Repairing your own car is a rewarding and sometimes cathartic activity. Yes, it’s still fun even after the skinned knuckles and the invention of curses that you’ve never used before! What’s not so fun is running into a part that either requires a special tool to remove or the existing tools that exist are not suitable for the task. Or, maybe you want to do a modification for your car, and the parts to do so don’t exist. It’s time to work those folds in your brain and get creative. Have you ever created your own tool or car part?
Most of my creative antics happened back when I was much poorer and had only one Smart Fortwo. Yes, that was a long time ago! I wasn’t even old enough to drink alcohol back then. I worked at McDonald’s and put most of my money into my car. Sadly, the American aftermarket for the Smart Fortwo has usually been on the pricy side, which sucks when your paychecks are just hundreds of dollars. Thankfully, replicating the parts seen in the aftermarket sometimes isn’t too hard.
One of my first custom modifications was to my Smart’s lower motor mount. The stock one, pictured below, is soft and rubbery. It’s great for daily driving, but it’s one of the reasons why old Smarts feel so sluggish. The powertrain cradle gently rocks with each gearshift, amplifying the “bucking” feel that some journalists complained about.
Smart tuners found out that if you replace the soft rubber mount with a hard rubber one, you get more vibrations into the cabin, but the car feels much sharper. A hard rubber mount, pictured below, costs $100 to $130 or so, depending on who you buy it from. That’s not a lot of cash, well, unless you’re living on McDonald’s wages in 2013.
So, I created my own. I used a knife to cut the soft rubber out of the original mount. Then, I bought a hard rubber suspension bushing for a few bucks on eBay.
Once it arrived, I grabbed a cheap sledgehammer from Harbor Freight and bludgeoned the bushing into the mount for the factory engine mount. I then used the motor mount bolt to align the bushing. I spent maybe $30 on the whole project, and my car felt just as sharp as the cars with the fancy $130 mounts. My car is still using the mount today, over 120,000 miles later.
Back in 2020, I bought a 2008 Smart Fortwo for just $1,200 to take on Gambler 500 adventures. There has been a 1-inch lift kit commercially available for the Smart Fortwo since basically forever. But it didn’t sit well with me that the lift kit for Smarts, which largely consists of rubber suspension spacers, is $300 on the low end or over $400 depending on the time of year.
Some Smart owners figured out that you can get most of the effects of the lift kit by buying a set of hockey pucks for about $15, drilling holes into them, and then installing them on top of your rear springs and on top of your front struts. Geometry isn’t as good as the proper lift, but that doesn’t matter if your goal is to beat the car up off-road. Sadly, I couldn’t install my pucks because my struts were too rusted out to be messed with, so I took the car off-road with a stock suspension.
Here’s where I turn things over to you. Have you ever made your own car parts or tools before? Why did you do it?
Top graphic images: Mercedes Streeter
I recently did a 4hr drive to Nashville to pick up a 2012 ForTwo. On the way the seller tells me, “Oh, yeah, it might need motor mounts.” I was a bit irritated since it was all “no problems” up till that point, but no problem, these things eat motor mounts like chips. Fairly inexpensive and not unexpected.
Hooo, boy, those mounts were shot. Tried to rattle my teeth out on the way home. I ended up pulling over at a Love’s, buying a pack of rubber straps from the truck parts section, and pulling as many of the straps through that front mount loop as I could force in there. Didn’t do a whole lot, but took the edge off enough I could stand the noise in the cabin.
I’ve been trying to make my own rear view mirror mount to adapt ‘button’ style mirrors to my Geo’s roof mount. Alas, I’m sure if I had a 3D printer I could probably make tons of things but I’m resorting to hacking apart a mirror and an OEM mount and making some sort of chimera.
I made a lift kit for my Patrol out of flat iron to keep the tires from rubbing. It turned out that I suck at making suspension components so they were way to flimsy,causing it to ride like a elephant in a water bed.
I made my own Volvo 240 timing belt changing tool, but it didn’t keep me from messing up the timing anyway.