Side of the road emergency repairs

[burnt03]

I'm not very mechanically inclined, so thought I'd start a thread to give me and any other rooks out there some helpful tips

What sort of things have stranded you on the side of the road/middle of the bush and what did you do to get back home? (without the use of a towtruck)

[wade shestaka]

Havent been stranded yet but these are some of the things i carry: ratchet straps, electrical tape and duct tape, wire, hoses, cap and rotor, wd 40, quick start, short length of chain, fuses, assorted nuts and bolts,bailing wire, saw and axe, tools, all necessary fluids, garbage bag, large ziploc bags, some rope, etc. Some of this i leave in the truck, some i only take when wheeling. Oh, i forgot the first-aid kit, emergancy blanket, candle and flashlight. Also good to keep some non-perishable food items as well. Iknow im missing some stuff but this is the jest of it. Get to know what items on your rig are proned to failure and take extras. The more weight you carry the more you stress your rig, so find a happy medium. Take a bar of soap for gas tank repair too, and if your in a wooded area and walking back to civilization for help carry something like the axe to defend yourself against predators, dont become a statistic. I also take a portable inflator when wheeling, but their only good for 33's at the most. Dont forget your tire repair kit,spare, and hi-lift jack.

[xjtank]

My cousin punched a hole in his fuel tank when out hunting with a buddy. Course they ran out of fuel.
They popped the hood off the truck and he sat on the fender with a propane tank above the carb and cracked the valve to get the truck out.

I thought that one was pretty smart to get his ass out of a sticky situation.

[75toylet]

ok, i'm no mechanic either so explain this propane thing to me. :confused: how did they get the propane into the carb? can you put too much in and what would happen? how far did they drive like this? this is the kind of idea that could save a bad day from getting worse but i'd be a little leery of trying w/o knowing what i was doing.

[muddhunter]

I've never tried it myself, but you would take a small propane bottle with a torch nozzle on it, hold it upside down right above the carb and voila, your gasoline engine now runs on propane. I think you'd have to hold the butterfly valves open by hand, because your gas pedal would become useless. I think it would be kinda hard to drive with your buddy sitting on the fender with the hood open, especially if you have to wheel an obstacle to get back. But ya gotta do what ya gotta do.

[75toylet]

yeah i was thinking the guy holding the bottle probably figured walking wasn't so bad by the time he was done. reminds me of when the throttle cable on my bronco broke near the top of clear creek back when it wasn't a 2 wheel road. everyone had to take their shoe laces out, tie them together and my friend in the passenger seat had to work the throttle by leaning out the window and pulling on the shoe laces. it was interesting trying to coordinate obstacles and throttle plus it was december and had just snowed so he couldn't feel his hands or face by the time we got back. considering the alternative though it wasn't too bad.

[Wackston]

don't forget about taping a spare door key somewhere on the outside of the vehicle and hiding a spare ignition key inside, you never know when you just might have that brain fart and lock your keys in, or drop them somewhere, my buddy locked his keys in with the motor running, now thats a brain fart

[killerbugsbunny]

Lots of times with flats, pick up a plug kit from princess. helped me out alot.
One time the fuel pump failed on my toy. I had gear oil container and hose and dripped gas into the carb to get me back to town.
Same thing as the propane bottle.

Last story, rear ring and pinion I totally destroyed(10bolt). Pulled the axles, removed the ring gear. Reinstalled carrier with no ring gear, and lube. Installed axles and drove home front wheel drive.
Good old killer got me home, now I have much bigger axles.

[Greg]

Originally posted by burnt03
What sort of things have stranded you on the side of the road/middle of the bush and what did you do to get back home? (without the use of a towtruck) Well, this wasn't me, it was a friend on the Summer Mine Trip II. His 22RE engine stopped running; it would just crank but not start, so after trying the usual things, he started tearing it down and discovered that the timing chain had skipped a couple teeth. So he fixed it, and put it all back together again, right at the side of a logging road in the middle of nowhere.

Oh yeah, then there was Doug, who broke a front leaf on his Sami in the Mud Lakes area. He wrapped his winch cable around the axle, tightened it up, and drove it home.

[Q]

About ten or twelve years ago I was out hunting with a buddy of mine a good couple of hours away from anything. That's a couple of hours driving. We were driving onto a landing at the end of a cut block. There was normal debris on the road nothing major. His truck was a late 80's F150. The front tire drove over a stick and as the tire rolled along it the end was forced up under the truck on the driver side. The truck had dual gas tanks and the stick just happened to smash the plastic solenoid block that the two fuel lines attach to for tank selection. We could smell gas right away and stopped. The contents of both tanks were pouring out on the ground. I pulled off my jacket and shirt crawled under the truck and with my knife cut the two fuel lines off the broken plastic and pinched them over to stop the flow. As I laid on the ground completely covered in gas my buddy found a couple of sticks to cram in the lines until we could figure out how to fix it.
To fix it we by-passed the heater and robbed the unused heater hose. We used part of the hose, electrical tape and the clamps to do our temp fix. I built up the fuel line quite a bit with rubber to fit inside the heater hose. I carved what was left of the broken solenoid block on the engine side fuel line to fit nicely into the other end of the heater hose. We left what was remaining of gas in the other tank alone incase plan "A" didn't work. We didn't have much gas and didn't want to put all our eggs in one basket. It wasn't long and we were on our way out.
The best part was that after being hosed down with gas the only way to stop the chemical burn on my upper torso was to either wash in Coke and stay sticky all the way home or to have my buddy rub me down with the block of ice we had in the cooler.
There was no banjo music, but I'll just say I felt quite refreshed.:redneck

You don't have to be doing much to have a big problem. I always go prepared now whenever I go out even on the most basic logging roads.

