So most of us have been guilty of half arsed or down right dangerous mechanical engineering at one point or another to our beloved vehicles.
What have you done, through lack of funds, naivety or just plain stupidity to keep your VW on the road in the past?
What would of made the VW engineers cringe?
Share your best and worst bush mechanic stories.

used an old as the hills pair of circlip pliers with two pairs of vice grips locked on to it as a rear wheel bearing puller one day, hooked up the coil lead direct from the battery out the passengers door after a short, just a couple that i can say iv done it worked so thats the main thing

well dont know if non-vw vehicles apply but made a nappy for my dad's truck to pass rego (oil leak before we had time to fix it) out of 4 zip-ties and an old sock filled with kitty litter. number 2 would be attaching mine and 3 other mates shoe laces together, to make a throttle cable in a 1200 datto with a turbo sr20 engine..... i drove it from the blue mountains to sydney with one hand on the steering wheel and the other out the window pulling on the shoe-lace cable. lets just say it was an interesting trip and at no point did any of us even remotely feel like falling asleep. there was more but i cant remember at this stage.... lol

An old mate of mine back in the day bought himself an LJ torrie and took me for a spin in it.
He was fanging it around the neighborhood giving it all it had. He then parked the car to show me the engine.
Upon opening the bonnet I was in disbelief at the fact that the motor was only held down with wire as it had broken engine mounts!!!
Bloody idiot he was.....

Not me but a mate of mine - lowered the front of his 1303 by compressing the springs with spring compressors and then leaving them in place.

mike was telling me about a beetle he saw and to lower it they had thrown 4 bags of cement in the front of it

LOL when i was at summernats with some friends my mate went to Big W and bought some bags of pool salt and put them in his boot so it would look lower then returned them the next day when we were leaving saying they were the wrong type

Quote:

Originally posted by polak mike was telling me about a beetle he saw and to lower it they had thrown 4 bags of cement in the front of it

I remember when my daughter was an apprentice (carpenter), and we went to a friends place about 40km away (where her builder husband had gone to a nursing home with alsymiers) as she was trying to get rid of all his tools that she had'nt been able to sell at a garage sale. We ended up with the 74L bug totally loaded with tools and boxes of screws, nails, and other fixiings - must have weighed well over half a ton - in the front, floors, back seat, behind the back seat, and nursing some stuff. The bug sure was low, and was like trying to steer a truck. I'm glad we didn't have to stop in a hurry.

I have also repaired throttle cables with wire when they have broken (probably 10 times or so over the years), ant the funniest was when my daugher broke one at TAFE when she went to leave at lunch time. She rang me about a spare, and I described how to twitch it up with a bit of wire. She was half way through when the rest of the class came out for lunch (all blokes), and she said she was OK despite their concerns. A few minutes later, she had it fixed, but the tools away, started it and drove off to get lunch, much to thier amazement.

When I wrote off my first 76 beetle the insurance company let me salvage some parts that weren't covered by the policy. So I dropped in some seats that were held in place with a bolt, so they weren't going backwards or forwards. I also pulled out the custom gauge panels I made and replaced them with black painted cardboard to cover the holes.