What’s The Most Daunting Roadside Repair You’ve Faced?

At the moment, my most difficult roadside repair was the case when I was driving through the city of Sunshine Coast in Australia, I saw a cart coming out of the supermarket Parking lot, which eventually drove into the door of my car and a small dent appeared at the site of the impact. The person who did not watch the cart said that they have a service in the city that provides mobile repair of dents (https://www.suncoastdents.com.au/) and that he is ready to call them and pay for repairs, to which I agreed. I thought it would take a long time, but the guys arrived in about 20 minutes and did the job in about the same amount of time. Surprisingly, not even a scratch remained. Here’s the story 🙂

Replaced a g/box extension housing in a Morris Minor way back when …….and the only replacement part we could find was in a paddock , had Redback spiders all over and under it, oh and a resident brown snake the was pretty pissed that we needed to disturb it !!

As an 18 years old wannabe rally driver I went to an area that was mainly dirt and gravel to try out my “skills” in my 1958 Holden FC sedan. Obviously I was out of my depth as the rough track and even rougher attempt at negotiating the same caused my steering arm to part ways with the rest of the car. Having left my toolbox at home, the only “tools” available were a long bladed fishing knife and an old pair of scissors that I had been using on another job. I needed to unscrew the end of the steering arm to fit it back onto the pivot arm so I managed to break off the end of one of the blades of the scissors and used that to reattach the wayward arm. It lasted long enough to get me back to the main road where I was able to call the Emergency Road Service which was just as well because they would not have come in to the offroad area where the mishap occurred.

When my oldest son was graduating HS and getting ready for college we bought him an early 80’s T-Bird. It ate starter solenoids at a ridiculous pace. I was called to get him started in parking lots, at friend’s houses and a few other places. When I was in college my Dad’s friend called me to ask for my help changing the clutch on his Vega. I said OK and walked over the next morning to find that the Vega died in the street in front of his house, so for a few hours we did the job, and had many laughs, while laying in the gutter under his car. That was 40 years ago and he sadly passed away last year but through the years every time we saw each other we had some great laughs about that day.

I replaced the clutch in my first car at the roadside after ignoring it slipping for a few weeks. I was 18 or so and had yet to amass any tools so the job was completed with an adjustable crescent, a single scissor jack and marker pen to align the clutch plate. For some reason I also chose to wear a white wool jersey to do the job…