One of my ultimate bodges
I was a first year apprentice so very green but totally convinced I knew everything! My dads Mk1 Cortina had an ongoing problem one winter where the screen wash bottle was constantly frozen.
I had recently helped him replace our hot water tank and in order to cash in on the scrap we cut up the old tank so it fitted in the boot. That gave me insight to how the hot water tank actually worked and was the seed of my cunning plan!
I ‘found’ A length of large bore copper fuel pipe from the trucks I was working on at the time and took it home. Once wound into a coil I took the top off the glass screen wash bottle (One of those large ones where the pump sat on top of the glass bottle on a screw lid). Made a couple of holes in the lid and then plumbed in the coil to one of the heater pipes with a pair of stepdown plumbing adapters.
Genius! We now had heating to the screen wash bottle which would warm the water to thaw it and in turn give us a hot screen wash which had to be better in winter months.
Really proud and the next time we had a really cold night we went out for a test drive in the morning. That’s when we discovered that the frozen water in the washer bottle had in turn frozen the water inside the coil and as I plumbed it in line with the heater we had no heater in the car either so no demisters and I succeeded in making the situation many times worse than before. We did both have a good laugh about it though.
BR
Colin
