dumbest automotive thing you've done?

[enzo]

I was 16 and got the keys to the old man's fully restored 57 Belair. It had a hopped up small block with a 4 speed. I drove it to school and my first period class was autoshop, so I thought I would give my grease monkey bretheran a show in the parking lot. I commenced to do a glorious burnout, one which would go down in infamy. All of a sudden, there was a huge clunk that came from the rear. The rearend blew into pieces, in fact the explosion was so massive that a piece of the ring gear flew threw the casing and nailed my classmate in the leg. He buckled and hit the floor, he ended up with about 10 stitches. Cool thing was - my teacher had the same rearend sitting in a junk pile out back; changed the rearend that day and drove the car home. My Dad never knew about it.

[zbugger]

I was about 19 years old and I helped my cousin get a 80 Z28 that was wrecked. It was smashed up at the rear quarter right at the wheel well. Well, my cousin got a bug up his butt and decided he wanted to take the damaged shock off that side. We pushed the car outside onto the driveway, and put it in park. Jacked up the car, sat right up next to it and got to work. We also decided to roll up some of the sharp edges while we were at it. Just so happens the driveway was on an incline, and the car was face down. The rear end was a one legger and the parking brake wasn't on. What's that? There's still gravity? Sonofabitch....... The floor jack, no jackstands, started to tip over. We said "****!!!!", pulled our legs out from under the car, and the damn car rolled down the driveway. We just looked at eachother, snickered, and said "I think we forgot to chock the front wheels.....".

[jannes_z-28]

I have one, not so funny but stupid enough.

This was when I had my racecars and we had got the Toyota Celica ready for the first testruns at the strip. But before going we had to start her up to check out everything.

You have to know that we had trashed for the last 14 days and non-stop for the last 48 hours to get her ready to go. The race was on a Saturday and Sunday. Our initial plans was to leave town 8 on Saturday morning. I came back from the garage at 5.30 AM to catch a few Z's before going. We had people waiting at the garage at 8.00 to go with us to see the car perform for the first time.

Well we didn't get to leave until 2.00 PM...

We had a few things left to do on the car, one important thing was the throttle linkage. We started to make that and after an hour it was time to start her up.

We checked everything, like timing and fueled it up and now it was time to hear the sound of this machine that had been my full occupation for the last six months.


It backfired like crazy, more timing adjustment. More backfiring. Adjusting the timing again, more backfire and more and more...

What the f**k, why doesn't it start. More deep checking, all cables look OK. Plugs are OK. MSD7AL-box is OK. Coil is OK (About that I have another story )

Give it another try, more backfire.

I have to tell you, this engine was a real piece. We had bought it from Pat Musi, it was a destroked ChevyBigBlock at 360 cu in that he had used in ProStock before the 500 cu in rules took place in 1982. This story took place in 1983.

Well after trashing with this backfiring one smartass guy say: "-Haven't you got the marks on the damper backwards???" I say: "-How stupid do you think we are?" And of course he was right. During the late night trashing I had marked the damper the wrong way. Obviously with my tired brain I had made the error. So off with the damper, put on the marks in the correct direction and back on with the damper.

It started on the first crank and sounded just perfect. This was inside a large garage two levels under street level and it was always nice to start up a race engine down there.

And now we could leave for the strip, we arrived late for the Saturday runs so we took her out on Sunday morning and ran a 9.07 off the trailer spinning the 15" wide Firestones half the track on a 8.9 record. That felt GOOD.

Here is a picture of that car:



Jan

[jannes_z-28]

As promised next story.

Again my old race cars, this was the first one, the Opel Kadett.

In our garage again we are preparing for a race and are going to start up the engine. It fires up OK and we start to warm it up. I lean in the car to point on the tempgauge how far we would go this time. My partner is in the driverseat.

