Vintage vehicle winter storage

[Phil Waterman]

Yup it is that time of year to seal things up and protect them, remember my experiences last year with something crawling all the way in to the valve ports through the manifold http://orbit.dnsrouter.com/~mlu/foru...ad.php?t=14498. What really bother me about that was along with the acorns the critter hauled in it carried in enough rat poison pellets to take out a lot of mice, rates and anything else but it still got into the engine and did damage.

So remember to seal up exhaust pipes, soda cans seem to work well.

If you want to do a quality check of your cats work on keeping the critters down, a friend of mine Dr. Duce has a critter early detection system he uses. Steve saves toilet paper tubes with the last one or two squares of TP still attached he carefully tears the end sheet so that he has a clean square edge he then leaves these around his shop and vehicles. If he sees a ragged edge he knows the critters are in the area.

Personally I have two methods I'm using one plain hold mouse and rat traps peanut butter seems to be the best bate. The other is one that I have used for years on my HUP. For some reason mice like to build nest in the rear seat tool box tried various the things the best one is antifreeze I leave an open gallon jug with a couple of table spoons of fresh antifreeze still in the jug. Lay the jug on it side without the cap. No more mice nests in the seat box.

But thanks for bringing this issue up again. Did several things one went and covered all the exhaust pipes, refreshed the moth ball pans in all the hardware cabinets. Baited the traps. And made a note to put a tech tip reminder club newsletter.

Cheers Phil