My best use of JB Weld was patching a pin hole on a Ford gas tank. I followed the directions to the letter and never had a problem.
I once used it in an attempt to patch a leaking heater core. It worked for about 3 days. It was so much trouble getting the thing out of the dash that I regretted not just buying the new heater core the first time.
I used it last summer on my riding mower. Mt trans axle housing is cast aluminum and has a threaded hole in it for mounting it to the frame. The thread stripped out and the bolt wouldn’t work well enough to trust it, so I filled it up with JB Weld and installed the bolt. It worked well enough for me to forget about it. I sure hope it hangs in there.
On stripped out threads in aluminum I have had good luck using J-B Weld to lock a stud in the hole. My most outrageous success was on an obsolete condensor. The old cars AC was still working when the car was sold many years later. But the failures were many. I never sealed a leaking gas tank successfully. There was always a seap.
I don’t really have any as I don’t care for the stuff although I suppose it may work ok in the right application.
Many years ago a buddy of mine bought a '53 GMC pickup out of farmer’s field on the cheap and the engine had a roughly 4 or 5 inch crack in the water jacket on the side of the block. He stuffed a full load of JB Weld into the crack and drove the truck for 5 years like that with his welding rig in the back.
Normally one might say what kind of welder would run an antique slow-poke truck but he could be forgiven for his transportation because he was top notch with the torch and electric welders.
I had to drain the tank, sand it down with a couple different grits of sand paper, then slather it on and wait as long as possible to use that tank again. Luckily, it was on an F250 with dual tanks. Come to think of it, the truck had a 460 V8 under the hood, so when your burning that much gas, what’s a weeping leak? Maybe it didn’t work at all.
Years ago, as a young kid spending summers on the farm in Eastern Montana, we had a 4WD Case tractor that suffered a catastrophic failure–a rod came through the side of the block. We pulled the engine, resleeved the block, installed a piston/rod assy from a used engine, and fashioned a plate to cover the hole in the outside of the block, attaching it with screws and JB Weld. Damned if it didn’t work.
If you do not mind repeated applications, bar soap rubbed over a pinhole leak in a gas tank works well. Now my favorite glue is shoe goo, glues incredibly strong, lost a bet because my fave liquid nails failed, jb weld has its uses, though the jb quickweld does not hold up as well for me.
460 V8, auto tranny, 4.10 rearend and 4wd. It got 13.5 mpg on the hwy, 11 mpg in town, and 8 - 9 mpg while pulling my travel trailer. I loved it. Gas as also $1.65 back then too. It was 2002 I think.
My outrageous repair was to my Toyota’s cylinder head. I had what I thought was a blown head gasket on my Toyota 22R 4cyl engine. I replaced the gasket, getting the valves reseated and new valve seals with the head off. Upon start-up, it started blowing white clouds out of the tailpipe that were too strong for residual moisture. I started to tear it back down, convinced that I messed something up. When I took the exhaust manifold off, I saw a green trail running down the 4th cyl port. Looking into the head, I found a pinhole leak into the exhaust port, obviously from the water jacket. A casting void must have opened up. Tapping on the pinhole with a screwdriver opened the void to about 1in long and 1/8in wide. Not wanting to pay for a new head, I mixed up some JB Weld, packed it into the hole, and put my potable spot light on it overnight to help cure it. That fixed it and didn’t have any more trouble with it for the next several years and about 70,000 miles.
I have used it many times to fix stripped pan bolts on aluminum case Torqueflights by putting some J B Weld in the hole and threading in studs and nuts.
For gas tanks I used to use a kit from NAPA that came in a pouch with a tube of hardener attached. You squeezed the tube, kneaded the pouch then sliced the pouch open and applied. That epoxy was so aggressive that it grabber through oil,gas,or diesel. It came with a wax stick to plug a hole with diesel or gas pouring out and you just put the epoxy over it. I never saw it fail.
I’ve never used it. There are two-part gas tank repair materials, muffler repair kits that I’ve successfully used to plug a rot hole on my old truck’s cat converter canister, and stuff designed specifically for just about every conceivable application. Of course I DO have numerous half-used tubes of just about everything…
By coincidence I just bought some JB Weld Original (called “cold weld” I think). Based on what Ray said on the show, that the repair guys at his shop use it all the time. I’ve never used it before. My first JB Weld task planned is to glue a cracked plastic D-handle to repair a shovel. I’ll report back here how it worked.
One thing I noticed when shopping for JB Weld is among the half dozen or so versions, there’s a clear version – “JB Clear” I think – that seems to offer a stronger bond than even JB Original. Why would the clear version be a stronger glue than the Original version?
I did a head gasket job on my F150 with the inline 6. When the head came off, I had to destroy the AIR injection system that threads into the cylinder head to get it off the head for “hot tanking”. Upon reassembly, I cut off each individual port and threaded each of six into their respective holes. For whatever reason, the ports would not retain torque, and each worked loose, one at a time. I replaced each with JB Stick Weld–the first two at a time, then all remaining.
The fix works just fine, with one exception that was operator error–I didn’t wait for the epoxy to fully cure! Driving the truck after this fix, I get a BAD misfire. Within a second or so, I figured out the most likely explanation was that a dollop of JB had detached from the main repair and had wedged the exhaust valve open.
My fix was to go full throttle, and rev the hell out of it! (Relatively speaking…probably 3800 RPM ;-). The goal was to blow it out the exhaust, and it worked. There’s probably a pea-sized chunk of it just upstream of my pre-cat!
(Oh and for all the haters re: deleting air injection–I passed my last sniffer test while putting out roughly 1/6 of allowable HC and CO. Not too shabby for 174K!)
We have a couple of 1997 Ford F Superduty trucks in our fleet with the 460 V8 . . . the very last year that engine was installed, from what I understand
They’re about 15000lbs gvwr, so they’re OBD1, not OBD2
@ok4450 that was the best it EVER got, and I was on Hwy 82 in South Arkansas going 55 w/out cruise. I had to make every effort I knew about to pull that off.
If I tried the interstate going 75 like I like to drive, 11 mpg would be more like it.
I used to tell people that it’d get 11 mpg even if you hauled it on a flatbed trailer.
It was an oil user, though I do not recall how much. I switched from 10w-30 Havoline dino to 15w-40 Rotella and that slowed the consumption a bit. I wish I had a reason to have a big block now. Even though the newer engines have more power on paper, they don’t have the same feeling of undeniable low end torque.
I went to the 7.3 non turbo diesels after that. They were a much more durable and torqy engine. Not that the 460 was weak. It’s just that the 7.3 IDI really earned and deserved it’s moniker as the “bulletproof” diesel. Like old girlfriends, they were all different, and they all had something special going for them.
My preference is also for low end grunt. That’s why my favorite motorcycle (and which I’ve owned since the mid 70s) is a big cubic inch Harley flathead. It’s a 2-wheel tractor that idles at 70 MPH.
Many years ago I bought a 25 tooth countershaft sprocket for the transmission to replace the stock 22 tooth and the guy at the bike shop asked me if I was sure the bike was going to pull that tall a gear without dying every time the clutch was engaged.
Not only would the bike not bog down taking off from a dead stop I could take off in 3rd gear without any hesitation at all; and that’s with a foot clutch and hand shift.