In a thread about a lost bolt, a few members admitted they'd done some dumb things while working on their cars. I'd love to hear a few of those tales. I'm sure they'd make the rest of us feel better the next time we make a bonehead mistake. For me, one of the dopiest things I've done happened when I was still a teenager. I was tuning up my 1966 Mustang and used a socket wrench to turn over the crank. For some reason, I left the wrench on the crank bolt. When I was finished, I started the engine and the wrench flipped over and lodged against something -- maybe a splash shield, I don't remember. It spun that crank bolt out at about a million miles an hour. How it didn't puncture the radiator is a mystery. I was extra grateful that the bolt head didn't get sheared off. I still get embarrassed when I think about it. Oh, I just remembered I also once managed to accidentally drill a one-inch hole in a gas tank and not blow myself to kingdom come. How about you -- anything you'd like to confess?

 

I hooked up the batteries in my dads boat backwards and fried $1500 worth of wiring in the outboard, and blew the tacho. I was only 12 at the time. After that he marked the cables + and - because they were all the same colour!

 

I posted a bolt story on the other thread. I think the 70's, or my late teens and early twenties I must have been in some secret contest to see if I could kill myself creatively. I think the dumbest was when I was driving a restored 1962 Buick Skylark coupe through Buttenwillow (hate that place) outside of Bakersfield in California in 115 degree weather racing a mustang and a Camaro. The overheating light had come on then gone out (apparently it had burned out). And instead of slowing way the hell down I explosively separated the engine into its various components. That wasn't the really dumb part, the really dumb part was selling the car for $20 because I was too hot and tired to deal with the problem. I still look back at my younger self and say, "what a complete idiot"! I replaced that car with a 1964 XK-E that had been hot-rodded and abused, which, come to think of it, was likely even more stupid... Sigh, the 70's suuuucked....

 

I set my Dad on fire once... the float stuck on the carb of an old car we were working on together. I realized the motor was full of gasoline, so I pulled the plugs out and was going to turn the starter to pump the gas out. it worked pumped a stream of gas out and all over my dad... But I forgot to unplug the distributor the next revoloution was compression and the plug sparked and ignited the gas on my dad... a quick hosing off and a big scare... he wasn't burnt, he did have a lot less hair. And that is the dumbest thing I've ever done... when it comes to working on a car.

 

This doesn't apply to working on a car per-say, but driving it. I was on the way home from picking up my XK8, so it was brand new to me. Keep in mind, I'm used to an LR3. Which has ground clearance (you all know where this is going now...)

I'm pulling into a gas station a little too fast and the entrance was quite steep. Needless to say, I did I fine job of scraping up the bumper underneath and even some on the front of the lip where its pretty visible- I was happy I didn't crack anything at that point.

This was last summer, near the end. So one of my projects this summer is taking care of that...

 

I owned a 1962 Pontiac Tempest with an iron-block four cylinder and automatic transmission. Made just over 100hp. Was considered a compact car then.

On a trip to the junk yard with my brother to pick up a part for his car, I saw a 326 c.i. engine out of a 1963 Tempest sitting under a shed. "It will bolt right into your car," the counter guy told me. Turns out he was right.

Spent most of Friday night and all of Saturday putting that V8 into my car. Fired her up and it sounded great! Backed out of my driveway for the maiden run. Revved it up to about 3500 rpm with the brake on (auto tranny remember) and...

Just before this part of the story is when I should have thought about what an extra 150 hp and twice the torque might do to the transaxle and rear-end bits on a car designed for an anemic 4-banger...

Foot off the brake, right foot mashed down, lots of smoke and rear-end shudder...and the torque pulled the rear end out of the back of the car all while spitting the transaxle innards out on the ground.

Pushed it back up in the driveway, pulled out the V8 and drove back to the junkyard. Turns out a V8 motor that was now tested just about covers the cost of a rear end if you pull the part yourself. Sunday was spent taking my car right back to where it started on Friday night.

