Crazy fixes / bodges

[rok-the-boat]

I wonder what ideas people have come up with when fixing bikes?

I had a DR500 and lacked the special tool for undoing the fork bolt to change the seals. I removed the C rings, filled the forks with oil to the brim, and put them (one at a time) between two walls (on the floor) and pressed them with a car jack. It was a bit messy but it worked. Seals popped right out.

[rok-the-boat]

Another bodge ... when younger I lacked tools.

So, how to undo the pesky crank nut to get the flywheel off to change the points etc?

Easy, put rope down the plug hole, carefully let it coil as you put it in. Then, when you turn the crank nut the piston can't move. Only did it on small single cylinder bikes. Never had a problem. Never bent a rod or damaged a piston.

I have a Makita electric impact wrench now and use it with torque sticks for tightening. It is ACE. I compared the torque settings with a standard torque wrench on my car wheel nuts and the torque sticks are pretty accurate.

[oldiebutagoody]

When I was young and broke I had to resort to suchlike fixes.

On both my GT750 waterbuckets there was a frightening tendency to wallow in sweeping corners. I decided to throw money at the problem. Literally I packed 8 x 10c pieces ($1.60 was 1/50th of my weeks wages) on top of each fork spring, and while i was at it bought my first Haynes manual, fork oil and new seals. It was impossible to do the cap up by hand though so dug out an old "Record" window sash cramp from the back of my Dad's garage. I could then wind the cap on under controlled pressure. Used many times over the years for similar tasks.

Bikes long gone but still have the sash cramp which I eventually inherited.

[Akzle]

an empty lion brown can and large hose clamp make for an impromptu piston ring compressor

[Black Knight]

You drink lion brown?-Sheesh!

[Luckylegs]

You drink lion brown?-Sheesh!

No he doesnt - he uses them to compress piston rings.

[Luckylegs]

Squirted CRC down the sparkplug hole to get the motor to fire after the bike had not been riden for a few months. While it worked for me others on here have said it would damage your motor although I have read on another site such a fix can be done. Maybe it depends on the bike if damage is done.

Come on now - you do yourself a disservice. We know you installed puppies to the bottom of the bike to lower the centre of gravity to help you get around corners at the recommended speed......

[rok-the-boat]

As a teen someone gave me a Suzuki T125 Stinger. Mice had chewed the wires. Didn't have much money so I rewired it with black wire - it was the cheapest. I got carried away and replaced every wire with black wire and house electrical connectors. Because I had done it myself I knew how it worked, but I pitied the next guy. I have never been afraid of electrics since.

[rok-the-boat]

Riding to Cornwall on my trusty Suzuki GP100 following my mate on a CB125. He ran over a piece of leaf spring and holed his crankcase ... oil everywhere ... right next to a motor shop. 1 inch hole. The guy there looked at it, cleaned it up, and made some of his personal mix - iron filings and an epoxy type glue - plus and inch squareish piece of sheet metal. We could not believe it - and an hour or two later - it held. He charged us nothing, saying it probably would not work. We rode on and that bike did many more miles.

[AllanB]

Rough bastards.


Whats wrong with balled up chicken wire stuffed down a exhaust for 'muffling' ............

[Akzle]

Rough bastards.


Whats wrong with balled up chicken wire stuffed down a exhaust for 'muffling' ............
Mufflers are for pussies.

[GazzaH]

Only the noisy ones

[Akzle]

Only the noisy ones

noisy pussy?

might want to get that checked out...

[rok-the-boat]

2 stroke exhaust cleaning

Take it off, stuff a potatoe in one end, stand it up and fill it with a caustic soda solution, leave over night - 24 hours. The next day it will zing like a new zorst.

[HondaLad]

I still can't think of anything that tops this.

https://www.kiwibiker.co.nz/forums/showthread.php/44462-ZX10-Mobility-Edition

[AllanB]

noisy pussy?

might want to get that checked out...

Could have run dry and now have a bit of piston slap.

[Maha]

I still can't think of anything that tops this.

That was legendary, saw him at the street races that day.

[AllanB]

Bamboo - the poor mans carbon fiber?

[GazzaH]

Bamboo? Bamboo? I used to dream of bamboo.

[awayatc]

While ago on wat back from cold duck to new plymouth accelerator cable broke on my Harley. ...

