marton

round here we have a problem with pine martens with a rubber addiction.
once they get under the hood they chew up everything with rubber like most cables. Only cure is to cover all the cables with a special flexible metal tube that some entrepeneur here sells in sets.

There are also a few around here with bites out of the spoiler; fortunately not mine yet.

Marton

Brian B

Thanks for all of the suggestions, Guys!

Shane, how much did the bag run?

tw1963

Having seen a friends engine bay reduced to bite sized shavings I can sympathise with the loathing that rodent attack can instill. There is no greater hatred then that of a man for a car eating mouse.

Now the problem with poison is its too slow and leaves the wiring as an after dinner mint for the soon to be ex-mouse. The problem with a trap is that it leaves all the other mouses alive to eat the wiring during the wake.

Best mouse catcher bar none consists of a 'moat' of acid surrounding a bait of peanut butter and bacon or dripping (pig fat). The little b***ds will walk across the acid and as soon as their feet start burning they lick them and drop stone dead. Its a bit dramatic but very effective and will knock out the offending mouse, his parents, grand parents, cousins and potentially thousands of his distant relations.

This method is an old farmers trick and is offered for entertainment purposes and to make mouse victims feel a bit better as well. This particular method of mouse management should only be used by old farmers during a genuine mouse plague and where local regulations permit. :-))

Colin Emerson

BrianB,
Feel for you, I had the same thing happen, posted it on here quite awhile ago. Driving, feeling good, and out pops a friggin mouse. Just load the perimeter of your garage/shop with moth *****, they can't stand the smell. Poison is too slow, plus your other friendly critters can get into it. Traps, are somewhat useless, they can clean them out without setting them off. It's like a buffet for them.
Just go grab 3-4 boxes of mothballs and surround your car, at the edge of your building, under your car, near the wheels( I think that is where they jump on). Pretty good fix for 10-15$, and just keep refreshing the stinky mothballs. Try to keep a few cats around, I let my cats roam the garage...you get cat prints on your car but better than having a family of mice living in you car

the flyin' scotsman

Funny you say that Colin............my farm cats are always leaving tracks on my car but I never see mice...........unless my feline friends want to show off their prize catches.

Colin Emerson

Malcolm,

Black 928's and cat prints do not mix very well, I think we both know from experience....everytime I go in my garage my car is covered with little footprints, but they keep the nasties away.

DG84S

Here's a fellow showing how to install an organic method for controlling mice and rats.

Scott M.

Brian;

I feel your pain. Frakin' squirels ate the wiring harness back half of my plow Scrambler, and chewed clear through the fuel line of one of my Grand Cherokees. Spraying high pressure fuel onto the exhaust.
I found a poison named 'One bite' at a local farm store. It is very effective unlike the blue pellet stuff that justs get stored all over the dam* place.
One bite is a corn based product and makes the mouse, chiprat, etc. seek out water thus taking them away from cars.
Where I live anyway, I've found that mice, chiprats bring snakes. All the more reason to whack the bastard*.

Sharkbody

Cotton ***** soaked in "real" peppermint oil from health store. Mix a half ounce to a pint of water, soak cotton and place in affected areas. Smells great and has a certain, "GreenPeace" feel to it. G

Brian B

I just found Moth ***** in the local store (its good to work in da'hood every once in a while). I'll spread them out tonight and see if that helps.

What I need is a really angry country cat with a large appetite...

dr bob

The organic folks recommend palpable boric acid, spread around as a tracking powder. Boric acid is the stuff that we used to mix with water as an eye wash solution, and it's benign environmentally. But it's tough on mices, rats, roaches, darn near anything that cleans itself. Mouse walks through it, licks the feet later while cleaning, and the stuff kills. Like warfarin (rat/mouse bait or cumadin blood thinner...), it's a fairly slow process, giving the mouse time to head outdoors before its little toes curl up.

The warfarin-based baits work amazingly well, especially the peanut-butter baits. Mice just love fresh peanut butter! Warfarin is a blood thinner/anti-coagulent, so exposure to it means that any minor bleeding will be fatal. It doesn't take long for internal bleeding to kill your targets. Again, they head outdoors if they can, so you don't have the issue of dead carcasses and their fragrance.

Mice need food and water to survive, so remove any available food supplies and cut off/clean up the water sources they use. I started putting the dog's food in a small plastic trash can after finding that the mice were using the bag for nests and the huge food supply to make more mice. Karen buys these big bags of bird seed too. So at least once a year, I close the garage, open all the cabinets, and set off a few of those aerosol insect bombs in there. These are the ones you buy to get rid of fleas and other things in the house. Turns out they kill all kinds of crawling wildlife, termites, roaches, ants, and (drumroll...) mice. Cleanup after the fumigation is pretty much a sweeping-up effort. Hard to believe so many things manage to stay out of sight in the garage.

DonS

I LOVES ME MICE!!!! MMMMMMMMMMMMMM, GOOD!!!!

Sharkbody

W Gith Warfarin it gets expensive. What with mice coming in for levels and dosage adjustment every week.

dr bob

If you buy cumadin at the drug store, and go for the analysis regularly, it can get REALLY expensive. I drove a friend to get her first few analyses... What a racket that is! She had come out of surgery way overdosed. I asked the 'doctor' doing the analysis to see the original dosage and schedule so we could see the effects of no dosage. She said she had no interest in what had been given to her previously, just waiting for the levels to drop low enough to start her on it again. We (I) had a serious discussion about using statistical tools to decide on future doses. She had this blank look, and then said "that's not the way we do it here."

Meanwhile, you can buy the same carefully-controlled prescription drug in big fiber drums for dollars a pound instead of dollars a milligram. As rat poison it's really cheap.

Meanwhile, I wonder if the recent med skool grad in the clinic was worried that I might blow the whistle on the operation, and set up my own little dispensary in the garage. It would go a long way towards Porsche maintenence I'd bet.

spinaker

Costco used to sell an electronic device that plugs into household current and emits a high frequency sound that mice can't stand. Works in line of sight only.

I bought a ton of them for the cabin as my wife is terrified of mice. After six years, still no mice. My neighbors all spend their opening spring weekend at trhe cabin disinfecting from the winter mouse infestation. We are spared that chore.

I also place an array under the shark in all directions during winter storage in the garage at the lake. I think it works although I did have evidence of the start of a nest on top of the air filter this past spring. First time in several of Porsche storage there. I'm pretty sure it happened during the first two weeks of last years winter storgae when I forgot to set the devices up.

I'll try to remember to look up the brand name there this weekend.