Omega Owners Forum

Chat Area => General Discussion Area => Topic started by: Owen on 01 July 2007, 21:44:20

Title: Botch jobs!
Post by: Owen on 01 July 2007, 21:44:20
Speaking of the renault 5, what the worst heap you have ever owned, and the worst, cheapest botch job ya did on yer old motors. ;)
Title: Re: Botch jobs!
Post by: Golfbuddy on 01 July 2007, 21:51:31
Good Question :y :y :y

I hope I don't get barred for this but I actually owned an Austin Princess :'( :'( :'(

The worst thing I did was to fill it with petrol which made it last longer than it deserved!!!
Title: Re: Botch jobs!
Post by: Kevin Wood on 01 July 2007, 21:55:00
Morris Ital.  ::)

Decided the thermostat could do with a change. Thermostat siezed in housing. Out with sammy sledgehammer. Thermostat housing cracked. Thermostat housing siezed into cylinder head. Put away sammy and got out the J-B weld. As good as new again, albeit with original, slightly battered thermostat.

Kevin
Title: Re: Botch jobs!
Post by: TheBoy on 01 July 2007, 21:59:44
Yeah, had a silver MV6, though decent enough car. Worse bodge I did with that car was take it to those useless, lying, incompetent, robbing, scumbag crooks at Crownhill Vauxhall/Evans Halshaw touch it  >:(
Title: Re: Botch jobs!
Post by: hotel21 on 01 July 2007, 22:01:10
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Yeah, had a silver MV6, though decent enough car. Worse bodge I did with that car was take it to those useless, lying, incompetent, robbing, scumbag crooks at Crownhill Vauxhall/Evans Halshaw touch it  >:(

Stop beating about the bush, you mealy mouthed person.....  Spit it out and say what you REALLY mean.   ;D   ;D
Title: Re: Botch jobs!
Post by: Timbuk on 01 July 2007, 22:03:56
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Good Question :y :y :y

I hope I don't get barred for this but I actually owned an Austin Princess

 :'( :'( :'(

The worst thing I did was to fill it with petrol which made it last longer than it deserved!!!


So did i :-[
Title: Re: Botch jobs!
Post by: TheBoy on 01 July 2007, 22:04:54
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Quote
Good Question :y :y :y

I hope I don't get barred for this but I actually owned an Austin Princess

 :'( :'( :'(

The worst thing I did was to fill it with petrol which made it last longer than it deserved!!!


So did i :-[
;D ;D ;D
Title: Re: Botch jobs!
Post by: Owen on 01 July 2007, 22:05:53
 ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D ;D  ;D ;D ;D

Had a 1.6 laser carpi, had to put flagstone in the back of it in the winter to keep its backend down, had to do the same with me Chevette as well ;D ;D ;D
Oh and on the chevet ;D, if you lifted the mat up you could see the road as you were driving along, wet feet in the rain! ;D
Title: Re: Botch jobs!
Post by: Timbuk on 01 July 2007, 22:07:49
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Quote
Quote
Good Question :y :y :y

I hope I don't get barred for this but I actually owned an Austin Princess

 :'( :'( :'(

The worst thing I did was to fill it with petrol which made it last longer than it deserved!!!


So did i :-[
;D ;D ;D

I was young and stupid at the time  :D
Title: Re: Botch jobs!
Post by: Kevin Wood on 01 July 2007, 22:10:03
I thought we were talking about personal botches. Dealer botches are in a different league. My dad had a Volvo 260 estate (another zero door volvo. good job it had a sunroof!). It was serviced shortly before he got rid of it, to a dealer next to where he worked. Dealer ran it around for a couple of weeks then got low oil pressure on the M3 one day. Shut it down and pulled into the hard shoulder sharpish to see a slick behind him that the Exxon Valdese would have been proud off. Sump was found to have a well and truly stripped sump plug hole with traces of plumbers PTFE tape dangling down ::)

Same car. Head gaskets failed and were duly repaired by stealer. Luckily it was a company car. 2 months later head gaskets fail again. Stealer asked if anyone had said anything when it came into have the head bolts re-torqued after x miles. Stealer had actually said that no re-torque was necessary.

Kevin

Title: Re: Botch jobs!
Post by: Owen on 01 July 2007, 22:10:26
Yugo Zastava is deffo the worst thing i ever owned :-[ :-[ :-/ :-/ ;)
Title: Re: Botch jobs!
Post by: hotel21 on 01 July 2007, 22:12:49
Biggest botch job I was ever involved in was on a 12000 horsepower, twin turbocharged, two stroke marine diesel main propulsion plant.....

Was sold to Chinese registry and contracted to be complete with a spare piston, piston crown, con rod, bottom end with hand cut white metal bearings, complete with a refurbed cylinder head, valve gear and fuel pump (all singular, by the way)

Looks kinda like this....

http://people.bath.ac.uk/ccsshb/12cyl/

Stopped the boat in mid-oggin and stripped out a perfectly servicable complete single cylinder engine unit and replaced it with cracked/broken/corroded parts.  Restarted the job, cleaned up all the bits that had been removed and chugged into port.  Completed the hand over and flew home alongwith a number of shipmates....

oh - and changed over a fair number of the brass name tags on all the valve handwheels throughout the engineroom so the valve labelled, say, fresh water inlet tank one was actually the suction from number 3 topside fuel tank....

Oh, how we laughed....   ;D

Must have taken the poor foreign flag buggers ages to suss it all out........
Title: Re: Botch jobs!
Post by: Marks DTM Calib on 01 July 2007, 22:14:34
A mates Mk3 Escort 1.6 Ghia.....he was selling it and when hoovering it out put the nozzle throught the sill.....some news paper, P38+40 and a spray of stone chip protect later and you couldn't see it so clearly.

