Jim Peffers
Viper Owner
I live on a farm and have an old house that has been added on to and modified several times; Because of this, it is not exactly mouse-proof. This farm is an active farm and we have a lot of livestock and feed and consequently, a lot of mice in the barns. For some reason, this year has been particularly bad (I think the cats feel somewhat overwhelmed). Anyway, since I did not want to leave the Viper out in one of the garages or shops, I modified the house so that I could park the Viper in the sunporch (a semiheated room that is mostly windows). I prepped the car for winter, parked it inside, hooked it to a battery tender, covered it, and just to be safe, put a little rat poison in an inconspicuous corner. Every 2-3 weeks, I start the car, run it up to operating temperature and move it around a little weather permitting (the farm has a huge parking area). Yesterday, I started the Viper as usual, warmed it up and everything seemed fine until I put it away. When I opened the hood, I smelled something - a kind of sweet-waxy smell. The rat poison is in the form of little green cubes and has a waxy texture. I got a strong light and started checking around and found that some d*amn mouse had stored some of the rat poison on top of the engine block beneath the intake manifold and it was melting as I watched. It made a helluva a mess in a very inaccessible spot. The first thing I did was remove some of the larger unmelted chunks with some very long, thin surgical forcepts. As the engine cooled, the stuff solidified and my wife and I were able to break it up using long, thin wooden dowels. We then attached a piece a 1/2" ID Tygon tubing (flexible, transparent tubing that is impervious to almost everything) to the hose of a small vacuum cleaner and sucked out all the little chunks. We then attached a small rag to one of those mechanical grabs (the tool used for retrieving dropped nuts and bolts and other crap from inaccessible locations and consists of a small grab at the end of a flexible shaft) and soaked the rag in kerosene and used it to swab out the spaces on the engine block beneath the intake manifold. What fun! The good news is that the engine is now spotlessly clean and there appears to be absolutely no damage to anything - believe me, we looked! If any of you guys out there are storing any kind of machinery where there is mouse/rat poison, check thoroughly before you start the engine.
