I Have to admit before I could afford my current vette I was quite the Bubba on my last vette (1977). I was a Bubba on the paint,radio, wiring, headlights and vacuum lines..You guys got any Bubba confessions?

 

I think there's a little Bubba in all of us. Even the perfectionists pull what they might consider a Bubba (though they may never admit to it).

So let me be the first...even though I haven't started my restoration I will most likely Bubba something on the car.

But it's okay.... Isn't there a Bubba-Gump shrimp? Forrest says it's the best.

I once made a piece of furniture. When I showed it to a friend I began to point out my flaws. He said, "That's okay, nobody would notice it if you don't point it out." He was right. One man's Bubba is another man's Mona Lisa. (Although I never did find her to be a hottie.)

 

Most people will have at least a few Bubba confessions.

My personal worst was a non Corvette one for a friend of mine, He had a rusty, old TR6 that he used as a daily driver. I tried very hard to keep him employed by keeping his car on the road. His rusty gas tank was leaking so badly that it wouldn't hold enough fuel for him to do a round trip so I welded his tank flange on to a 5 gallon, metal gas can. He drove it that way for years.

It made my stomach turn every time I saw that car.

Oh, and if you must have a Corvette one, until I replaced my engine harness last fall, I had the replacement fusible link held in place by morrettes.

 

Alright, I'll display my ignorance: what's a morrette?

 

I dont know either, Please Dumb it down for me...........

 

Canadian wire nut

 

I used to have a 78 Audi Fox that once broke down on the DC beltway when I was about 20. Buddy of mine and I figured out that there was no fuel pressure. Inline fuel injection pump back by the tank locked up.

So, not being able to get a pump with that kind of pressure on a Sunday, we peeled the cannister pump apart and cleaned it up. Tried to re-peen the thing back together, but it leaked REAL BAD.

Tied a bunch of rags around it and hauled *** back to Watkins Glen...about 5 hours away. A rolling molotov cocktail Bubba got home, though

 

I had a Corvair, a Vega and a V8 Gremlin. I had a 66 GTO that musta had the coil wired backwards. I put the 8 inch crank dampner on my 7 inch original timing cover and broke off the timing tab to get the damper on. I did not warn the machinist enough and he decked the pad... I didn't buy that CLEAN 67 numbers matching blue roadster for $25K. Man that was a beautiful car. But I do know about car electrics. There is smoke in the wires. As long as the smoke stayes in the wires, it will work. If the smoke gets outta the wires, it won't work anymore. See?

 

well, i will say that i have never intentionally bubba'd something up. i'm sure that when i was about 17 or 18 and i was trying to fix something right that it was closer to a bubba than i would like to admit. but as an "adult" i have never been able to shortcut a repair, i was always taught that "anything worth doing, is worth doing right". it may sound corny, but that is just the way i was raised. sometimes it can be a bit of a curse, because i just have trouble saying, "well, that's good enough"........

 

I try to do everything so that I don't have to feel bad about it later, but I recently fixed the paint damage on my t-tops myself which came out pretty nice but I'm no professional car painter, hence it's perhaps a bit of a Bubba way how I did it. Still, the result is so much better compared to no paint at all. Can be only noticed if looking very close.

 

In my mind and experience "Bubba" is simply a reaction, the elusive individual that shows up like a little devil on your shoulder when stressed. I honestly believe that no one starts out working on their Vette with the intent to pull a Bubba (I gotta fix that thing...where's the bailing wire and duct tape??). It's only after they've been at it for way longer than planned and have hit snag after rusty, brittle snag that the beast rears his ugly head and you take whatever shortcut you need to to get the job done and get rolling. Or, once you've blown the budget and your realize to "do it right" is gonna set you back yet another hundred bucks, the shortcuts kick in.

Frustration + lack of time + lack of $$ + limited knowledge = bubba. It just happens.

The rheostat on my original headlight switch was burnt, literally. I found if I switched the feed wire to the adjacent, empty tab on the wiring connector, the rheostat was by-passed and I had full function apart from the dimmer. I was totally cool with that, total bubba that avoided the extra $40 I would have (and ultimatly did) spend to get a proper replacement switch. You do what you gotta do.

I did a similar thing with the little orange module that dims the interior lights...it was beat and instead of dropping the cash for the replacement I fashioned a jumper wire and rammed it into the connector to keep the ground open. Taped it up and stashed it away...worked like a charm. The plan was to take my time and locate the replacement for a reasonable cost instead of the knee-jerk reaction to just cough up the dough and get it done now. I found the part cheap and fixed it right.. all is well.

The real problem, especially for the next owner, is the bubba-isms that are done that are never followed up on and ultimately corrected. We all know them all to well. It's just too easy to bury these things and forget about them when dealing with the next problem or repair. Which reminds me, I really need to fix that hole in the gas tank that I repaired with Bubble-icious...ahhh, when I get to it.

And so it goes....
Smiles, Steve

 

I plead the fifth, for fear of incriminating myself with Bubba tactics

 

Frustration + lack of time + lack of $$ + limited knowledge = bubba. It just happens.

I am almost positive, we have all been in this situation. If you have always worked on your own cars.

 

Been there. Done that.

 

Not with the vette but with old DD,just fix it so it runs.... much tape and steelwire

 

I totally agree.

Stuff like this isn't even Bubba to me. Getting it running today so you can fix it right sometime later is A-OK in my book. As others have said, if you, like me, were strapped for cash between the ages of 18 and 28 such that you had to do all your own repair work yourself, and you NEVER Bubba'd ANYTHING, well then, you are a much smarter man than I am. Especially with regards to the "limited knowledge" variable in the equation above. Many was the time I thought I had fixed something correctly, only to later find out that my ignorance of the system had caused me to Bubbatize something unknowingly. This later realization usually happened when I found myself beside the road somewhere scratching my head about why some system isn't working AGAIN!!!!!! (Those are the times when I "gained experience".)

If I bought your car and later found your bubbliscious gas-tank repair, I would probably laugh, and wouldn't be all that pissed off about it. I would have appreciated it if you had told me about it somewhere along the way, but like you said, stuff happens. The harmful Bubbas to me are the professionals who figure out ways to short-cut repairs, sometimes even knowing you will be back in a year or three because what they did sucked, and do it just to get more money out of my pockets.

 

Yup...but I save it all for my 89 Grand Marquis...not the other cars!

 

Bubba???-me no, never

"Sweetheart, where's the beer can I had cut apart to fix the hole in the exhaust pipe?" !!!!!

SEMPER FI--1970 Dave

 

The list would be a bit long. Even used some all thread to make my own tranny mount. With my engine swap, I wanted it to be easy to maintain, ended up with a FORD in line fuel filter. I have a piece of a cut up road sign as a car part (no kidding, but it worked).

Road sign piece is attached to the frame and the in line high pressure pump is on top of it. It was great for protecting the pump, but kind of a bubba.

I need to buy a new air intake tube, when doing the engine had the Camaro LT1 intake tube, had to put it on upside down and block the sound dampner off to make it work (going ot have to make my own or buy a smooth one and put it on upside down as well, as I have to have mine bend to the other side because of the corvette accesories). When you put a new style engine in an old car on a limited budget, you either pay a whole bunch, or bubba a few things until you can do it all the way for show.

 

It all started in 1957... holding the plastic body of a 57 Plymouth model over the gas burner of my mother's stove. Going to make the plastic 'soft' so I could customize it.
One second car, the next second melted blob!!!!
Regards,
Alan