MacGyver award? Or perhaps a better tittle, how many Amps is this rated for?
so I get but one day off a week. This weekend the Corvette club organized a lunch run to a country pub. And I mean way out in "Whoop whoop " as they like to say here in Australia.
Start out this morning in a perfect running, highly polished C3 Corvette. Meeting point about an hours drive. Car ran perfectly and all systems working A1.
so we all take off in a group, about 25 Corvettes of all different years. We head up into the hinterland, long, long uphill drive as we enter the mountains. Very winding road with no where to pull off to the side. And sure enough, the circuit breaker on my charging system decides that now is a great time to give it up. Volt meter go's from 14.5 volts to 10 instantly. I'm running twin electric fans, fuel injection with intank electric fuel pump. I'm not going to make it 5 miles without a charging system. After about 2 miles, finally found a place to pull over. Crawled under the car, removed the heat shield over the breaker and reset it. Fired it up, yup, charging again. Pulled back onto the road, maybe 100 yards. Pop! No charging again. Damn. Went another mile or 2 and managed to pull off. Yup, the circuit breaker is definitely Toast! Great, I'm in the middle of nowhere, the whole bloody club left me behind as they thought I had it fixed the first time. Armed with only a leatherman tool I says to the missus, if only I had a piece of wire. She picks up a small chunk of mechanics wire from the ground and says, "How about this?".
soooo.
I unplug one of my headlight relays mounted very close to the Alternator, I have a new power wire coming up from the starter Solenoid for clean power to the headlights. I tie the mechanics wire to the hot post on the Alternator and plug it into the hot wire going to the starter Solenoid. We were about 60 Kilometers away from the lunch pub. We got there about 5 minutes after the others. Then an hour drive back home after lunch. A very scenic drive to be sure, but I think I was watching the volt meter much more than the scenery. Made it home just fine.

 

Amazing ingenuity. Well played sir.

 

So it was your wife that really saved the day!!!

 

McGyver would be proud!

 

Cool story and Congratulations on your ingenuity!!

 

She gets the Mrs. MacGyver award.

 

Another Bubba is born

 

I disagree, he's not a "bubba" candidate , but is a "MacGyver."

Bubba is a fixer that is too cheap or ignorant to do things right. MacGyver uses knowledge & inginuity to survive a bad situation but does things correctly when he can...

JMHO

Kudos to the OP!

 

Exactly! Now....take your wife to her favorite restaurant.

(does your wife have a sister?)

 

In response, when I arrived home. I stopped the car in front of the garage. Put my ramps in place. Pulled the car into the garage and up onto the ramps. The "MacGyver" repair was undone immediately after taking the photo shown above. Once off the ground and I could get under it. The defective circuit breaker was removed.
Bubba would have just said, Yup, Fixed! And left it at that.
Currently, my car is out of action. Waiting till I can get to the electrical shop. Time to get parts to re-engineer the add on electrical's. This WON'T happen again!

 

Thanks for sharing that. Very creative solution. I'd like to think I would have thought of that.

These stories are some of the best part of Corvette ownership. Pretty sure we all have a few.

FWIW I would have been a lot more comfortable with a few wraps of electrical tape around that wire. I think I'm going to check to see if I have a roll in the back of my car.

 

I was just kidding about the bubba fix! I figured it would be fixed right, unlike our nemesis Bubba...

 

what year is your car ?

 

It's an early 77 model. And no, it's not all factory stock.