Previous owners bodges

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M

Mingus

Active Member
Posts
133
We've all seen it.....new acquisitions with bodged up fixes and 'field' repairs. Now of course we would never do any of these but whats the worse you've seen.
Mine was on a S3 Hicap i bought last year.....brakes were dodgy as hell....took apart rear drums and there were no adjusters fitted for the shoes.....wasnt broken....just nothing there,
 
My favourite was someone on ere cleaning up the chassis only to find some packing material filling the holes, Then waxoyled over.
 
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If you guys don't mind a non LR example :
Years ago I bought a 'sixties mk 2 Zephyr & couldn't understand why the front passenger side was low. Close inspection revealed that a large dent in the top of the wing had been filled, not with any traditional product, but cement :eek:
Perhaps the PO worked on a building site & had some mix left over !
 
My sills were mostly old copies of the daily mail and filler. Two of the things I hate most.

What would also be interesting is to hear what bodges peeps on here have done - I once snapped of one of the rear trailing arms on an off road and reattached it with cable ties and binders twine. Got us off the course and then the 40miles (at 15miles an hr) to Devon 4x4 to have it welded back on.
 
When I first got my series 3, the chassis had a patch that was tack welded on in two places. The rest of the "welds" were silicone sealant.

Once it had been painted over with underseal it was very difficult to tell.

Most of the other welds on that chassis looked like pigeon droppings. Thankfully I chopped it up and sent it for scrap.
 
Apart from the usual electrical bodges found on almost all second hand cars, the two worst bodges I've come across after buying a car were:-

On a Mini, a previous owner had fitted one of those small bracket things to drop the steering wheel which wasn't the real bodge, they'd fitted it without adjusting the steering rack to allow for the different angle of the steering column. That put extra strain on the spline joint between the rack and the column which, you've guessed it gave way one day. Not a pleasant experience trying to brake without being in control of your direction. As they say, "Squeaky bum time".

The other bodge I came across was on my old Lotus. For a long time I couldn't work out why the engine looked like it was on a tilt. As you're probably aware the Elan was a fibreglass body on a separate chassis and it turned out that the front body mountings had collapsed at some time. That dropped the body onto the engine, well, the airbox on the carbs to be accurate, so rather than repair the body mounts, the previous bodger put a spacer under one side of the engine mounts to tilt the engine so that it cleared the bonnet when it was closed. That one had me scratching my head for quite a while.
 
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One of my mk2 escorts was rotten in the boot floor so I cut the entire floor out & welded in 5mm x50mm angle iron
across the chassis behind the rear seat/across the rear panel & up along both chassis legs with a 19mm
piece of marine ply as the floor the mot tester said he couldn't fail it & commented on my welding skills lol

I also had a tow bar on to it haha :eek:
 
had an accord type r and thought it had issues with alignment/drop links/control arms. When I stripped suspension the shocks weren't even for that model!
 
I once used a squashed coke can and some twine to fix a snapped clutch cable on my old golf. It had broken on a hill doing a hill start.

I once got a moped home about 4 miles by stuffing the punctured tyre with grass, leaves sticks and stuff.

I used my belt to hold the battery down on the same golf after the battery tray rotted out. I had tried a bungee cord but it was tight enough so I used the bungee cord as a belt

Lots of others when at home to make tools do things they shouldn’t lol
 
The pipe running from the manifold snapped on my 90 while in wales so a red bull can, RTV and some jubilee clips all fixed! lol

Previous owner had also connected everything behind the dash with connector blocks and red wireing. Wasnt east trying to fit a new stereo lol

Steering damper was more duct tape than steel i did wondee why the steering was off
 
My 1989 mini sills were paper mache with filler ( like mentioned earlier) when I bought it in 97.
I was going to say, cutting springs to lower the car, but we’ve all been there......;)
Had an XR3i, someone crashed into the back of me. Hammered it out and filler, pop rivet another rear panel over the top of the crushed one and tucked it behind the bumper, to part-ex for a Astra GTE.

Careful what you say about your Landy, the previous owner may be a member on here........don’t need to offend people ;)

Got say, the moped tyre with twigs is the one that got me
 
I had a triumph 2000, that had vast amounts of black wiring all over the place for a home built by previous owners security system that didn't work. It took some time to remove and find where it intercepted the ignition system.
I have of course done the coke can on the exhaust.
The important bodge was having to drive from the Firth of Forth, to Weston super mare. Just outside Hamilton the wipers froze to the screen And the mechanism under the dash broke. After defrosting the wipers I drove the rest of the way with a string out of each window, and the heater on full blast. I did discover that around 55mph the snow blows over a Chrysler Alpine windscreen with out hitting it.

This 110 had some well hidden by black stuff, dodgy welding to rust on the rear half of the chassis , hence it's now got a galvanised one.
 
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