Just the Tip

EDITOR NOTE: This is a reprint of a series entitled Just the Tip authored by Thomas Brobst. His ‘make-do-with-what-you-got’ and ingenuity makes for interesting reading and maybe help a poor soul out of a perplexing repair. See if you agree with me this is fun reading.

Just the Tip
Tip #9

Hello again my avid readers and welcome to another hair-raising episode of Just the Tip! In our last episode we...um...we...ah, who cares what I talked about last month, right? It’s not like I’m writing a serial here. Hah!

This month I’m going to talk about a general conundrum involved with working on old cars….especially old British cars. Actually, most cars, old or new, domestic or imported! The thing is, you see, the engineers that design these automotive beauties work toward specifications that are written by the marketing department. Marketing people worry about what their customers want, not what the service technicians want. So, what we end up with are cars that are very often not easy to repair. By that I mean components are crammed into places that are hard to reach with human hands, let alone human hands holding tools….and, oh, what? you want to be able to actually see what the hands and tools are doing in there? Good luck with that! This is why there are so many specialty tools on the market.

But what’s a poor slob to do when he’s in a tight situation on a Sunday evening and his wife’s car is up on jacks and he can’t get a wrench on that one g$%damn bolt that’s obstructed by that f&#king bracket? Well, in my case, over the years, I have bent, cut, grinded (ground?) heated, welded, chiseled, sawed and whatever else it took to customize tools to reach those hard-to-reach fasteners. It’s amazing the art one can create with a bench vise, oxy-acetylene torch and a 3-lb sledgehammer. I took pics of some of my creepy-looking tools for this article a few weeks ago when I was looking through my toolbox but the real impetus to write it came when I was helping club member Jeff Rohrbach replace a clutch slave cylinder in his MGB last weekend. Wouldn't you know, I had to hit my stash of Frankenstein tools just to remove the slave cylinder flex line from the hard line. All that room under that car and this particular hose connection was shoehorned twixt the frame rail and the starter. There was no way to get any kind of wrench on the big nut at the top. Yes, a crow’s foot may have worked but who has one in that size? I still don't know what size it was...but I happened to have a custom bizarro-socketed crow’s foot welded up and ready to go. Ha-ha. I wonder what I was working on years before that necessitated that monstrosity? Might it have been a similar car?!

Anyhoo, the Tip this month is don’t be afraid to customize your own tools. It’s easy, fun, inexpensive and will get the job done! Plus, you never know when one of them will come in handy in the future!

~~ Tom Brobst