Posted on 02/27/2012 6:50:44 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
JB Weld is fabulous stuff.
I use it all the time. Haven’t found anything yet that it won’t stick to.
My wife drives a 95 Roadmaster Buick that we dropped the Comprehensive coverage on. It has 170,000 miles on it and should go to 300,000 with no problem .Look around—there are a lot of old Roadmasters on the road. Made back when they built real cars. I might even keep it as a classic when it hits 25 years old.
Looks and drives like new get 26 mpg on the road and has 350 LI engine ,no problem passing with this car.
I don't know about fenders, but you can buy the side panels near the fenders for pennies on the dollar at a junkyard or even a close color match at the better auto parts stores for a little more. My 1997 Honda has one set in place with the plastic zip ties. It looks fine from the outside.
You can get a supersize bag of zip ties at a hardware store for under $6. I've found them to be one of the most useful things in a garage. Thread through a pegboard or drilled holes in basement beams and you have a place to hang tools, dry garden produce, etc.
I was at Lowe’s trying to find some metal strips that were not thick. The clerk asked me how thick, and I said, “Like aluminum foil, only stronger. I then remembered using a rectangle cut from a coke can and bent into an L shaped rail that I JB Welded to a gaping hole in my radiator of my Reliant in the Moab Desert in 1998. It got me another 1,000 miles before I had to add more JB Weld. But I did let it dry only an hour and a half. ;-)
I told the clerk “never mind”.
It works amazingly. Aluminum soda cans are thick enough do be a really strong skin (unlike aluminum foil) but not so thick as to get in the way. Whenever I need to join two thin pieces of plastic, metal, etc. togehter, I can just cut the right shape from a soda can, slather it with JB Weld, press it into the back of the thin joint as a new metal skin and I have what I expect to be a permanent fix.
You get that kind of mileage with that thing?! Man, I’d drive it into the ground myself!
One of the things I live about the 300m is the passing ability. Every day I pass an average of 11 cars, sometimes three or four at a time. In the Scion it was always a challenge.
We were in a Renault. Came around a blind curve and met a truck hauling a car.
My doc told me my airbag injuries were consistant with being dropped from a 50ft cliff.
Had I not adjusted my seat all the way “back” (so I had room to put on rain clothes the day before) my injuries would have been far worse.
I was in a couple wrecks in my young crazy days..in both in a VW. I’ll pass on the airbag. Thanx.
Now you’ve really got me wondering. I have a mint 2001 Highlander Limited. I very seldom drive more than 10 miles a day. Most days only 3/4. Now I’m wondering if I should drop the Comprehensive part of my insurance. On a very limited budget here. Time to stop in and talk to my insurance guy, I guess.
Thanks!
After all if I can bolt a 2x4 to the back of my pick-up and have it passed as a rear bumper why not a pretend air bag?
Personally I think you should be able to go down to your dealer and buy a brand new '62 Rambler or Dodge Dart. (Or even a VW air cooler) These cars would sell and people could fix them themselves should they break. It is the safety Nazis from the federal Government that prevents this from happening.
Just look into the specs just for door handles sometime.
I'm sure you maintain your car properly, but how many others don't bother, knowing that they can get that sticker slapped on without having to worry about paying for tires that actually have tread, or brakes that actually stop the car?
I think this is a good thread for this youtube video. A 2009 Chevy vs a 1959 chevy in head-on crash test. The results are fascinating.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=joMK1WZjP7g
She gets around 20 on short trips, but on the highway we get 26 regularly., which is actually better than my sister gets on her new Buick with the 6 cylinder front wheel drive.
According to Kelley Blue Book you car is worth about $5,000, it might pay you to keep the comprehensive for a while.
“In other words, they are an expensive way to make us all pay for other people’s negligence.”
There’s even more nanny state regs with respect to auto safety equipment. I have a friend who uses his street car at track days. He has installed an SCCA-approved five point harness in place of his DOT lap-shoulder belt. He was stopped for a traffic infraction and was ticketed for the five-point harness because it was not “DOT Approved!”
When the Forest Service LEOs stop my licensed dirt bike and ask me if the tires are DOT approved I ask if the officer is a “statist” Haven’t got a ticket yet.
“I have seen far more people hurt by airbags than I have seen helped by them.”
My thoughts exactly. One reason I’ve been putting off replaceing my 1992 chevy truck(no airbags).
Thanks V! I think you’re right.
The irony is that side impact and head airbags may actually be more useful than the steering wheel located kind. Working in the PRM, I run across veterans of the DOT Volpe Center (in Cambridge) and pick a lot of useful gossip about research into auto crash physics and other minutia.
Seems that in a side impact crash, most of the fatalies are caused by relatively low g-forces ripping the victims heart out of place by the application of lateral acceleration to body. We can withstand accelerations in the other two axes, front to back and top to bottom better than side to side. When you fall or jump, these are the natural directions along which the body absorbs impact. Seat belts don’t help alot, they reduce the front to back acceleration (with respect to the vehicle’s body axes) and the impact of your noggin on the windscreen and steering wheel.
The kind of shocks that standard seat belts and shoulder harness protect against are the most common, and they are relatively simple, cheap and easy to install. Standard airbags just double down on the same problem (aggravated by people’s refusal to wear seat belts.)
I’m agnostic about side restraint and head proctection, but I wonder if the same money applied to things like better brakes and visibility wouldn’t be more effective.
I remember as a kid growing up near the intersection of Rockaway Boulevard and the Belt Parkway in Queens, the local Mobil gas station (”L&L”) used to tow in a lot of wrecks, and park them on an unfenced corner of the lot (near a phone booth), where you could not avoid passing within a few feet of them when passing by on the sidewalk.
I’ll always remember about 1960, the sad sight of a late model T-Bird with a flashy red interior, the front end crumpled, a couple of spiderweb patterns on the windsheild and blood all over the dashboard. It was not at all unusual for wrecks to have one or two spiderweb cracks on the windsheild, and blood on the interior and crushed in steering columns. You rarely see that nowadays. Of course, wrecks are kept behind stockade fences, these days, as much as anything to keep the neighbors from complaining.
I’m impressed.
Duck tape has been held up as indispensable.
Now you give the case for plastic ties.
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