My Dad could not have been more amused.

 

Sold my 1967 Camaro SS/RS 396 convertible to my brother-in-law who totaled it a month later

 

Once owned an MG-TD and was working on it early one morning in the garage on the ground floor of the house (bedrooms above it). Had previously converted the car to a supercharged setup, which meant moving the induction system from the left side of the engine to the right side. Yes, exactly where the starter switch mounts on the firewall bulkhead. The carburetor was millimeters away. As I was working, the wrench slipped and formed a brief bridge from the hot side of the switch to the copper fuel line to the carb. I recall the copper line glowing cherry red before it burst into flames. Fortunately, I always work with a fire extinguisher near at hand and was able to extinguish it quickly. Damage was slight, but cleanup was substantial. All in all, a small price for taking a stupid risk and not shielding the switch or disconnecting the battery.

 

The dumbest for me still has to be the drill bit down the carburetor explained in the other thread. But, related to cars, there are 2 runners up. The first was when I inherited my folks' 1963 Pontiac when I first started driving back in 1967 or so. The first thing I wanted to do was install some stupid reverb device for the rear speaker. So I was upside down under the dash drilling holes to mount the switch. Later I felt what I thought was dust in my eye. Turns out it was a small chip of metal from my drilling--trip to the emergency room to get it extracted.

The other dumb thing related to the same car was in 1970 when I was driving to a car dealer with my girlfriend (who became my wife). I was on the way to buy a 1970 Roadrunner (the same one with the carburetor story) and they were going to give me some money for trading in the Pontiac. The Pontiac looked great but I had been putting off replacing the radiator (leaks) instead using some of that stop-leak stuff. We were on the freeway right at the offramp to the dealer and first some smoke (kept going of course) and then some rattle and then engine died. Couldn't get it started so my girlfriend and I walked the several blocks to the dealer to put the deposit on the Roadrunner. The dealer asked where the Pontiac was and I told him some ****-and-bull story. I told him I would bring the car in when finalizing the deal (I was hoping that the car would start once cooled off). Well the car never started (apparently blew a rod or something from overheating) but the dealer gave me a few bucks out of sympathy since the car at least looked good.

Doug

 

The dumbest thing I've ever done did not involve a vehicle, but it did involve gasoline, so I'll 'fess up and post it here....

Back in March 1997 we purchased a 20-acre parcel of wooded land near Hanging Rock State Park in the Sauratown Mountains of North Carolina. Gorgeous views of the Hanging Rock formation itself, just a lovely piece of property. We planned to build our final home at the top of that property, so I contracted with a local guy to bulldoze and build a gravel driveway to the future homesite at the top of the property. Told him to pile up all the downed trees in a clearing down in the valley below the homesite where I would let them season for a couple of years and then go through the necessary channels to obtain a burning permit and burn them....

After a week of his bulldozer and roadgrader clearing and constructing our driveway, he had accumulated a huge pile of downed trees about 150 feet long, 15 feet wide, and 12 feet high at the bottom of the valley. They sat there curing until July 1999 when I decided the time had come for The Big Burn. I did some research on how to go about this and discovered that the experts recommended dousing the lower section of the debris in kerosene in order to get the fire started, then let the fire burn uphill and run its course. I figured "why use kerosene when gasoline will greatly accelerate the speed and intensity of the fire" so early on the chosen day of my burn (July 4, 1999), I filled my Chevy S-10 pickup's bed with 45 or 50 gallon jugs of gas using the empty milk jugs, orange juice jugs, and coolant jugs I had been gathering for at least two years. Folks at the local gas station had to be wondering what in the hell I was doing....

Then I filled my 20-gallon Igloo cooler with ice, water, and Gatorade (highs on the mountain that day were forecasted to be in the low 90s), drove the two-and-a-half hours to the property, and stopped by the local fire station to fill out the form and obtain my burning permit (good for 24 hours). They asked me when I planned to start the fire and I told them just as soon as I reached my property and got everything prepared. They never looked in the back of my truck....

