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Japan's world-class transportation infrastructure couldn't withstand this month's 9.0-magnitutde quake, but their construction teams are still amazing. This stretch of highway was repaired in just six days by a Herculean road crew. This is the triumph of Japanese engineering. More »
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If we've learned anything from Google Street View, it's that something is always going on in this crazy country of ours. Whether it's flashers, crashes or shootings, the roving cameras tell us that not everything interesting happens indoors. This is especially true for the automotive enthusiast that lacks a garage, like this fellow here. More »
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Using bondo is something nobody likes to have to do. The stuff is an admittance in your failure of metalsmithing mastery. Still, Bondo is no wussy taskmaster on it's own. It requires a steady hand and a sense of surface space, gradient approximation, and speed - or more appropriately, the sense of balance between speed and perfection. Maybe most critical is the ability to gauge available possibilities with the stuff, and what requires more drastic measures. The roof came to me dented, the result of a mix of garageless car, high wind, and trees with weak branches, so I knew it would be a bit of work to fix it. The last owner knocked the dent out from the inside as best as possible, then slapped down a skim of Bondo, and then took a nap, never to return with a sanding block. Now we finish the job. More »
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Nothing says I love you like a puddle of gasoline on the floor in the morning. A couple of days after fiddling with the inner fender business mentioned earlier, I walked into the garage to the overwhelming smell of dino juice emanating from a spot directly under the inner fender. That'll show me. Taking the panel back off as well as a secondary inner panel, revealed a sweaty, smelly, series of tubes rusting away. Among them were the fuel delivery line, fuel return line, and brake line. The brake line was perfectly fine, but the fuel lines were messy. Now, there is a right way to repair this and there is the quick-and-dirty way to do it. Obviously I chose the dirty way. Jalopnik in no way advocates what follows; though time-tested, this repair method may result in you randomly catching on fire, but it's cheap, reliable, and fast. More »
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Today's question comes to us courtesy of a reader we'll just call Gregor. True, there are some green zip ties lashing down the front of our WRX. Though, the plastic bolts they replaced were actually inferior. So we can't count that. We do remember a friend with a mid-80s Thunderbird that carried 5 gallons of antifreeze with him at all times because depending on the weather, his radiator would start boiling up green funk. But that was more stubbornness than DIY disaster. Could it be that we've never done anything boneheaded while fixin' our own car? And we're not about to count a 7-cylinder Pontiac as a mistake. How about you? – Jonny Lieberman More »
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