the worst ones ive seen have been on the most expensive car ive ever bought !

injectors loose and leaking on boost
1 bolt holding on a caliper
£3000 clutch triple plate carbon done 1500 miles and it locked up, flywheel bolts hadnt been torqued came loose 1 fell right out and jammed itself inbetween the carbon plates !

those are the main 3, i had alot more aswell that ive sorted, car is now almost done but i would NEVER EVER buy a car from jdm garage in devon again, they talk a good game but thats where the good game ends with them im affraid.

 

Nova v6 I bought,no rear flexis on the brake pipes,1 split on a track day,plenty filler,carbon panel silicones and pop riveted over sunroof,holes drilled in the bumpers and grille for lightening and air,cav leather seats welded to the floor.
Another nova had a doorbell button for the horn,was pretty funny
Saph cos had filler inner sills,floorpans,boot floor and chassis legs,looked almost perfect until you scraped away the underseal,early 88 spec rs turbo rung with a 90 spec plate,and those were just my cars I can remember,not cars I have seen!

 

Did they build the car or has someone else tinkered with it?

I find it quite amusing when a car has literally tens and tens of thousands of pounds thrown to have the very best equipment and parts put on it and then it has a nasty bodge done. Completely baffling?

 

lots of different tinkereers but yeah over £100000 and built by monkeys madness.

i was assured it was built top notch hence would never use jdm again.

im happy with the car but only because ive sorted it out myself.

 

There was a guy on turbo sport who found a load of wood in his sills, lemme dig the pictures up.

Ginge

 

My pikey van convertion I am doing.


Went to remove the RS engine that was in it after trailoring it to my unit.

Jacked up the front end, proceeded to undo the drivers side engine mount on the turret, un did the first nut two turns and it fell strate through the turret!

O/S of engine hit the deck They hadn't put the spacer/washer under the nuts.

Then I did a thread about the rest of the bodges on it, to many to mention here.

Fuel lines, pump, wiring, battery tray.......... could go on all day lol

 

Had a Mini which had the A-Panels made out of a old castrol-r oil can..

 

I dont know how some people come up with the ideas i really dont..

 

My brother once bought a capri and the rear arches didn't look to clever. Turned out to be chicken wire backed with cornflakes boxes/pie tins, then filler over both sides!

 

My ol mans series 2 had the filler off a gallon can as a top water hose going onto a metal Hoover pipe down to the bottom hose held together with gaffa tape! All taped onto a fiesta 1.1 radiator! And the best bit was he drove it all the way back to Leicester from Scotland and only noticed when I pointed it out lmfao good one dad fixed the next day though with a trip to my parts shed shame there's so many bodging numpties out there

 

Last RWD saph I had was easily the worst I've ever seen wiring wise (and i have seen some seriously messed up cars wiring wise), fuel pump live was wired into the rear lights with speaker cable, not even properly connected, just twisted together.

Fuse box was a complete abonimation with scotch clips and black tape everywhere.

Nothing in the car worked AT ALL, no lights, no guages, no windows, basically only the headilights and indicators, after about 2 months of fault finding and securing bare wires that had basically grounded out and wrecked the loom i had it all working and as good as new, shame the shell was rotten to the core, I think it got broken in the end after I sold it.

Exhaust was held on with bits of what looked like heavy duty fence wire twisted around the hanger and made into a loop.

 

Fpmsl at the seats welded to the floor.The door bell well thats just funny as fook.

 

Some quality bodges going on here
that pick up wedged on its side with planks of wood (haha)

Ive had a fair few on my cars ive bought

battery cables on a old m3 rep i had was hold on by cable ties
was meant.ti be round post bat but had ford square post

leather belt holding the section of exhaust on a saxo vtr i bought
it hadnt long gone through mot either lol

I bought a focus that was 3 month old from a dealers (ex demo with all the toys )

Had it a few week & a bloke stopped me n said that my fog light comes on when i reverse

found out it had foreign spec lights on the back n the fog & reverse was wrong way round

how they never noticed when they did the final factory checks lol

 

one of many the twat at ace performance did with my conversion was to wire several lives through the live for the alarm. unfortunately i only discovered it when smoke started pouring out from under my dash when they all melted together whilst travelling at 70mph.

 

I had a cherokee jeep with yellow garden hose for brake lines

 

Got to be some more out there?

 

Very Funky gearbox mount

 

Rear brake calipers fitted upside down, after a 2 year £15000 restoration at a "specialist"

 

my mondeo tdci rear anti rollbar bracket cable tied because they snaped the bolt,once bought a izuzu trooper with thr rear brake caliper cable tied out of they way did not notice until i hit the middle pedel hard and ended facing the other way thinking what the fcuk

 

My mate just bought a 13cdti corsa private and he only made it 2 miles before the timing chain went! When I Stripped it theother day it the tensioner was well fucked and someone had cable tied the guide rails together to keep the chain tight! There were also bits off wire with the cable ties too when I can't work out is he stripped it down to bodge it so why not replace the chain ect

 

Brought my escort shell for conversion to rwd an when removing the sills thay were held together with newspaper/ fibreglass and bodyfiller lol nice

 

Found a Volvo engine under the lid of mine

I have a good story from a mate of mine who's an MOT tester. A few years back he had an old Cavalier in for MOT, and he failed it as the sills were made out of paper mache. My mate kept tapping away at it to find solid metal, but there was very little there. The owner came in saying he has owned the car for about 6 months and knew nothing about it, he thought it was a good solid car.

