I know by definition that a temporary repair should be just that, but as a capable bunch does anybody have a temporary repair that has lasted surprisingly well.

today I finally got around to replacing the exhaust box which I repaired at the side of the road on the way back from Bad Camberg in june, considdering all I used was a nail and some putty it has done me proud! I could have probably eeked it out for a few more weeks, but as the car is my daily I didn't want it to let me down.

I have over the years made lot's of get you home repairs and would be intrequed to hear of others experiences.

If i get time later i will try to think of a few more, the trouble is that if it lasts too long it becomes "fixed" and never gets sorted!

The throttle cable snapped on my Split camper at the carb end once, around 11pm and about 100 miles from home. For some reason I had a small length of copper brake pipe in with the general mess of my toolbox, so I managed to get a bit of that onto the frayed cable end, 'securing' it with a couple of squeezes from some wire snippers and a little bit of filing down on the outside, so it'd go into the bolty noggin thing on the carb. That must have been in 1998 or so, and it was still there when I sold the van 3 weeks ago...

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Various electric connections bridged with croc clips, and mole grips covered in tape.

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In the early 80's I bought myself a 050 distributor. i thought I was cool as everyone else had 009's! I then proceeded to sit on the cap as i fitted it to my Beetle. I couldn't find another cap anywhere so Super glued the cap back together. It was in 3 pieces at the time. I must have driven the car 20000 miles and 10 years with the stuck together cap, eventually forgetting there was a problem.

Last week I found the cap in a Bosch box. Do you think it's worth anything?

Why yes it should be stuffed and mounted:lol: and put on display for all to see.
You reminded me of a friend that had a dizzy cap brake on him when at the coast and he got home with it held together with Callor-Tight and rubber bands Happy days ( not )



Andy W

Not so much a repair as a lucky escape, when I was in my teens a friend of mine, Steve, and I drove my trusty 1302s through Europe (via the former Yugoslavia and Albania) into Greece and on to North Africa taking the ferry from Piraeus to Alexandria. At one point I was driving down a mountain road in the Peloponnese negotiating tight hair pin bends on 1: 3 inclines, the roads at that time not being made up, when a hornet flew into the car through the open window.

I always had a morbid fear of getting stung and this was my first encounter with a hornet. Seeing it as an industrial sized wasp, I panicked and let go of the steering wheel and went off the road. We ended up on the same road but another layer down the car having pretty much flown through the air at one point and then hit terra firma and run onto the road, ending up across it.

The engine had stalled and all the camping equipment in the car had flown all over the place, Steve and I sat there for a few moments stunned and dazed blocking the road until some locals came along and hooted at us to get out of the way. It seems that a VW dropping out of the sky and landing across the road wasn’t so unusual in those parts.

I started the engine and we drove on down the mountain side into the next little town. There were some grinding noises coming from the front axle and the steering was pulling to the left, but otherwise the VW was going ok. We found a little local workshop in the town that had a hand painted VW sign over the door and a dusty, white type 3 on the forecourt and I managed through sign language and a lot of pointing to tell the mechanic what had happened and where I thought the problem was. He changed a front wheel bearing and we went on our way.

This was on the home leg and we then spent the next couple of weeks driving up through Greece, across to Italy and into Switzerland and then through France and back to the UK. The Beetle was cruising on autoroutes at 80 – 90 miles per hour and negotiating the mountain passes, hairpin bends and steep inclines through the Swiss Alps without any problem.

When I got back to the UK I took the beetle along to the VW dealership in Worthing for it’s MOT and Service (this was in the days when VAG knew what a beetle was) and the car failed it’s MOT on the steering mechanism. It needed a new steering idler and carrier.

I had the work done and when I went to collect the car, they unusually brought out a box from under the counter with the old idler and carrier in it. It was completely shattered with fractures running right through it. The mechanic said that he’d never seen one go like that before and couldn’t imagine what I had been doing with the car!

I can only assume that the carrier had shattered when we came off the mountain side, in which case we were very lucky that it had got us home and not disintegrated on an Autoroute or Swiss mountain pass! :shock:

Mike :thumbup:

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Back in the 1970s a good friend of mine who was a bug owner and mechanical engineering student at the time, went on a camping holiday with his father (a mechanic) and his brother in an early split window Kombi camper powered by a 36 hp engine.

On the way to the Carnarvon Ranges in central Queensland, the van dropped number 3 exhaust valve through the piston while many miles from the nearest town. They pitched camp in the drain at the side of the road, dropped the engine out and stripped the engine down to remove the broken bits of metal from the crank case. The engine was then put back together with no push rods or exhaust valve in no 3.

Once the engine was running again, a decision was made to continue to the Carnarvon Ranges on 3 cylinders, so that the holiday was not totally ruined. It made that ok, so they then decided to push on to Rockhampton (a distance of approx 500km).

They ended up driving into the night, but because the piston had a hole in it and there was no exhaust valve, it was blowing the sump oil out the exhaust pipe. They ran out of engine oil with still some distance to go. As there was no service station open to buy more oil, and given that the engine was stuffed, the butter, the cooking oil, the brake fluid and anything else slippery was poured into the engine.

The van limped into Rockhampton (with a strong smell of cooking). A second hand engine was purchased from a wrecker and fitted. The holiday trip then continued without further problem.

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