Mice
 

What do you do to keep them out of your car durring the winter hybernation?

We've got a small issue with mice and Im affraid they'll tear up my car.

Suggestions?

Put a cat in there for the winter? Awww nevermind bad idea! Lol I heard something about mothballs maybe but I don't know how true that is but they don't smell too good either.

silly boy,,just lock your doors:)
i put a couple mouse traps inside and check often

Last couple of years I have taken the "Bounce" type sheets that your wife puts in the clothes dryer and liberally placed them in the interior, trunk, and underhood compartments. Seems to have worked okay since I had some mice trouble before this...none thereafter!

I've got one in wife's car I can not catch with traps or using the 5 gallon bucket with floating bait trick. Has too much food from goldfish crackers etc. that kids have left in there to care about my trapping. Have never failed with peanut butter on a noodle in the old style victor trap until now. Guy even ate about 4 sticks of gum and survived.

My next solution is going to be to route a piece of metal flex into the car from the tailpipe and gas his a$$.

I have been using the electronic clicker on an extension cord under my old cars & that has worked. Also got some of the peppermint extract. Supposed to work well in engine compartments to keep them out.

Subscribing.

I'm currently using the dryer sheets in the car (underhood and in the trunk as well) with
"mouse food" packets placed at all the openings to the garage.

They take the poison and leave the wrappers (I've found a couple bodies) but so far seem to be leaving the cars alone.

K

Never fails...
 

Try one of the newer "sticky" traps baited with a little p-butter or cheese. This way you get the pleasure of snufing the little unwelcome guests using a method of your choice :eek:.

X2 on that the sticky traps with peanut butter do work. They love peanut butter!

i had some get into my 68 low mile car, and they ate the seat covers and ripped stuffing out...i used the bounce and have absolutely no problems since, i shove it in every crack and opening i can find, i aslo put it in my seats i store for future projects and no issues...works..works very well....

WAX BLOCK POISON.
had em get in my garage/ lemans once. ate soft rubber underhood and seat belts.
i live next to a petting zoo. i now use the wax blocks down the property line.
i put one in each of my window wells, and inside my rollup garage door.
they might get inside, but they cant resist those blocks and once they eat those, they arent very hungry anymore, they retreat back outside to get water.

try it. you'll be surprised. the blocks will have teethmarks in them the next morning. some of them will be gone.

not real nice but only the rodents eat them. and the wax survives a while outside in the weather.

Cat for 30yrs. No mice.
Plus they make pals.

Adopt a pussy cat!

I used to use Irish Spring, but the mice ate it!!

Moth balls, dryer sheets, Irish Spring soap, peppermint extract do not work. I've tried them all, and the mice built nests out of the Bounce sheets, ate the soap, and pissed on the moth balls.

The way I finally eliminated mice in my cars (I store 3 of them) during winter storage was to enclose them in a "Car Jacket". This also eliminated parts corroding due to condensation. The car comes out of the bag in exactly the same condition as when it went in. Highly recommended. www.carbag.com

I've got the cheap spring traps under each of the cars baited with peanut butter - and check them often.

Have to remember to push them further under next time, my Lab tripped two of them this weekend. :D

Oh, & there is no such thing as a small problem with Mice - where there is one, there are some!

Im using this now. They are in little plastic blocks that they go into and eat. Suopposed to make them not hungry and very thursty and want to retreat outside no matter what the temp is. The poison is suposed to eat away at their insides. Its worked well as they are eating them and Ive found two dead bodies.

Funny thing is that I had the extra blocks in a freezer bag in the garage. I looked at the bag yesterday and they chewed through it. Surprise!!!!!!!

Im just not putting this stuff in my car. I have the house surounded with them.

Ill try dryer sheets but Ive heard both sides to that. Any way to plug up the tail pipes?

Go to a boating store and buy 2 "emergency plugs" they are tapered wood cones...shove 1 in each pipe. Or stuff a handful of mice up each pipe!!! :eek::pound:

Here's one method I've heard that works for us: Store the vehicle on jackstands over the winter with the wheels off the ground, and place each of the jackstands in a drain pan illed with a couple inches of coolant. With the car off the ground, they can't get into it without climbing through the coolant and up the jackstands. That combined with the delicious and deadly oolant, we usually find a few dead ones a season in the pans, but none make t to the car itself. Disclaimer: Do not use this if you have freerange pets or children!!!

I use the CarJacket along with traps and two free ranging cats.

The past few years, a couple of stray cats have been living between mine and a few neighbors. Nice enough, I haven't seen a single mouse in my garage. The traps are all old and unused now.

<Has too much food from goldfish crackers etc.>

Life is good!

I haven't tried it, but I from what I have heard, bacon makes peanut butter worthless. I do know from past experaince that peanut butter is deadly!