Only thing that gave it away was that a bit of paper mache that was retrieved was a piece of the Daily Mail, dated 2 weeks previous

 

2wd cossy with a repair to the chassis leg......news paper and filler.

 

Had a brown montego 2.0 gti auto paid 70 quid for it taxed and moted from a dodgey auction,

The auto box leeked like a bitch and when it got low on oil it would drop in to 2nd even if you where doing 80 nearly throwing you out the front window.

Found a pissed up bum asleep on the back seat one morning.

 

some of the other bodges i forgot about:

My last puma had a welded in roll cage. Note i deliberately didnt say "fully welded" I found eventually that the top 1/4 of each roof bar had not been welded as the guy hadnt assembled the cage in the correct order

Other bodges id found on my cossie puma include:

Dodgy fuel pump wiring.


a screw in the boost control pipework


next to the tape is a small hole drilled in the boost pipe work to bleed off air to increase boost. An even bigger hole was under the tape


brake pump relay just tucked under windshield scuttle panel.


re-used 20 year old knackered ovalised saphire cossie top mount cups and bearing causing the strut top to snap off Dont understand why youd do that when building up new struts with new avos when back then it would have cost only £20 to use new.


bodged and crushed air filter inlet.


three washers behind the TCA bush instead of one.

 

Anti roll bar link on a 206 taped up with yellow electrical tape

 

as per my back street garage thread, my mates sump plug replaced with an ill fitting sparkplug and some siicone

 

I bought a s2 a couple years ago for parts,was paperwork with the car with letters to the dvla asking why the car was going to be put on a q plate and that the previous owner hadn't had any problems for the last several mots getting it passed,car seemed to be a bit wierd as it was supposed to be 88 spec car but had white roof lining and 90 spec rear spoiler and a 90spec front bumper with the xr3i blanking still in place which wasn't to unusual,trouble was also in the paperwork was a receipt from a salvage yard and a hpi check for a 90spec xr3i shell and it all checked out to the chassis number on the floor lol they were trying to get the original rs turbo plates onto the xr3i shell but had had an inspection done on the shell and the chassis number in the floor obviously didn't match the rs turbo lol the shell was a shitter aswell lol

 

I have now know, someone had wired in a rear fog into the reverse light on a seperate switch even though it has a rear fog switch and fog lights.

 

Someone fitted the engine to the wrong end of my nova.

 

Two major bodges:

One were someone had used a bathroom sponge and fillered over a gap due to rust on the roof corner of there Mini...

and a friend works at a m.o.t centre and a guy had wallpapered and used emoltion paint to cover over the rust on there VW Van

 

My first car was an XR3i cab, Bought it, got it back, to find that the retaining bolts for the suspensions struts werent there !!!!!!!!!!

worse yet it went through an MOT with a pass like it

 

S2 I bought a few years back had some hidden gems... looked so mint from the outside & had a huge spec but...

Brand new gearbox that had auto oil in it, the gearbox cradle had sheared 3 bolts so oil filter started to bounce off the drive shaft, huge jubilee clips on the CVs. No sump seal.

Almost every fuse & relay was wrong, looked like he'd just gone mix & match in the fuse box. Alternator & starter wiring resting on the downpipe, nothing clipped or taped up.

More bodged interior wiring than I've ever seen, XR3i fuel pump & relay (on a 240hp ZVH!), guy had used bathroom silicone on the thermo housing was only after I wired in a temp gauge it was reaching 120deg easy with no booting, no wonder he pulled the wire from the clocks!

Had two splits in lower rad pipes, he'd just ripped up some rubber gloves & cable tied them over.

Took 2 months to get it where it should have been... wondered why he took 2500 when he wanted 4k , did have a hefty spec to be fair. Ahhh well live & learn

 

Oh & he couldn't get it start when I first got there, said he'd had problems since he fitted a dump valve... he was running the vacuum pipe straight to the MAP sensor & left the inlet pipe dangling

 

the lorry with no brake pads, seen this before, usually it's cos the pads wear so much they literally wear into nothing.

Had the old household electrical wire as speaker wire trick on my old hilux.

can't really remember anything too dramatic on my cars though, bought a golf that failed mot on one brake disc, so the guy only replaced one. Seen quite a few new fords with the wrong fog/reverse lights around the wrong way.

But as someone else said, i quite enjoy buying something cheap and going through all the bodges and fixxing them up.

Actually just thoguht, bought an auto disco years ago with a transmission fault, for some reason where the selector cable lever fits onto the square lug on the side of the box someone had put a washer behind it so the square lever no longer fitted on the square lug it was now sat on the threads with a nylock nut keeping it on. This caused slight wear on the threads which is why it was getting it worse as every time you moved the selector it was moving the lever on the threads instead of the square lug. Couldnt believe my luck when i removed the "extra washer" (actually i think it may have been more than just one washer?!) pushed the lever back on the square bit and fitted a washer and a correct nut - the nylock wasn't even the right thread and just caught on the first few threads then road tested it and it was perfect! I'd been having sleepless nights for weeks expecting a pricey gearbox rebuild ahead!

 

once had a rover 214, that had a scafold bar welded where the mid section tube should have been