When you drive old cars, you’re forced to be resourceful. You need to be able to diagnose noises. Is that a ‘stop right now’ sort of a noise, or a ‘push on to the next safe stoppign place’ noise, or a ‘meh, I can safely ignore that’ noise? You may also need to deploy cunning fixes to get you on your way. I once had to tie on a shock absorber with speaker wire after a mounting snapped and have become quite good at driving a car with a broken clutch cable.

One of my favourite ‘bodge’ materials is aluminium tape. It can cover holes in bodywork if you’ve got leakage, and, as I discovered this weekend, you can just about use it to stem a leak from a diesel pump. It isn’t ideal for that though. Where it really scores is for exhaust bodgery!

The bodger’s friend – aluminium tape.

For the second time in a week, I was forced to deploy this most marvellous of materials, as the Nippa was getting noticeably throaty in the exhaust department. Not a bad thing perhaps, but the neighbours might not agree.

The exhaust system is utterly shot to be honest. It had a welded repair last year, but the whole system is flaking away. There was a hole just before the rear silencer though. Perfect for a bit of tape!

Who need’s a proper bandage?

Now, you can get exhaust bandages to offer a more robust bodge, but they’re not necessarily very cheap. At £7 for a roll, this tape offers great value. There’s enough to ‘repair’ several exhausts! I wrap on a few layers, and try to get high-tack tape. Ultimately, this exhaust still needs to be replaced, but this is good enough to pass an MOT, and saves you the embarrassment of driving around in a car that sounds like it is farting loudly. A few seconds’ work and it’ll sound good as new. It is no longer an immediate concern.

I know it’s good enough to pass an MOT, as part of the Omega’s work was doing the same.

Omega passed an MOT like this.

The MOT merely states that there should be no leaking gases, so it’s absolutely fine. As you can see, the Omega’s patch is still holding up, even after 100 miles of driving. It gives me the luxury of time to find the best deal on a replacement system, and, more importantly perhaps, it enabled me to drive home legally.

Sure, the aluminium tape wasn’t enough to really fix the diesel leak, but it did slow things down a great deal. That was a more temporary bodge solution, but one which achieved the desired response. I far prefer this stuff to gaffer tape, which can leave particularly nasty gluey mess where used. In fact, aluminium tape has become an essential part of this bodger’s toolkit.