MUFFLER HACK
Mah hunnybear’s car was making busted-mufflery noises. Some scrap aluminum, two coat hangars and a bit of aluminum tape later, she was quiet again:
There! I Fixed It!
If this lasts through the next 6 months I’ll be pleasantly surprised. I figure the coat hangars will rust and snap pretty quickly. I figure I should find some aluminum strapping ’cause even the galvanized stuff doesn’t last very long once Winter sinks her salty teeth into it.
How to fix your exhaust with one of these:
(*) Put your car up on ramps or jack stands. Don’t jack the front of your car up and work under your car leaving just the jack between you and death. If you’re lucky the ER guys will just laugh at you. More likely they’ll play soccer with your decapitated head. Use ramps or jack stands, use the parking brake, chock the tires, wiggle the car and satisfy yourself that it’s not going to fall on you while you’re under it.
(*) Find the hole in the exhaust by starting the car and using your senses. Listen for the sound. Feel for the warm air. DO NOT carelessly jump in and out of your car to while it’s propped up. If you topple it, nobody will play soccer with your decapitated head but somebody — maybe you — will kick you in the ass for busting up the car. Be hell of careful.
(*) Now you know where the hole is, and whether or not this hack will work for you. On this car, that exhaust pipe you see there has a seam on the other side from the picture, and the seam rusted into a nice big hole. On MY car, last year, the exhaust rusted at the joint between the pipe from the engine and the pipe from the muffler itself. I had to buy a new muffler because I don’t know how to fix rusted metal flange joints. I had to do a lot of grinding and metal cutting and cursing to install it. This one was lots easier.
(*) Find some scrap aluminum. I think the white stuff you see in the picture was once aluminum siding, but I don’t know. It’s not mine.
An appropriate sheet of aluminum will be wide enough to cover the holes and then some, and long enough to wrap around the exhaust pipe and overlap itself a bit. Do not use tin snips for harvesting aluminum siding from your house.
(*) Bending metal around the pipe while lying under your car will not be fun. Find a mandrel to bend it around before you crawl under there. I found a round bit of wood post lying on the ground but it was too thick. You want something roughly the same diameter as your muffler, or a bit smaller. In the end I found a post driver in a friend’s barn. You know, heavy hollow metal tube, capped one end, handles on the side, used for driving metal posts into the ground or an unfortunate enemy.
(*) Get three coat hangars because you will screw one of them up. Start by clipping the twisted hangary bit (you know, what hooks onto the coat rack) off. How do you cut thick coat hangar wire? Find a pair of slip-joint pliers. Not little needle-nose pliers or wire cutters. They have metal cutters at the base of the jaw near the pivot but those are meant to cut tiny bits of 18ga. wire. Most slip-joint pliers have a much beefier coarse cutter that kicks coat hangar wire ass with relative ease.
(*) Cut your wire to an appropriate length. An appropriate length is enough to wrap around the exhaust pipe and leave long tails so that you have some leverage to twist them together with your hands. If you leave short tails you won’t be able to bend them easily. If you leave the tails too long you’ll poke yourself in the eye while you’re under your car and the ER guys will laugh at you.
I ended up snipping somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 off the end of what remained of my coat hangars after I removed the twisty hangary bit. Figures that one coat hangar wouldn’t be enough for two muffler ties. Once you’ve got your lengths of wire, bend them to shape around your mandrel.
(*) Crawl up under your car. Fit your aluminum sheet around your exhaust pipe. Wrap a coat hangar tie around the sheet. Pull the ends of the tie ’til the thing is tight, then start twisting the tails together. Aren’t you glad for those long tails now? Do the other tie.
(*) Grab your pliers and tighten your twist-tie. Try not to tighten it so hard that the metal breaks. I did that and I needed another coat hangar. See what I mean about the extra?
(*) Now take your aluminum tape and wrap the joins where the aluminum sheet meets the muffler like I did above. You’ll find that the tape roll won’t fit around the top side of the pipe because the car is in the way. You’ll have to cut a long length of tape and peel the backing off as you go. It’s a pain to get the tape over the top without it wrinkling and sticking to the wrong things. Cursing helps. Once you have one layer on, overlap it with another two.
(*) Get out of there, you’re done! Start your car and listen to her purr.
What should you do with those left-over bits of coat hangar wire? Leaving them in the driveway so they’ll get sucked up into the lawn mower and impale someone’s flesh is one option. Here’s another:
DUCT TAPE TIRE PRESSURE POUCH
I have this little tire pressure gauge. One nice thing about electronic gauges like this one is that they use a strain gauge to measure pressure. Strain gauges are tough and hard to break. Conventional mechanical pressure gauges tend to rely on lubrication and moving parts that wear or fail.
The one I have has a couple of problems: it comes with a small button-cell battery that nobody’s ever heard of. The gauge was heavily discounted at Canadian Tire, and the reason why is probably that the battery was dead.
I took it apart and retro-fitted it so that it takes more standard CR-2032 button cells. If you’ve never heard of these, they’re pretty easy to get: find a computer nobody’s using and take it apart. There’s probably a CR2032 on the motherboard.
So now I have this nice tire pressure gauge with a full battery that’s three times as big as the one it came with and should last forever, right? Except that the way you operate this gauge is you push the front panel (the black bit with the display on it in the pic below) to activate it. Then you read your tire pressure and put the gauge away in your pocket or on your keychain, where that poorly designed power button gets pushed over and over again until the battery dies before you even get a chance to read another tire pressure.
Here’s my solution to THAT problem:
T.P. Gauge Pouch
This duct tape pouch has a protective panel that keeps the power button from being pushed when it’s in my pocket.
There are two bits of coat hangar held on either side of the power button (see my fancy high-tech diagram) that keep the piece of scrap balsa from touching the button. The scrap of balsa keeps other things like keys and fingers from touching the button. No touchy button, no drainy battery.
Tips for making your own cheap-ass duct tape pouch like this:
(*) Cut yourself two bits of coat hangar the appropriate length to protect the button on either side. Lay down a piece of duct tape, sticky side up (this is challenging but once you figure out how it’s easy. Hint: use fingernails.) Lay the coat hangar bits out on the duct tape to the proper spacing. Now fold the tape over the wire and your spacing is set. This helps so you don’t have to try and hold four things in exactly the right place later on.
(*) A great place for scrap balsa is a box that Maroc tangerines come in. Cut yourself an appropriate piece of balsa and duct tape your duct-taped-coat-hangar bits to it. Then wrap it in duct tape for good measure. Now you just have one piece to worry about placing exactly right later on.
I don’t want to ‘splain how to make duct-tape pouches. It’s a cross between papier-mache and sewing. Basically you make panels of duct tape by slapping two pieces of duct tape sticky-side together (like papier mache) and leaving wide edges uncovered for attaching to other pieces (like sewing but with pre-glued seams instead of thread. Right? Right?
Here’s a hint, though: getting the pouch to be the right size is tricky. Obviously you want to end up with a piece that you wrap around your pre-pouchified object so that it sticks onto itself and makes a snug fit. Less obvious is that once you have it, you can fold bits of duct tape along the edges (or if you’re dexterous enough, put ‘em along the inside) to reduce the inner diameter and make the pouch fit tightly.
Wait, dang it I didn’t even want to get into this. Curses!