Spliced keyring onto remainder of cable and juggled between accelerator / brake /handle bar with right hand in middle of winter on winding inland roads.

In the end I had it sussed and passed a fair few vehicles at decent pace....

[rok-the-boat]

I had to bodge a throttle cable too. Once on a bike, once on a car. On the bike - finger works well, just wrap it around something. On the car ... a friend jammed a bit of wood on the throttle linkage while I held the clutch ... didn't go very fast but flat roads saw me get home.

Clutch cable bust at the lever on a TS125 - you only need it for setting off - mole grips on the cable craftily levered against the lever bracket. Down hill rolling start Ok tho.

And I once drove a car from Scotland to Sheffield without using brakes - if I used the brakes - the piston seized on and you had to hit the calliper with a hammer to free it. Ah, I lie - I braked once and had to get out and hit it. Handbrake was used ...sometimes. As soon as I got back I fixed it - shoulda done it before I set off :-!

I guess not many of you guys ever had to bodge stuff ... we were pretty poor and had no choice ...

[ellipsis]

...for some reason the brake fluid escaped from my old HG Holden while it was parked up in Havelock, (Marlborough) while I was out fishing for a few days in the outer sounds...got back late from fishing, dead town, nothing to do but either hang around and freeze 'til morning or drive home to Banks Peninsula with no brakes...took the safe option, and drove..I'd put a 1 Ton gearbox in it, like all my Holdens, and that little floor shift worked overtime all the way home...another time in my HJ Holden returning from Golden Bay I hit something on the road just after coming off the Hundalees, bent the selector on the box and got all the way back in top gear...got trickier as I got close to Chch about 8pm on a Friday night...poor old girl had to work hard trying to stay with some revs at times...no bodges necessary, just had to pretend nothing was wrong, both times...

[Drenai Knight]

My latest bodge job was zip tying a lawnmower gas tank on my KV75 because i cant find the original. and it was missing a front guard and chucking dirt in my face so i found a DR200 rear guard and zip tied that to the front. They both work exceptionally well.

332893

[Akzle]

My latest bodge job was zip tying a lawnmower gas tank on my KV75 because i cant find the original. and it was missing a front guard and chucking dirt in my face so i found a DR200 rear guard and zip tied that to the front. They both work exceptionally well.

332893

i'm on my phone and blind. is that a fucken goat?

[Paul in NZ]

Went out for a weekend deer hunting with my best friend in his Mk1 Cortina wagon…

He was a bit ‘excitable’ in those days and drove everywhere pretty well flat out. On the very sketchy gravel road to the place where we were leaving the car, he managed to catch a big rock on the muffler which pulled the whole system backwards. Those cortinas had a stupid flange fitting where the cast iron header joined the pipe. The pipe had a flared end which was clamped onto a ridge on the header with a V clamp thing. These were dodgy when new – fecking hopless by the time the cars got to us…

Anyway it pulled the pipe off the header (broke the flange) but we were only a 100yds from the road end so he kept going… The hot pipe fell against the hydraulic clutch line and burnt through it… So way out in the whoops, no clutch and no exhaust… Fuck… (no cell phones then either)…

We had a 6” crescent wrench so we pulled the whole exhaust off and cobbled enough pipe work to get the gasses out of the engine bay. We then developed a starting technique where he would start the car, I’d push it as fast as I could and run and jump in through the rear hatch and pull that closed while he crashed it into gear and we were off… I’d climb over the gear into the front and job done… it was a bloody long trip home…. Getting through a couple of fords and up rough tracks with no clutch was not easy..

[Drenai Knight]

i'm on my phone and blind. is that a fucken goat?


Nah it's a 1973 Kawasaki Kv75 sometimes called a MT1 [Mini Trail 1].

[ellipsis]

…around about 1975 or 6 I bought an Austin A30 for 25 bucks in the back bar of the British in Lyttleton.
I bought it sight unseen, even though I could see it parked out on Norwich Quay through the open door. It was rusty green and the constant abuse of taxiing the crew members of a coastal ship which was in the dry dock on survey, to and fro between the dock and the British for the whole period of their stay, about 6 weeks, had fucked the back springs from constant overload. I saw eleven people get out of it a few days earlier.

