Cheapest repairs that you've done on your car..

[warninglight]

Collapsed cat in the disco exhaust severely limiting airflow, no boost etc.

 

New cat pipe from LR - £800

New cat pipe from Britpart which wouldn't fit, and if it did would last 6 months - £150

 

2 hours start to finish with a slitting disc, crowbar and MIG, priceless...

 

And it looks fine for MOT testers!

[FakeConcern]

On youngest daughter's Clio the Climate control connection cogs broke. I zip tied the cogs together (advice from Cliosport forum, thanks).

 

On my Ovlov V70 T5 the aircon compresser clutch packed up. Used a zip tie as a shim & it worked fine (advice from Swedespeed forum, thanks).

 

So I now know all you need in your tool kit to fix air con problems is a packet of zip ties.

[twosmoke300]

Collapsed cat in the disco exhaust severely limiting airflow, no boost etc.

 

New cat pipe from LR - £800

New cat pipe from Britpart which wouldn't fit, and if it did would last 6 months - £150

 

2 hours start to finish with a slitting disc, crowbar and MIG, priceless...

 

And it looks fine for MOT testers!

The mot tester couldn't give a rats ass if it had a car or not . It's only dpfs that they check for on diesels

[chodweaver]

Wife complains that her Fiesta has gone all dead noisy. Exhaust had parted company about in line with the gear stick. Welder. Baked bean can. Temporary fix. That was two years and 30,000 miles ago. And two owners.

 

Sent from my GT-S5830i using Tapatalk 2

[Noel Tidybeard]

Punctures fixed with self tappers

punctures fixted with self tappers AND sillycunt sealant- i kid you not, we dont call him dippy for nothing!

[stripped fred]

It's a good feeling when you can fix something or at least keep it going for longer. That's why I've been amassing a shed full of tins of bits and bobs. One day they'll come in useful! Too much nowadays is designed to be thrown away.

[D Spares & Tyres]

Not quite cheapest repair but the best financial breakdown I`ve ever had was when my £250 Citroen ZX put a rod through the block up near Pitlochry

 

Green Flag paid me £300 not to relay it home, they just took it to a scrapyard in Perth who gave me £100 for it, then they gave me a hire car FOC to get home in which they picked up from my house in Shropshire a week later

[Taff]

Choke flap spring on the Talbot Samba broke. The spring from an old pen that was lying in the car saved the day. It continued saving the day until the car was written off a year later.

 

lol!

[Semi-C]

Following a recent tyre failure, I enquired, at my local tire-supplier, about some replacements.

 

A pal of mine works at aforementioned tie-urgh sellers and gave me 2 x nearly new 175/70/13s he had removed from his 100E.

 

The price for fitting was to be £a drink.

 

Due to my tardy collecting of the freshly fitted up wheels, my pal and his colleagues have now requested I demonstrate the removal of my jeans to disprove their collective theory that my trousers are in fact tattoos.

 

Am I being exploited? Is this objectification?

 

If it doesn't cost me owt they could drench me in jittler and leave me to set like Richard Attenborough's mosquito cane topper in Jurassic Park.

[D Spares & Tyres]

Have just remembered the cheapest fix was also on the aforementioned ZX, bought cheap due to a slightly slipping clutch. Adjusted the clutch myself for free and did thousands of miles in that car

[the judge]

I once bought a mondeo td from tuebrook auctions. L plate I think. Snatched and baulked every gear. Looked underneath,and looked like a recon gearbox. Dropped the hypoid out,put correct pas oil in,and Bob your cross dressing Uncle Fanny!! Cost,a fiver.

[nebuchenezer]

Uno 60s - driving along one day the gearstick fell sideways onto the passenger floor - bolt had fallen out of linkage - repaired with twig found at side of road and carried on for another six months without touching it again - cost = free 

[Station]

Replaced MR2 alternator at the side of the road at 2am with an MGF alternator. Wedged it tight with a big branch from a nearby tree.

[xtriple]

635 CSI BMW bought for £750 'cos the head gasket was fooked. Garage had investigated and quoted mega dosh so just flogged the car. It was silver and utterly mint.

 

One new radiator cap and a solder of a connection for the fans and all was good

[Vince70]

My last Audi A4 wasn't a free repair but it did only cost about £15 for a secondhand MAF from eBay and 10 minutes to fix..

 

The car was a late model one with all the toys and was very low mileage but the previous owner had been told by a garage that it would cost a good grand to fix it up as it might need some sensors and an ECU plus a Catalytic converter to get running again properly..

 

I bought it for spares to retro fit some goodies on to my early A4 as it only cost £225 and came with about 5 months tax and a ticket and I ended up driving around in it till the tax ran out and then I put a new ticket on it and sold it cheap at £850

 

It wasn't meant to be a money maker as I'm no good at that but I just tried disconnecting the wiring to the MAF on the journey home out of frustration which sorted out the problem but I didn't have the heart to tell the previous owner I got it running properly by just taking a second to disconnect a wire.