On the dash is also the MSD blaster coil mounted and somehow my indexfinger touches the connections on the coil, not the spark wire but the feed and earth. You have to know that this coil is getting 400 volts from the MSD7AL box so it is a lot of juice that nows travel thru my finger up my arm over my heart and out the other arm that I am holding to the cage when I am leaning in. I start to spasm and screams on top of my lungs. This is not heard over the engine and the driver is concentrating on looking at the tempgauge as I have instructed him. I am starting to collapse when he see me. He shuts the engine down at the same moment. Not because of me, because he thinks something is wrong, it missfires. Of course it does, my body takes all the voltage the coil is supposed to have

The scary part is that my muscles got kramped when everything was on so I couldn't get loose before the engine was shut down. It took a few minutes to catch the breath but then we started it up again and all was back to normal.

Lesson learned: we taped the connections on the coil.


Jan

[ProTouring442]

My first story: Back in highschoold my Dad had a '61 Corvette with a nice 283 and a 4-speed. I was 15 maybe. As a project, we had been building a very nice 350, it was on a stand in front of the Corvette. Dad asked me to back the car out of the garage. Now, that Corvette's very old husrt shifter didn't always like to find reverse, so as I struggle to find the damned illusive gear, my foot slips off of the clutch and the car lurches forward into the engine, which in turn falls over onto the front of the 'Vette.

My second story: This one was really dumb, but funny. Ever shim an oil pump bypass spring with a welch plug? I have... Idles fine, but when you hit the gas you watch the oil pressure gauge goes wacko, and the oil filter hits the floor with a huge bang!

Shiny Side Up!
Bill
'72 442 "Inamorata"

[trapin]

Jim...great story about the Riviera. I have to ask though, why didn't you just hit the brakes? Were they broken or were you so shocked that it just didn't cross your mind?

----------------------------------------------------

Dumbest thing I ever did was pull the coil wire on my Camaro when I couldn't get the car to shut off. My friend Dennis and I had hooked up an MSD-6A box to my car and had apparantly done something wrong with the wiring because when I went to shut the car off...it wouldn't stop running. Mind you I was 18 at the time. My friend suggested I pull the coil wire to cut the electricity to the spark plugs. And like a dumb ass I went ahead and did it.

KRRRRZAAAAPPPPP!!!!!!!!

.....my arm went numb for about 20 minutes. If you were ever wondering if those boxes worked well. They do....trust me.

[Ummgawa]

Jim...great story about the Riviera. I have to ask though, why didn't you just hit the brakes? Were they broken or were you so shocked that it just didn't cross your mind?

I was 6 years old, kneeling in the front seat. I have a tall old man and the power seat was ALL the way back. If I could have touched the brake my chin would have been on the bottom of the steering wheel. I thought I did good steering the beast through traffic (It was pure luck) that was coming from right to left.

Did the best with what limited driving skills I had available to me at the time.

At seven, however, I was ready for the Indy 500

[trapin]

I was 6 years old....

Ahh...that explains it. You didn't mention that in the first post. That's how I got confused. But then again...I confuse easy.

[Ummgawa]

Originally Posted by trapin

Ahh...that explains it. You didn't mention that in the first post. That's how I got confused. But then again...I confuse easy.

It begins.....


When I was 6 years old (In 1966),


I fully understand, dude. Its been a rough Monday for me too.

[TA219]

I guess i was 6 or 7 years old when this happened....

It was the same ol normal routine, my mother got me and my little sister ready for the day and put us in the car so she could drop us off before she went to work.
That day we decided that we were gonna play race car driver while mom ran back inside real quick. So one of us is playing with the steering wheel and the other one is shifting the column shifter from P through 1st as fast as we could

shoot, mom was coming back to the car so my little sis climbs back in to the back seat and i sit in the pass side like a little angel.

Mom gets in & trys to start the old station wagon and it wouldnt start, (this thing had problems so mom was very familiar with it under the hood)

She gets out and gets under the hood, does her magic and the car starts right up, and immediatly starts rolling in reverse (we didnt get it back in park after playing racecar driver )

Luckily we had a long, dirt driveway out in the country.

Mom yells "push the brakes" as she is chasing the car down in heels , I think great here is my chance... I jump to the drivers seat and try to push the breaks but i can bearly reach them ......the car wasnt stopping. (i think this was the first time i said **** outloud )

Luckily mom was in pretty good shape because next thing i see is the door swing open and mom managed to get the car stopped just before we exited the driveway.

I thought i was the luckiest guy in the world when Mom said that she wouldnt tell Dad about any of it