I drove it away that night, the arse was dragging and the front seat fell out when I was driving the little pommy joke up a seriously steep hill. I managed to keep my foot on the gas but I was sitting on the floor by then, luckily I’d driven that road blind for some time so I managed to get to a point where I could swing it onto a bit of flat road…anyway I fixed the spring issue by jacking the body high enough to slide a pipe through the leaf ends that had come through the body due to rust and overload. I shackled it to the ends, dropped her on the ground and it worked, but it clattered and slapped around so much that it drew attention to the fact that it was fucked. Don’t forget this was in the day when if you new the right kind of person , a WOF label from Govt Print was a $1.50, but it still paid to be not too overt about it.

After the local MOT cop ordered me and the A30 off the road in a very infrequent stop outside the Lyttleton road tunnel on a bloody saturday morning, after returning from a trip into Chch, I had to get very drastic. It was the clattering and banging under brakes that drew his attention.

To be fair he wasn’t such a bad guy, still a traffic cop though. He could have done more than call me things that were probably true at the time, but he didn’t. But I did have things to do later that day so I needed the wheels, moving.

I changed the configuration of my repairs and opted for a clatter free and softer ride. Being a chippy and having a saw and shit , and some good old 4x2 , I built a new section of wall that sat up under the window sill where the boot lid hinged behind the back seat. Two struts of 4x2 bolted into the shackles at the end of the springs and built into my little wall and it was perfect, but when I dropped it on the ground it was jacked up about four inches too high and it didn’t really suit the profile I was trying to create, so up in the air, unbolt the new struts, cut three or four inches off and re-bolt them. That was perfect too. It was still rust and green and a bit of orange red lead though, a dead giveaway.

The bloke I shared a house with was a painter, he had a four gallon tin of bright red roof paint. His little brother helped me mask off the glass with newspaper and sellotape and then I splashed on lots and lots of red paint. I used a wallpaper paste brush because it was the biggest brush I could find. I would hazard a guess that after doing that and it being a hot day, we would have gone and sat on the verandah overlooking our wee town and smoked lots of pot, but anyway the A30 drip dried and was fairly tacky when I drove back through the tunnel about 4 hours later.

I later sold the A30 for 65 bucks, a long time later. They were my flash, red, wheels for a few more months.

[gsxr]

Back in early 1985 I picked up an almost new GPZ 550 factory engined street legal race bike from Wellington that had been crashed and repaired and proceeded to ride back to Christchurch. After fueling up in Blenheim is was getting dark Heading up the hill south of Blenheim late on a Sunday night there was very little traffic so none of any use to ne. Fortunately I had in my backpack my handy wee pocket knife handy tool thingy. I used the tiny saw to cut a lenght of #8 wire from a cockys fence then cut that into 2 pieces. Useing two rocks i peen one end and fitted as a temp chain link then peened the other end.Was a mission in the light of a 1/2 moon Got me back to Christchurch with no issues .

[roogazza]

…around about 1975 or 6 I bought an Austin A30 for 25 bucks in the back bar of the British in Lyttleton.
I bought it sight unseen, even though I could see it parked out on Norwich Quay through the open door. It was rusty green and the constant abuse of taxiing the crew members of a coastal ship which was in the dry dock on survey, to and fro between the dock and the British for the whole period of their stay, about 6 weeks, had fucked the back springs from constant overload. I saw eleven people get out of it a few days earlier.

I drove it away that night, the arse was dragging and the front seat fell out when I was driving the little pommy joke up a seriously steep hill. I managed to keep my foot on the gas but I was sitting on the floor by then, luckily I’d driven that road blind for some time so I managed to get to a point where I could swing it onto a bit of flat road…anyway I fixed the spring issue by jacking the body high enough to slide a pipe through the leaf ends that had come through the body due to rust and overload. I shackled it to the ends, dropped her on the ground and it worked, but it clattered and slapped around so much that it drew attention to the fact that it was fucked. Don’t forget this was in the day when if you new the right kind of person , a WOF label from Govt Print was a $1.50, but it still paid to be not too overt about it.

After the local MOT cop ordered me and the A30 off the road in a very infrequent stop outside the Lyttleton road tunnel on a bloody saturday morning, after returning from a trip into Chch, I had to get very drastic. It was the clattering and banging under brakes that drew his attention.

To be fair he wasn’t such a bad guy, still a traffic cop though. He could have done more than call me things that were probably true at the time, but he didn’t. But I did have things to do later that day so I needed the wheels, moving.