 

It was good news really as I later found out that hardly anything is interchangeable between an early and a late B5 Audi after buying it.

[D Spares & Tyres]

Same ZX again........

 

Gear link rod had worn and kept popping off

 

Bit of crisp packet wrapper over the ball, pop back on and its fixed for a while

[Aston Martin]

The 93 Panda, sounded like the exhaust manifold gasket had gone. Ordered a new one, then I discovered the manifold was loose.

[tooSavvy]

Same ZX again........

 

Gear link rod had worn and kept popping off

 

Bit of crisp packet wrapper over the ball, pop back on and its fixed for a while

 

Ford Escort mk2... wipers would stop as arm under dash would fall off the motor spindle/ball end. Polythene bag crushed into socket got us home

 

I dropped the arm & drilled a little hole in it, Bolted a piece of stiff plastic on, with a 'tuning fork' slot down the middle - no more dropping off the ball end

 

... just time invested.

 

 

TS

[tooSavvy]

The 93 Panda, sounded like the exhaust manifold gasket had gone. Ordered a new one, then I discovered the manifold was loose.

 

My PandaFire 750 was giving a tremendous 'granngggwannngg' sound from under the engine - like exhaust baffles but MUCH louder - local whipped it up on the ramp and couldn't see anything.

 

I stood under it and asked about this 'plate thing', supporting the downpipe... Guy grabbed it and it was sheared/cracked straight across.

 

He twisted it with big pliers (=no noise) and I got one from a scrappy to swap over... job done

 

 

TS

[Angrydicky]

On my Somerset, the headlining is pinned back above the doors with thin cloth-covered ply, nailed in place. After 62 years of abuse. the cloth was hanging off the ply in places. I ignored it for ages until eventually it got to the point that the whole thing kept falling down while I was driving.

 

Removed the trim. pulled out the old knackered tacks with molegrips and glued the cloth back around the trim. Then I found a box of old tacks the same size as the original Austin ones (the benefits of being a hoarder) and nailed the whole lot back in place.

 

Looks at least 70% better, and total cost 0.

[2MB]

Driving through an absolute cunt of a rainstorm in my e30, wipers on full pelt when one of the spindles slipped on the arm and stripped its teeth. Repaired with part of a cheese & onion pasty wrapper over the worn spindle, lasted until I sold it a few months ago, still going strong as far as I know.

Current 190d, steam started to come from under the glovebox. Read some horror stories of ripping out dashes to replace heater matrices, got a bit depressed, thought 'fuck it' and dropped an egg into the expansion tank. Done about 4k miles since.

[cobblers]

I bought a MK2 Golf GTi with a tuned MK3 16v engine in, it went like a goodun but the lad was quite eager to get rid of it, I was suspicious, in the end I gave about £400 for it 3 years back.

On the way home I stopped for fuel, and when I started it back up it blue smoked the entire forecourt out to the point where people were giving up pumping fuel and running away out of the smoke.

Nursed it home to find it was WAY overfilled with oil, but the sump plug was seized to fuck and totally rounded.

 

Nothing would shift it, in the end I welded a 46mm hub nut on it and had to use an 8 foot scaff pole to shift it, lifting the car off the axle stands before it budged!

 

After I changed the oil it ran fine! I thrashed it about for 6 months, but eventually I realised that I needed to calm down a bit, so I did a swap with it for my VW T25 that was advertised at £2k. I'm happy with that.

[Tamworthbay]

Just sorted the centre console on my E46, it was doing the standard late 90s/ early 00s German trick of the rubber coating peeling and looking appalling. Two hours to strip it out, give it a damn good good scrubbing with a scourer in water so hot it almost hurts and it looks like new. Cost of new bits - £290, cost to me - Zilch.

[D Spares & Tyres]

My xantia suffered a fuel leak today causing it to barely run. Common fault,it was from that thing at the bottom of the filter housing that appears to have no purpose.

 

Got to a shop, bought some chewing gum, sat there chewing for a short while then gummed up the leak ☺

[Bren]

My xantia suffered a fuel leak today causing it to barely run. Common fault,it was from that thing at the bottom of the filter housing that appears to have no purpose.

Got to a shop, bought some chewing gum, sat there chewing for a short while then gummed up the leak ☺

Water drain tap?

[HMC]

Reading through the history on my repurchased range rover- the transmission oil cooler sprang a leak, a new replacement oil cooler was £extortionate. I used a bit of hosepipe and 2 jubilee clips and 9 years and 20K miles later the bodge is still doing its job.

[D Spares & Tyres]

Water drain tap?

Nope, that thing at the back by where the fuel goes in. From inside you can see a spring but I've blocked up several and they work fine

[The Moog]

Its the heater stat. Pre warms the veg/dizzle.

[Lacquer Peel]

It is the water in diesel drain tap.

[The Moog]

It is the water in diesel drain tap.

Isn't that in the front?