So I drove to the property, parked my truck at the homesite, and began carrying all the jugs of gasoline down to the base of the valley. Once all the jugs were in place, I climbed all over that debris pile and saturated the first 50 feet of it with gas, making sure not to spill even one drop of gas on me. I used the very last jug of gas to pour about a 30-foot-long fuse away from the bottom of the debris pile. I walked back to where I had set my Igloo cooler, wiped the soaking sweat off of me as much as I could, took a big swig of ice water, grabbed a pack of matches, and headed over to the end of my poured-gas fuse....

As soon as I struck a match, the entire bottom end of the debris pile went off like a hydrogen bomb. I was blown backwards about six feet by the force of the blast, knocking me down in the process and scraping my right leg raw from knee to calf on the rocky ground. The hair on my right forearm was burned off since I had used my right hand to strike the match, but other than that I was not burned anywhere else (being soaked from head to toe in sweat probably saved me). I immediately knew that I should have used kerosene and I considered myself very fortunate to still be alive and breathing....

So I picked myself up, brushed myself off as best I could, and limped over to where I had set up my Igloo cooler about 50 yards away. I could still feel the massive heat coming off that inferno as the flames shot up 30 to 40 feet in the air. Within two minutes a huge column of pitch-black smoke was rising high into the sky. Within five minutes I could hear the fire engines' sirens as they wound their way up the mountain, no doubt expecting that I had set my entire property on fire. But within about ten minutes all the gasoline had burned off and the debris pile began to burn normally on its own and neither my property nor the surrounding property was ever threatened....

The firemen chewed me out for using gasoline instead of kerosene and told me that I had to stay there and monitor my fire until they said it was safe to leave. Nobody said a word about my scraped and bleeding leg. They told me to call them if I needed them and said they would return every three hours or so to ensure that everything was going as planned. So I stayed on the property, stayed hydrated with my ice and water and Gatorade, and watched to make sure that everything was okay until they finally released me to drive back home just before dark....

When I finally arrived home around 11:30 pm with dried blood all over my leg and completely exhausted, my wife took one look at me and thought I had been in an automobile accident. So I told her the entire story and while she indeed expressed her concern by cleaning and dressing my leg, there were a couple of times where she could not help but to bust out laughing. It took the rest of the summer for those scrapes on my leg to completely heal. When friends and neighbors asked what happened to my leg, I just blamed it on sliding into the bases while playing softball....

That's one Fourth of July I will never forget....

You can rest assured that I've never used gasoline as an accelerant again. And we sold that property for a profit in 2002 before the tech bubble completely collapsed....

 

Many of these (and those that I expect will be forthcoming) are great candidates for Darwin awards!

Doug

 

Got two that I can remember - both involve the old Sunbeam Alpine Convertible I had for many years in the 1970s / 80s.
Had some nasty noises from the back, so booked it into a transmission specialist to get the differential changed - a job I knew I couldn't tackle myself. Drove all the way across London with clanking noises from the back, got to the workshop, guy takes one look and shows me that one rear wheel is held on by two very loose nuts. A few days previously, I had adjusted the rear brake shoes and forgotten to tighten the nuts. Two had fallen out, and the remaining two were about three thread widths away from oblivion. Lucky escape and lesson learned.
Same car - first trip with g/f to South of France in hot Summer. Noticed strange noise, sort of squeaky chirp, every time I slowed down to take a corner. Stripped the front hubs by the side of the road as I suspected wheel bearings. No obvious problem. Put it all back together and drove on - keeping speed down just in case. Noise continued, but I eventually realised it wasn't the car - it was the cicadas in the grass verges by the side of the road. 1. You don't get that in the UK so a new experience, and 2. with the roof down and a couple of holes in the exhaust, I only heard them when going slowly round a corner at low revs.
I once had to get a 30hp diesel boat engine from a yard about 100 miles away from the marina where it was to be installed. Took the passenger seat out of the Alpine, put the roof down, and had the engine craned into the space. Got some very strange looks as other drivers came past me on the motorway - they had never seen an offset-mid-engine-convertible sports car before .