Bruce! Don't gas 'em! They'll die in the car and stink it to high heaven. If you use D-con, once they start eating it they can't stop until they're dead. Be certain that you leave a flat pan of water near the bait. They start to bleed internally and get a raging thirst. They go to the water and die there. If they're poisoned and die somewhere that you can't get to them, they'll stink to high heaven. The bleeding will cause the odor when they decompose.

:rolleyes: Go organic. Catch em and slow roast em over charcoal. Or dip em and do em up like corn dogs. Kids love em for snacks. LOL

The sandman treatment
 

Might be a bit dated, but was funny as heck.

I hope you are not squeemish about baiting the vermin out of your place. Just bait them and be done with it. There is entire industry out there eliminating mice and rats for the betterment of society.

We have the technology and it is proven, why even mess around? Or get one of them Co-exist bumper stickers that the leftist place on their cars.

Greg

I've used moth balls with success, but you have to use enough of them.

Old school snap trap secure a cotton ball on the trigger with some dental floss and add some coconut oil to the cotton ball and you will catch your mice. This has never failed me, so give it a try.

Have always used this...
http://ezpetsupply.com/p-1290-fresh-...repellent.aspx
BUT its NOT for use in California, is anything?> its flippin PINE NEEDLES FYI....

video of trap
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFdfoYhGJj8

[IMG]E36C4j_xl5aydyn1CD0pcqjfsrwyUvYURaUuTLWtSPJxwo-1Lo2fltAvSuFwhB_c-AL_USDeRTliFPdi9pCDuQeBXnu3w-Lb-fiwP1I_HihArYGAaSrKEnVuTmc1qUYJ5aJ9CR0dDdngQBd9gIq-OnXsOqIVww7U[/IMG]

I like this! Shock the sh** out of them!

I like it also, but $100.

http://www.victorpest.com/store/rode...FQen7QodHElZsA

Got his *&@!
 

OK, so my dad and I are pretty close when it comes to sharing technical information. Thanksgiving he comes out with, "I always use meat on the trap." Huh? I had used bacon long ago, but this was news to me.

I put some leftover turkey in the trap and nailed the little bugger within 3 hours. This after I saw him run up under the dash and then the 'Service Air Bag' Msg. showed up on the way to church. I had tried to trap this guy a dozen or so times before the turkey, & he never even took the bait or triggered the traps. Never had that happen before in a lot of years of mouse catching.

I'm going for the poison wax block next and the fly paper stuff so I can set an example for the others. Where do you get those wax blocks?

Rich - What happens to me with the poison bait is that they drag it off and end up storing it all over the place in the car or wherever. I have found stashes of that stuff everywhere! Good idea on the water pan, I had not thought of that.

Wax blocks can be bought at lowes/home depot, or farm/garden stores like agway, or livestock supply stores.

Can someone provide a brand name on the 'wax blocks'? Is this the same product as those green cubed 'bait chunks', as sold by TomCat?

As far as I can tell, I have had good luck with green Irish Spring brand soap. I cut up a bar in dice-sized cubes and put several pieces on a paper plate. One plate in the trunck area, one on the intake near the air cleaner snorkel, one the front seat and one under the rear seat.

By the time April rolls around the soap has lost most of its aroma (now the car smells like it just had a bath). FWIW, I haven't had seen any evidence that critters have chewed on the soap cubes and haven't detected any damage or droppings.

If soap, dryer sheets, moth balls, etc. work so great, why don't professional exterminators use those things or any products that are similar?

It's because they don't work.

Thinking that they do is like thinking that asphalt shingle repel meteorites. After all, I have asphalt shingles on my house and it has never been hit by a meteorite. So the shingles must be working!

Not trying to be a wise-ass, just trying to save someone from the agony of rodent destruction caused by a false sense of security. I've been down that road and it sucks.

Fair enough and no hard feelings on this end at all.

But, I don't have Corvette-syndrome enough where I want to (nor can I afford) put my cars in a ziploc bag... btw, what if a mouse chews thru the bag? ;)

I, too, have seen dryer sheets used to build a mouse nest. I think that stuff works (sheets, mothballs, etc.), but has a relitively short window of effectiveness.
for whatever reason, mice like to travel along the edges of walls more than across the "open field" of a floor. i'll put mouse traps (bait end butted up against the wall) without any bait and catch mice. i do this on the insides of the tires. one on each wheel, with peanut butter (just in case). i think that's how they get into the car, so stop them before they enter. this system has been very effective for me, but does require periodic maintenance.

I cut the very bottom off of plastic milk jugs to make a shallow "bowl" about 1 inch deep. Put about 2 doz mothballs in each, plus put that on a paper plate w a couple of bounce sheets on it....i.e. dryer sheets + moth balls. I put one of these setups on each of the 4 floorboard sections + 1in the trunk.......shouldn't probably say anything but so far so good. Oh, also used double layer aluminum foil over the air cleaner spout and on the exhaust pipes....held on w good rubberbands.