[dryflyin]

friend of mine lost his steering out in longworth (hour or two out off prince george) so off goes the hood, buddy hops in the engine compartment with a wrench to do the steering guy inside does the throttle. they do this all the way to PG, passing beers to the guy up front along the way.

[sdillen]

A lot of my breakdowns/trailside repair techniques come from driving little british cars -- you have to know how to improvise when you are battling Lucas electrical systems. . .

-- tire plug kits are a good thing, as is onboard air.

-- I run dual batteries and carry welding rod/#10 filter plate/welding gloves after last summer.

-- Not 4x4, but when I used to deal with little british cars, I had a clutch desintegrate in rush hour traffic in Seattle. On Spitfires, you can pull the tranny out between the seats, so I walked across the street to the parts store and bought a clutch/pressure plate, and changed the clutch on the side of the road. The 4x4 lesson is to carry whatever tools you may need to fix whatever might break.

-- Know how to drive your truck without using the clutch. That will save you when you break a cable or blow the clutch hydraulic system. Drove my spitfire from Seattle to the central Oregon coast with no clutch hydraulics once. . .knew I'd run out of fuel, so I had a spare can on the seat and just refilled the tank while idling along the side of the road in 1st (gas tank was in the middle of the trunk lid, had the top down!)

-- I've had to pull and clean the EGR valve on my S10 a number of times on the side of the road (when the valve sticks, it's basically a wide open manifold vacuum leak). After it stuck the first time and I waited on the side of the road somewhere south of Sacramento for 4 hours waiting for GM to show up (they never did show) I bought factory shop manuals, and I don't go on long trips without the manuals and a good set of tools. Know what might break and bring the tools to fix it!

-- U-joints break. Bring something to fix it. Or at least something to pull the driveshaft and be able to run on the other axle (this means you can't have slip yokes which will result in dumping your fluids all over the road).

-- Tie wraps will fix lots of things if they have to. Can even use large ones as a fan belt in a real pinch, although nylons work better. Speaking of fan belts, for those of us running v-belts, it's nice to adjust all of the accessories so you can take a single size of belt. That way, when one breaks, you can always use the belts you have left to run the more critical stuff (water pump and alternator was more important than water pump/power steering once).

-- Duct tape will fix water hose leaks. Especially if you loosen the radiator cap so the system won't pressurize (which you should do if you have a coolant leak anyway). Polywogs will plug radiator leaks for a short while, but that's another story. . .

-- British cars get dirt in the points. My old Scout used to as well. A business card is the best thing I know of to clean the points and get the car running. The most recent case of this was on my way back from Hut this last spring there was a TR6 dead on the side of the road. Had it running in about 5 minutes.

-- Fire extinguishers are a good thing. It's much easier to do a trailside repair of a broken fuel line than it is to replace the engine and wiring after it burns.

I think of everything that I've had break, I've only had to be towed twice. . .once when I spun a rod bearing in an MG, the other when I broke a timing chain in a Volvo V6 (valves meet pistons and very bad things happen). Every other time, I've been fortunate enough to be able to rig something up to limp home.

[muddhunter]

Originally posted by Wackston
don't forget about taping a spare door key somewhere on the outside of the vehicle and hiding a spare ignition key inside,

Tape isn't the greatest way to do this, it falls off pretty easy, I would use a twist tie, or a zap strap. my $0.02

[Canadian, Eh!]

It's amazing what speaker wire can do as well. Back in the day I had a truck with bad tie rod ends. Long story short one side had the ball fall outta the cup and being a good hour away from home I wan't about to have it towed all the way there. I tied it all together with speaker wire and drove all the way home. A little sketchy.....yes......but it worked.

[muddhunter]

A guy I worked with had an old Chevy van, the U joint in his driveshaft popped while he was out for lunch on his break, he made it back in time, he just wrapped the U joint in 5/16 nylon rope, and limped it back to work where he ordered the U joint from Lordco and installed on his next break.

[pony]

Would be proud of all of you!!:D

Great ideas, I too am looking for what "little things" to pack that can be crucial i.e. tire repair kit

:beer :beer

[wade shestaka]

I forgot that pepper or canned milk can be used to plug small rad leaks. Just dump it in.

[dryflyin]

not many jeep problems but my repairs of throttle and clutch cables, twisted brake linkages,fractured fuel lines(gas in the eyes really burns by the way),fried ignition switch and replacing the rear bearings all in the middle of nowhere(why is that always the case. my buddy always seems to break down beside a parts store) taught me to improvise and always bring tools