys in the back seat shift gears and another one do the steering wheel. SO, let me recap...I'm working the pedals and taking direction from the navigator who had his head out the window, another guy is shifting and yet another is steering and nobody can see a thing out the windshield. We made it all the way into town for some food and back home. Might have been some beer involved : (

[into69z]

One of the many stories I have had was just a few years ago. My Dad called me and explianed that he was going to replace the old 69 truck for a new ranch truck. He asked me if I wanted it and a gladly accepted. When I got to his place, which was 525 miles from my house, he asked me how I planned on getting it home. I told him that I had rebuilt the truck about 17 years ago and I would just drive it home. I checked all the basics before I left, oil, water lights etc. and with my wife following me, headed for home. Got to a gas station about 100 miles away and after filling up the truck would not start. It had a new battery but just click so after about 1/2 hour I got a BFH and tapped the starter and then she started. Drove about 45 miles past Phonienix and just then the engine spewed all the radiator water just as I was coming to a rest stop, so I coasted in and tried to figure out how to get home since I had so much trust in my workmanship, I didn't carry any tools! The water pump took a dump. I called a friend who found a Napa auto parts store in Blythe Ca. which was 196 miles from where I was and was on my way home, so I called to see if they had a small block water pump in stock and find out what time they closed. I called AAA and asked for a flatbed tow truck and we headed for the store. We made great time with the tow truck driver as with the truck running 55 - 60 was about all I could do with the high rear gear, but the tow truck was running about 80! We got to Napa about 1/2 hour before they closed got the water pump and had to buy some tools and gasket sticky, put it all together and drove it the remaining 60 miles to the house. Lucky for me , my AAA card is the premier free 200 mile card, and with buying tools and the water pump, I still did better than I had planned because I was home about the same time as I had planned and spent less because I only filled up once.

[71gmcburb]

one that comes to mind for me was when I bought a 68 Thunderbird 4-door (it had suicide rear doors like the lincolns of the day)in Seattle. owner told it just needed a fuel tank and it'd run and drive.

I thought "it's only 35 miles" so me and a buddy drive down with a 10 gallon pony tank for a boat and some fuel line. I routed the temp fuel line onto the pass floorboard hooked-up the pony tank, checked all fluids, started the car and away we go. me in the T-bird and my buddy running chase in my 66 Econoline.

Made it about 1 mile and car started overheating, let it cool and as we were gonna be driving interstate speeds for most of the rest way home I pulled the thermostat, refilled the rad with water and rachet straped the drivers door and passanger rear door shut as the latch wouldn't catch and we started off again. Getting up to 65 took a bit so I pulled off again and after a quick inspection discovered the carb was flooding out after it warmed up, so I took a headlight conector for a 9006 headlight bulb that I had in my tool kit and cliped it to the carb housing to hold the butterfly open and drove the car the rest of the way home like that.
That was a adventure. I restored the bird and sold it about a year later

[pat 70/71]

This happened to me back in my VW daze! I had a 72 beetle 2240cc close ratio trans all the good stuff, porsche alloys disc brakes, basic drag car on the street! I could pull the front wheels off the ground from 1st to 2nd gear. any how,broke a throttle cable on the 101 at cold water canyon and pulled into the center divider( no emergency lane ) cars were just blowing bye! I had to get out of there or be hit so I took of one of my chicks shoe laces and tied the dual 48 IDA webers open and started it up and made a speed run off the freeway! Sounds funny, but to control the gas I turned the key off& on! Never was I more happy to have a 11 second street car (4 mpg) cheers, Pat