I changed the configuration of my repairs and opted for a clatter free and softer ride. Being a chippy and having a saw and shit , and some good old 4x2 , I built a new section of wall that sat up under the window sill where the boot lid hinged behind the back seat. Two struts of 4x2 bolted into the shackles at the end of the springs and built into my little wall and it was perfect, but when I dropped it on the ground it was jacked up about four inches too high and it didn’t really suit the profile I was trying to create, so up in the air, unbolt the new struts, cut three or four inches off and re-bolt them. That was perfect too. It was still rust and green and a bit of orange red lead though, a dead giveaway.

The bloke I shared a house with was a painter, he had a four gallon tin of bright red roof paint. His little brother helped me mask off the glass with newspaper and sellotape and then I splashed on lots and lots of red paint. I used a wallpaper paste brush because it was the biggest brush I could find. I would hazard a guess that after doing that and it being a hot day, we would have gone and sat on the verandah overlooking our wee town and smoked lots of pot, but anyway the A30 drip dried and was fairly tacky when I drove back through the tunnel about 4 hours later.

I later sold the A30 for 65 bucks, a long time later. They were my flash, red, wheels for a few more months.

haha mate, sounds like my Austin A40 Somerset. Bought it for $75 in about 1969 to run around in until I fled to Aussie for an OE of sorts. The spring hangers popped thru into the boot so I used two pieces of 4x2 wrapped in rubber from a tube to stop it sagging at the arse . Worked great for months as we only ever did about 80kph in it anyway ,always with mates and their beers as we headed off to piss ups. It was classic blue with a Bell sticker in the rear window and was always a standing joke .(Gazzas Somerset !!).:laugh::laugh:

[Grumph]

Greymouth Kart street race some time in the mid 70's....A mate had a twin Mcculloch laydown kart he'd imported from the US. Bloody weapon - but not the sort of thing you'd want to run on a bumpy street circuit...Started off pretty good running well up in the GP, worked his way into the lead then as his pit crew I'm approached by officials - the side tanks look like they're loose. It had long side pannier tanks between the wheels mounted on crosstubes.
Anyway, he's blackflagged and comes in so I go over the fastenings and tighten up those that are still there and send him back out saying I'll give him a wave when I've got something sorted to replace the lost bits...
Well to cut a long story short - it was a very long race - he was in another 2 or 3 times and the wire mesh fence at the back of the pits had a large gap in it by the end...He did finish, in about 5th from memory.
At the prizegiving I was very surprised to be called up to receive a prize for my efforts. I'd expected a bill for the fence....

[rok-the-boat]

haha mate, sounds like my Austin A40 Somerset. Bought it for $75 in about 1969 to run around in until I fled to Aussie for an OE of sorts. The spring hangers popped thru into the boot so I used two pieces of 4x2 wrapped in rubber from a tube to stop it sagging at the arse . Worked great for months as we only ever did about 80kph in it anyway ,always with mates and their beers as we headed off to piss ups. It was classic blue with a Bell sticker in the rear window and was always a standing joke .(Gazzas Somerset !!).:laugh::laugh:

My mate bought an old ford van (like a car, not a big van) at an auction. Really cheap. He was so happy. At the auction we had been unable to open the bonnet. Once home we pushed and pulled and pried and levered and 'bang! ... once opened, the car dropped to the floor. The suspension top had rotted through and it was resting on and pressuring against the bonnet, which was why the latch wouldn't free the bonnet. Both sides. He scrapped it and had to pay to get it towed.

[rok-the-boat]

I swapped an old mini for an old Fiat Panda, early 90s. Took it for it's MOT (UK = WOF) and it failed on a few things ... but one was that the previous guy had hammered the rear brake pipes flat to cure a leaky cylinders. The bodge worked, of course, and I managed to find everything super cheap at a breakers yard.

That same Panda had low oil pressure so I pulled the sump and oil pump an put a small washer against the pressure relief spring. Presto - instant boost. No oil light. But WTF ... oil started leaking out of everywhere. Checked the oil pressure switch - bust. Replaced it. But my brother sold it to someone before I could pull the washer out (I had gone overseas) ... and I hear it always leaked. I mean, would any mechanic ever know to check for that extra washer in the oil pump. Ha ha.