It’s funny the things we put up with in the process of putting a car together. An older, wiser friend once told me, “Temporary fixes usually become permanent solutions.” He’s right, of course, and I was familiar with the notion long before someone expressed it in such a succinct phrase. I was the one guy among my group of friends who was content with having missing door panels or no carpet, driving the car while I worked on whatever I was doing at the time. More than once, back-seat passengers had to sit on folded moving blankets because I hadn’t put the seat cushions back in yet. In that same car, I removed the inner component of the glovebox because the cable controlling the HVAC blend door broke. I’d reach in through the glovebox opening to turn the heat on. This lasted for several months before I actually fixed it.
The trend continues, of course. Project Truck Norris, for example, had a bad seat frame and a couple of missing seat springs on the driver side when I first got it. It felt like sitting in a crater while driving it. My quick fix involved raiding the bottom of my dresser looking for material to shore it up. Old T-shirts, towels, and even a pair of boxers were shoved in place of the long-gone foam and broken springs. I was pleased that it was a step up from the shredded, duct-taped upholstery and broken seat springs jabbing at me each time I sat down, yet I snickered to myself pondering how long it would be this way. After about a year of that temporary fix, I remedied the situation with a better (but still temporary) fix. I cleaned and painted the seat frame, reinforced some of the broken springs, and added a new foam and upholstery kit from Classic Industries. It’s still not done, though. The seat still needs a few new springs, and the upholstery is clamped at the back with vice grips, rather than new hog rings.
Likewise, at the back of the pickup, my friend, Paul, and I installed the fuel cell under the bed, sawing a gaping hole in the bed floor to access the filler and fuel-line plumbing. We supported the cell with some modified Blazer tank straps we re-bent to fit the shape of the cell. Those straps instantly lost their shape the first time I filled the cell up, causing it to pitch rearward. A pair of ratchet straps came to my aid, crisscrossed under the cell and bearing most of the weight. I’ve put a few thousand miles on the thing since then, and only just replaced it with a slightly better solution, when Lucky Costa and I swapped my bed out for the cast-off bed of Hot Rod Garage’s latest project. We dropped the cell in the bed and ran the plumbing through the floor. A single ratchet strap remains, but it’s just maintaining the lateral position of the cell, not actually holding it in the car. Temporary fixes are OK as long as they’re regularly superseded by less sketchy temporary fixes. Eventually, you’ll end up with a good, permanent solution.
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