Your top bodge

[Trickedem]

When I was in the Army in the '80s I was duty mechanic for a squadron summer camp in Bavaria. On the way down one of the Bedford trucks overheated, upon investigation I discovered that the top radiator hose had collapsed. I didn't have a spare so instead took it off, wrapped it in several layers of gaffa tape, refitted it and topped up the coolant.
That Bedford spent the next 2 weeks going back camp in Northern Germany one day then to Bavaria the next. I did check the hose a few times during the fortnight whilst waiting for a new one which never arrived.
The gaffa taped hose held up perfectly and it was not changed until a week or so after we returned to camp.

Arte et Marte
REME at its best!

 

[raleighnut]

I think it originally came with a plastic covered wire that went from back to front of the door, by the time it arrived in my hands it had long since gone. Me and my dad improved it no end by hand painting it brown . It had been used by the BCF who had roundly trashed it !

Shaun

The old Landrovers had a similar 'lock' but with them you could reach the outer handle to unlock the door, in a Mini you'd have had to be a contortionist to reach the handle.

 

[subaqua]

i couldn't possibly say as they might get picked up on XX years defect liability.

 

[Mad Doug Biker]

I have a habit of keeping things from old bikes to use on a new one so that the 'spirit of the old bike lives on'.... Or something.

Of course, it has to still be aesthetically pleasing, such as the old metal yellow drinks cage from my Big Sister's Raleigh Marauder MTB from the late '80s that now lives on my Felt S22 (which is black and yellow, so it looks in keeping).
Weight weenies will be onto me about it, but a few grams doesn't matter to me, so, there!

From a variety of other bikes, I also have a few lights, saddles, mud guards and even the handlebars off my own old Raleigh 'Max Ogre' MTB awaiting their next use in the future.

Not really a bodge, but I do like to keep certain things for future use.

 

[PeteXXX]

No1 daughter asked me to fix her leaking sunroof a few years ago....

Sorted

 

[ColinJ]

Here is another of my bike bodges ...

As most of you probably know, Yorkshire, Lancashire and Derbyshire have some big, steep hills. I bought a cyclocross bike last year and found it very overgeared for said hills so I resolved to lower the bottom gear as much as I could with as little expense as possible. I put a huge 12-36 road cassette on but the rear mech would not cope with it. Here comes the bodge ... I discovered that 9-speed Shimano mountain bike rear mechs work very well with 10-speed Shimano road shifters and cassettes (as fitted to the CX bike)!

So here we are - a 9-speed rear mech for a 10-speed bike; it works perfectly!

 

[Salty seadog]

Here is another of my bike bodges ...

As most of you probably know, Yorkshire, Lancashire and Derbyshire have some big, steep hills. I bought a cyclocross bike last year and found it very overgeared for said hills so I resolved to lower the bottom gear as much as I could with as little expense as possible. I put a huge 12-36 road cassette on but the rear mech would not cope with it. Here comes the bodge ... I discovered that 9-speed Shimano mountain bike rear mechs work very well with 10-speed Shimano road shifters and cassettes (as fitted to the CX bike)!

So here we are - a 9-speed rear mech for a 10-speed bike; it works perfectly!

Gleaming. Thumbs aloft...

 

[ColinJ]

Gleaming. Thumbs aloft...

I haven't ridden it as much as I had hoped to because the main offroad escape route from Todmorden that I had planned to use was the Rochdale canal towpath towards Hebden Bridge. That was closed by the extensive damage caused by the 2015 Boxing Day floods. The damage has finally been repaired so I intend to get the bike a lot muckier in the months to come!

 

[Piemaster]

A bit dodgy when you're doing 90mph on the motorway!

In a mini? That would have been optimistic in any of the ones I've ever been carried in, which is probably just as well as ears started to bleed with the racket of some fine bodging of exhausts.
I once dropped a bag of cement into the boot of a mk.4 Cortina. The petrol tank then landed on the floor, some wire from a nearby handy fence wrapped around the bumper. Sold the car on like that, which was incidentally the worst car I've ever gone around a corner in. When it actually vaguely responded to steering input.

The Alfa 156 had a factory fitted bodge, the emergency fuel flap release is a piece of string poking through a hole in the boot trim.

Working on ships in far flung areas were spares can take months to arrive inevitably involve bodging at some point. Finest one I can think of was taking a timer from a broken washing machine to fix a show stopping bit of kit.

 

[Accy cyclist]

In a mini? That would have been optimistic in any of the ones I've ever been carried in,

I had a 1275 GT Clubman and an 1100 Clubman. Both very capable of reaching 90mph. My Mini 850 though was like a hairdryer and actually drank more fuel,due to having to keep dropping a gear and revving more.

 

[slowmotion]

Two friends at college each owned battered Renault 4s. Fortunately their MOT dates were few weeks out of sync. Bits were swapped from one car to the other so that each could each pass the test. Eventually an eagle-eyed MOT man spotted that the entire underside of one car was held together with pop rivets cunningly camouflaged by a skilfully-applied coating of mud.

 

[slowmotion]

I knew before opening the thread it would involve toilet cisterns. Modern flush mechanisms seem to be ill-thought-out, flimsy, pieces of parp that demand bodgery when they fail.

Our loo flushes only courtesy of two zip ties.

Wash your mouth out! The Euro-flusher is one of the EU's finest achievements.

 

[Alex H]

One from today's BBC News......

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-37816776


A motorist "fixed" his car window with plastic sheeting and tape, leaving a small peephole to see his mirror.

He was pulled over by police in Northampton on Saturday while driving the white Toyota at about 12:00 BST on Wellingborough Road.

Officers, who seized 30 cars that day as part of a road policing operation, said it was an "interesting concept".

 

[Profpointy]

The day I moved into my previous house I hung some curtains in the hall window that were too long, so I cut the bottom off roughly and turned up a quick hem with staples. Those curtains stayed like that for almost ten years.

Did that with my trouser hems once; admittedly it wasn't from my best suit

 

[summerdays]

In the early days of my relationship with Mr Summerdays he lived in a house with a dodgy loo thing. The seal had gone and the owner of the house was rather poor but discovered a certain brand of pate had the right dimensions! So every now and again they had to go out and buy the pate so a replacement seal could be created. I think this system carried on for about 10 years after Mr Summerdays moved out!