 

1977, My hair was long and my cares were few. I had just received a set of smooth bore Mikuni carburetors for my 500 production racer and I was excited to install them as we had a race coming up the following weekend. The bikes were all stored at my father's house so I drove over to install the carbs. It was a warm sunny day so I pulled the bike out of the garage on onto his back deck. Hours later I had the bike back together, double checking all the nuts and bolts were torqued and safety wired. Squatting next to the bike I thumbed the starter and it roared to life. Just as the smile reached my face the bike fell off the milk crates that were holding it up knocking me backwards off the deck with the 400lb motorcycle landing on top of me. It was only a 1 foot drop but I laid there wedged, my foot stuck in the deck and the motorcycle trapping me. I was able to hit the kill switch saving me from serious burns. My father arrived home about 2 hours later, poured himself a drink, pulled up his directors chair leaning over me and questioned "what seems to be the issue Jeff?"
35 years later I reminded him of this story while we were choosing his senior living apartment.

 

My "long hair few cares" days were also in the early 1970s--becoming a distant fond memory now.

Doug

 

Maybe my hair wasn't that long, but young I was indeed when I was working on my 1st car. I lifted the car with a hydraulic jack, so I could work under it. But somehow I forgot to fully close it and it was slowly dropping to a point where I couldn't move anymore and a good weight of the car was on me. Bit frightening, but my 1st luck was that I could reach the jack with my hand, close it, and slowly could jack it up, and my 2nd luck was this was only a mini, so not that heavy.


Great thread and stories, keep them coming!

 

When I was in my late teens I was changing the oil on some crappy old Chevy 2 wheel drive. By the shed there is a little incline that we drive the front wheels up giving us room to crawl under easily. While laying under the truck lengthwise, I thought "What is this lever" and pulled it. Whatever I did put the truck in neutral and it rolled back down the incline. Being a lower clearance 2WD, the front end just scraped my belly and belt.

That is scary as **** having and vehicle start moving when your laying under it.

Funny how most of these stories are when we were kids or in our teens. Nobody will admit that it happened last week.

B

 

I've certainly done my share of bone head things but one that always sticks in my mind that happened while working on cars is this: I think it was an old Chrysler I had that I wanted to change the spark plugs and plug-wires on. I removed all the wires from the distributer and the plugs and set them aside. Put in all the new plugs and put the new wires on them to the distributer in no particular order... had no idea they had to go back to a specific position! I just couldn't figure out why the car wouldn't start again. Thankfully, my brother in law who had a little car sense came over and helped set things right.

Only problem I ever had with gasoline was trying to syphon some out of the car once and swallowed a good mouthful of it... both good lessons learned the hard way!

 

Telling my Dad 25 years ago that I had no room for his 1967
series 1.5 E-Type Drophead (which he had owned since new and had never seen a snowflake), so he should give it to my brother instead.

 

There isn't enough space to list them all.....maybe top of the list is not tightening the prop nut on a boat and then having to reverse in a crowded windy marina........spun the prop right off and bounced (lightly) off a few boats before throwing a line to an onlooker.
Maybe blowing my '69 XKE at 120mph because I didn't want to spend money on con rod bearings when I "rebuilt" it.......
Last week I dropped the metal clip for the coolant level sensor plug into the depths of no return....why does every other plug on the car just snap together?

 

Fantastic stories! I am feeling so much better about my little mishaps now. Glenn, that's an opening line I'll never stop chuckling over -- "I set my Dad on fire once." Funny now, but I'm sure pretty scary when it happened.

Keep 'em coming.