Electric Tape Hacks For Working On Cars

There's a big difference between knowing what needs to be repaired and figuring out how to repair it with what you have on hand, ie, hacking it. For example, I needed to clamp up an angle brace inside a subframe member so I could drill holes, but the "C" clamps I got from Harbor Freight weren't very "C" like. In fact, with the top of the clamp throat being basically in line with the top of the clamp, it appeared to be useless for clamping anything but two flat surfaces together. I needed to get the top of the clamp down inside the subframe, so I used some electric tape and a socket to hack a clamp extender.



Electric tape is ideal for such hacks because it's strong and hold tight if you stretch it, but also comes off very easily unless you bake it on or age it in the sun. Another electrical tape hack is winding it onto your finger in reverse to hold a nut. In this case, I was reuse the same tape from the clamp, making it a frugal hack. The shaky finger is just how us old guys get when we've been exerting ourselves for a while:-)



Some of my proudest moments as a teenager working on cars were getting at nuts and bolts friends couldn't deal with, one of the few advantages of having small hands. But sometimes, you can't get your hand into in to the end of a bolt to hold a nut, not even two fingers. So the best you can hope for before reverting to taping the nut to a stick or into a wrench is sticking it to a reverse tape job on your middle finger. The great advantage of using a finger is feel, since you can rarely see into locations that you can't reach.