Tuesday, August 14, 2007

Spinner's car repair

Emboldened by the success of my first foray into auto repair I turned my mind to the sun visor problem. Both the sun visors on my 1994 truck are broken off. The visors are just fine, but the little plastic thingies holding them in became brittle with time and broke in half. Nissan does not sell little plastic thingies. Instead they will happily sell new visors at $140-some each.
I considered canvassing the local junkyards, but was stymied by the concept that plastic thingies of the same age would also be brittle. Hmmm... Perhaps I could jury rig something.

Long time friends may recall my misguided attempts to build a CD spindle using the directions in Spin-off Magazine. Suffice it to say that after much angst and several visits to Home Depot for varying sizes of rubber grommets and flexible tubing, I ended up with a wobbly spindle that never did spin evenly. I have finally found the silver lining to that experience. I used the leftover grommets, plus rubberbands, to create a sort-of stopper I could shove into the hole in the roof that formerly held the little plastic thingy.
Tada! It worked! Now I needed something to keep the visors from flopping down. Add in some double-stick Velcro and I have functional visors. (OK - add in a particularly hot afternoon and regluing the double-stick velcro with superglue finished the repair.)

Total new outlay: $1.88
Reward: mostly working visors (they flop a bit when down) and just a bit of smugness.

3 comments:

Sharon said...

Impressive ingenuity, also an indicator that your truck is nearing retirement.

ShannonAZ said...

Hmm, 2 gromits, a rubber band and 8" of velcro. Add a couple finishing nails and 2 feet of lamp cord and you could make a MacGyver rail gun.

magnusmog said...

Smugness is allowed I think, good work !! :)