This one also had the standard knackered Ford gearbox where the drive shaft bearings were knackered and the speedo kept jumping due to the speedo drive gear not engaging properly and wearing out the nylon gear teeth......so we popped a new speedo gear in and drove the car through a ford and then ragged it through the long grass just off a field road to get the oil off......the buyer bought it......
Title: Re: Botch jobs!
Post by: Timbuk on 01 July 2007, 22:18:16
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Quote
Quote
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Good Question :y :y :y

I hope I don't get barred for this but I actually owned an Austin Princess

 :'( :'( :'(

The worst thing I did was to fill it with petrol which made it last longer than it deserved!!!


So did i :-[
;D ;D ;D

I was young and stupid at the time  :D

Funny enough, the only time it let me down ( still living in Coventry then ) was one Sunday afternoon,  the front crank seal let go when i was on my way to a place with a dry ski slope, think it was called Telford :D

Mine was a 2000HL in a lovely Burgandy colour, my mate was following me on the M6, i looked in my rear view mirror and saw clouds of smoke, thought my mates car had blown up or something until i realised it was coming from underneath mine :-/ and guess what car he had..... yep a nice Austin Princess in Burgandy, although he had a posh 2200HLS with rectangular headlamps  :D
Title: Re: Botch jobs!
Post by: wakeyomega on 01 July 2007, 22:18:34
Early 70's I lost a wheel on a triumph spitfire at 60 mph 1 week after doing a deal to part exchange with a garage for a MGB, but before the exchange. The chassis arm the stub axle was attached to was ground down by the road surface. A bit of welding from a mate, underseal then .....rub all over with soil and grit before the underseal dried, to 'age it' - class 1 botch, but it worked   ::) (and yes, it was safe).
Title: Re: Botch jobs!
Post by: omegaV6CD on 01 July 2007, 22:19:41
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Speaking of the renault 5, what the worst heap you have ever owned, and the worst, cheapest botch job ya did on yer old motors. ;)

Well, the worst botch job i have ever done i did it on one of my dad's trucks, a scania 142, the cam lobe at the exhaust was worn to f*** and the engine at full load was making a metalik banging noise from the problematic cylinder i decided then to remove any valve lash in order to help the cylinder breath, it run 4 months like that and then we sold it.
Title: Re: Botch jobs!
Post by: Timbuk on 01 July 2007, 22:24:09
We did pot rivet some new sills over the old ones once ::)
Title: Re: Botch jobs!
Post by: hotel21 on 01 July 2007, 22:25:52
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We did pot rivet some new sills over the old ones once ::)

Nowt wrong with that, as long as you grind the heads off so the tester dont see them.....  :-X
Title: Re: Botch jobs!
Post by: Owen on 01 July 2007, 22:52:16
Ah, a drill and a pop rivet gun! Tools of true bodgers!

Ah, me Mk2 escort held together with pop rivets and a umteen pots of filler!
Title: Re: Botch jobs!
Post by: Jay w on 01 July 2007, 23:08:09
worse stealer bodge job i have seen was when i picked up my E30 325 SE after a large service.
Had asked for the antifreeze to be changed as well as the service, paid a fortune for the all the work, drove it 10 miles down the road and the temp guage shot off the scale......There was little/no water in the engine, had warped the head and blew the core on the rad.
the dealer claimed i had drained the system and ragged the nuts off it and so created the damage, 6 months later and a small claims court case, they paid up and repaired the car.....

The other bodge i have found this weeked was done by my local robbing, scumbag, halfwit, muppet, pea brained morons who work for the local Vaux stealers, when they did the cam belt on my miggy the left hand exhaust cam was 2 teeth out!! Now it has been done properly she really flies along, up until now she has always been a touch sluggish.

I would NEVER use my local dealers again, they are a waste of space
Title: Re: Botch jobs!
Post by: Martin_1962 on 01 July 2007, 23:12:19
Bodges

1) molegrips to hold clutch cable when it popped through bulkhead on the Sunbeam (a weak spot)

2) Bent part of a front cross member rather than lift the engine slightly to change cam shaft.

3) Silicon sealer to repair a radiator leak while on holiday.

4) Silicon sealer around the exhaust ports when changing the manifold gasket as two studs were broken - this lasted well over a year!!!!
Title: Re: Botch jobs!
Post by: Big Rod on 02 July 2007, 10:44:26
Worst car I've ever had, hmmmm, tough one, there've been so many..........

First one that springs to mind,

'87 Ausin Montego. Two years old when I got it and it started disintegrating the day I got it and just got worse from there.

'83 Alfa Sud. So rotten the MOT man advised me not to drive it home. Started to fix it, but ran out of steam when I realised that I actually needed metal to weld to!!

'77 Trans Am. Didn't realise at the point of sale, but one of the rear wings was made entirely of body filler, (It became affectionately known as the Isopontiac!), and the engine and gearbox were held in by one bolt each. the scary thing was that I drove it 250 miles home from Blackpool like that.

Worst/best bodge has to have been glueing the handbrake mechanism back together again on the S2N Omega. (Wasn't as good as the team that repaired their leaking cooling system with parma ham though!!)
Title: Re: Botch jobs!
Post by: Kevin Wood on 02 July 2007, 11:30:24
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Isopontiac!

ROFL! I like it.  ;D

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the scary thing was that I drove it 250 miles home from Blackpool like that

Burt Reynolds would have been proud!  :D

Kevin
Title: Re: Botch jobs!
Post by: Big Rod on 02 July 2007, 15:32:06
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Burt Reynolds would have been proud!  :D

Yeah, I grew a moustache and bought some aviator style suglasses especially for the trip!!