After having to redo the interior of my GTO after failure of moth balls, bounce sheets, and Irish Spring I can't afford not to put my car in a bag! That same winter mice also got into another of my stored cars and built a gigantic nest behind the master cylinder made up of a bunch of shredded dryer sheets and some kind of hair they found God knows where. Luckily they didn't damage anything and only made a stinky mess that wasn't too hard to clean up. They also got into a third stored car but only left huge piles of mouse poop on top of the intake manifold and front shock towers.

There is always a small chance that one of the little buggers will chew through the bag. But mice follow their noses and the smell of a polyethylene bag is not what they typically are attracted to. Also, when I bag up the car I try to keep the bottom as smooth as possible to eliminate any places where a mouse would want to build a house (outside of the bag) if one should happen to stumble upon it.

The other giant benefit of bagging the car is that since there is no condensation inside the bag, my polished aluminum parts don't corrode which means I don't have to spend hours polishing everything in spring.

Again, a great idea if you can afford to bag your car or have the space to do it. I have to push my car up against the side wall for the winter so theres ample space for other things to move in and out while its in its inop state.

put up small signs around your cars: NO MICE ALLOWED

True, it does take some space and a couple hundred dollars one-time expense.

At one time I jammed 3 cars into a 2.5 car garage for winter storage, which meant one car was on wheel dollies because it had to get pushed up against the wall. I just laid out the open bag with the closed side against the wall and rolled the car onto the bottom of it, then had my wife help pull the top of the bag over the car and zipped it up. I put some scraps of sheet metal over the zipper so the wheel dollies could roll over the little lip easier.

I hope I'm not starting to sound too much like a broken record! There are a couple other guys I know that use the car bags and they love them as much as I do.

the bigger wax blocks are called "havock" i think, and they're for rats but that's what i use, because they're bigger and they last longer outdoors.
another brand was called "just one bite" those were good too! the small ones are "tomcat" they get eaten fast.
i had a gargantuan rat cut across my workbench one night. thats when i noticed he'd been in my car too. shocker.
bought the wax. saw him staggering around in the driveway the next day.
my garage is old, but spotless. there is no food in my house either!!!
i never had a problem until a petting zoo opened next door to me.
i use the blocks and i see 'em chewed up, all over the place, but the only rodents i see are dead.

Engine ear i'm gonna get some irish spring, sounds like it freshens things up!

Interesting topic and one which like many of us in the northern regions have had problems with. In my immediate world turbo buicks as many newer cars have is underside hood pads...a favorite nesting place for rodents s they love nesting in that material and will even stuff air cleaners with the stuff.

I will get my buddy to post what many of you will find so unbelieveable but it is true as the car is well known in the turbo buick world at just how destructive rodents can be.

The kicker is, it doesn;t take rodents long to do their damage. I would not rely simply on one single method to keep them at bay...the colder the weather the more inclined they are to seek warmth as in your pride in joy in the garage.

I have never had a problem in recent years. I have a heated pole bldg keep it like 45-50 degrees...and I have two stray cats that cost me nothng that reside in my bldg and have a cat door to go inside and out....zero problems cost is cat food....

My neighbor passed away so I feed the 3 cats they had that "patrol" outside the building only they won't go inside my building.

I will try and get my buddy to post the photos tomorrow. Meantime here is the background.....

Car is a GNX with less than 600 actual miles on it. (Real money a 65 to 75 grand car even in todays economy)

This customer of ours lives in one state and stored this car in another state. He stored it in a building that also housed several company van type trucks that were used to vend candy. Wrapped candy....

Over a northern winter left for months on end with no one checking on the GNX. The pictures once posted will tell the story. You talk about energetic workers these rodents moved literally pounds of wrapped candy from the vendor trucks to every nook and cranny under the hood and in the tailpipes of this GNX.

I hope the pictures are clear enough to view as in some cases you can even read the wrapper on the candy.

Maybe not in this case but where things get really bad is when they chew thru wires and set material...not to mention their toliet facilities becomes your car and any surface they see fit to use.

Look for photos tomorrow nite....

[email protected]

ok, i mean no disrespect but....
it's never a good idea to store your mega dollar,/ ultra rare car in a warehouse full of loaded candy trucks!

My cat does such a good job, nieghbors on both sides leave thier side doors open for him when weathers nice.
All ours are unattached.
He's brought back 2-3 couple times and leaves them outside for me.
Seriously.
Get'n good at gray and ground squirrels too.
But favorate snack is short tailed shrews.

You guys are scarin the daylights outta me.

I think I'm just going to sleep in the GTO every night.

:oogle:

K

Not a good idea, they get pretty hungry in the middle of the winter. :D

Dude,

You better re-think that. It's gonna get cold out there!


Charles