I made a big boo boo... arrrrrrgh

So I decided to change the auto trans fluid in my '88 Accord on my own....
huge mistake. I ended up breaking off a part of the metal casing around the
bolt and now there's a 1/2" gash. If I were to add any fluid, it would leak
badly.

Would it be possible to fix it? I have the part that broke off and it would fit
perfectly if I could weld it back... unfortunately I don't have a welder. How
about Krazy Glue?

Or should I just take it as an expensive lesson and get another car?

 

Start calling automotive machine shops. See if they can patch it. I've
seen some pretty ugly fixes applied to the cases of motorcycles used for
training courses.

 

Or look for a local race track. Welders do good work on aluminum parts all
the time. A transmission case might be pretty oily, but no worse than a
motorcycle transmission, I suppose.

Local machine shops would be a good source of welder references, maybe a
body shop.

 

I never had any trouble doing my wife's '89 when she had it. Probably a
good thing I didn't know this was a possibility; else I'd have
bad-lucked myself into it for sure.

This definitely qualifies as a catastrophic error, which is actually
easier on me and my mood than the half-ass stuff I do to myself far more
often. An odd calm settles over me when something like this happens.
It's like it's SO screwed up that I know immediately that I can't
recover from it right then no matter what, so the pissed-off
solve-this-problem-right-now mechanism in my brain never gets going.

Nah. Cyanoacrylate is rather mediocre for metal to metal, and even if
it did bond okay it would almost certainly still leak.

Well, as another poster suggested, you don't have anything to lose
trying JB Weld. This sounds right up its alley. Make sure you clean
both sides thoroughly, and make sure you spread it consistently with no
breaks. Also, you're going to need to clamp it, which may be
challenging. You might be able to worry a bar clamp or spreader around
and make it work. Give it 24 hours before you try to check the repair's
integrity.

Failing that, the machine shop suggestion is a good one. Chin
up--you're not completely cooked.

 

Have a pro weld it. Don't bother with glue because there's too much oil
and too much stress for it to ever work.

 

I know exactly what you mean, I used to build P.C's back in the days when
you could make money doing this, (I just repair them now!) one time I
wrecked a £5000 ($8000) server by dropping a whole cup of coffee into its
opened innards, I just stood and looked at the mess for a minute and carried
on with something else, it was a very strange experience!