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It's most fun when you get multiple mistakes at once. When I was draining the oil from my truck, I had forgotten to open the plug on the catch pan. I started panicking when oil started spilling over the side of the pan and I dropped the drain bolt into the pan. I was in deep poo poo: oil spilling everywhere, drain plug underneath all the oil, and I'm on my back with only inches of movement so I can't see to fish for the drain plug. So, I did the only thing I could do and plugged the drain hole with my finger. I had to reach up with my left hand and blindly hunt for the oil catch pan plug while splashing oil all over the ground and myself. That was a tough few minutes. On my XJ, I overtightened my oil filter and broke my filter wrench trying to get it off. I probably overtightened the new one as well, so I'm not looking forward to that. And I stripped a lug stud while torquing down my wheels. I've got a torque wrench now but I still haven't fixed the stud. Hey, at least I didn't leave them loose!
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Apr 29, 2015 20:29
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Yesterday I was taking stickers of my scooter with a heat gun and now I have a molded dent and some paint scraped off on one of the panels 
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Apr 30, 2015 04:48
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When I was 17 I did an oil change on my first car, a 93 grand cherokee. I overtightened (and sequentially crushed) the oil filter. Realizing that "gently caress, now I need to buy another one" I jumped in the seat and started it up, got all the way to the end of the driveway before I realized "gently caress! There is no oil in this thing!" Shut it down and then had to walk back to the store to pick up another one. Took me over 3 hours to walk to the store and back by which time it was dark. That was a fun oil change. I'm sure I dropped the plug into the drain pan as well. This was before I knew about "proper tools" and used a bucket to drain oil into, not a shallow pan like I do now.
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Apr 30, 2015 07:46
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some texas redneck posted:I think everyone does this at least now and then. I keep a magnet on a stick thing handy for that now. Easy way to resolve though. Stick the magnet under the drain pan, run it to the edge and up the side. Lifts the plug clear with no grubby fingers or tools.
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Apr 30, 2015 11:13
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leica posted:Yesterday I was taking stickers of my scooter with a heat gun and now I have a molded dent and some paint scraped off on one of the panels I did this when removing a bunch of FEAR THIS stickers off my elites oem trunk. now I use less heat and plastic razor blades
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Apr 30, 2015 14:32
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I think my favorite oil changing mistake was the time I was changing the oil on a Lexus at work. 95 degree day, not a cloud in the sky, approximately 150% humidity. Our uniform naturally was long sleeves and pants, dark blue. I've been in the pit for four hours. Lexus rolls in, straight off the highway (we were maybe a quarter mile from an exit ramp), boiling loving hot, I drain the oil, it splatters off the expanded steel mesh on the rolling pit drain pan at me. Duck, wait for it to finish... grab the filter and loosen it. Whoops! Dropped it, ducked, and it rolled down the length of my spine splattering hot oil as it went. You kinda lose the ability to care about being burned much when you work in a quicklube. Car's gotta be done and out the door in 15 minutes, with oil/filter changed, all zerks greased, tires filled, washer/PS/trans/diffs/tcase/cooling system topped off, battery and brake/clutch fluid levels checked, air filter/wipers/cabin air filter/all bulbs checked, and everything you touched double checked by someone else. No time for worrying unless you are actually seriously injured. I still have a scar on my right wrist, twelve years later, shaped like the pinch weld on the heatshield for a Ford Windstar's catalytic converter from that job. It was a bad second degree burn, maybe even third degree, there was definitely a little blackening and charring at the center where I got it the worst. gently caress whoever designed that vehicle for putting the filter in an absolutely retarded spot, it was bad enough to get to when cold and we were too swamped to run around looking for the firesleeve.
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Apr 30, 2015 19:56
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Being young and helping my bro work on his Duster. I recall we were working on the transmission and that he had the bolts out on the ground. Cue me knocking over the coffee can-filled "random nuts and bolts container" onto the ground by the said tranny bolts. In college while making a turn, my Dakota's horn decided to honk itself and stay on. At the moment I probably could have just pulled the wiring or a fuse but instead I took a hammer I had in the front seat and bashed it until it died. For the couple years since that I didn't have a horn and felt very vulnerable since now all I could do was yell at people that cut me off.
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Apr 30, 2015 21:18
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I've done the standard "leaving the oil fill cap off when starting the engine after an oil change" and "snapping off rusted bolts everywhere" when I lived in Ohio, but that last one reminded me of a truly boneheaded thing I did with my wife's car. We bought it knowing the horn needed replaced, so I ordered one from the parts store. I installed it, and it just was weak. I finally realized that I had ordered only a high-tone horn, not both. She drove it that way for almost 2 years before I finally surprised her with a very nice, very expensive, loud-rear end dual horn solution. It freaked her out so much the first time she honked at someone trying to change lanes into her that she nearly hit the car on her other side.
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May 1, 2015 15:27
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A few years ago I was doing a head gasket job on my 87 Supra, and I decided that after having done this a few times I would replace everything possible with new. In my haste to do so I failed to consider that the threads might be seized and managed to twist off the heater union on the back of the head.    Lesson learned, don't apply large amounts of torque on 25 year old seized parts that don't need to be replaced.
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May 1, 2015 15:49
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Nocheez posted:I've done the standard "leaving the oil fill cap off when starting the engine after an oil change" and "snapping off rusted bolts everywhere" when I lived in Ohio, but that last one reminded me of a truly boneheaded thing I did with my wife's car. We bought it knowing the horn needed replaced, so I ordered one from the parts store. I installed it, and it just was weak. I finally realized that I had ordered only a high-tone horn, not both. She drove it that way for almost 2 years before I finally surprised her with a very nice, very expensive, loud-rear end dual horn solution. It freaked her out so much the first time she honked at someone trying to change lanes into her that she nearly hit the car on her other side. Leave it on top of the spot the hood catch lands (usually a latch mechanism in the middle of the radiator support) so worstcase you drop the hood on it. It won't latch, you'll notice and open the hood again. That was how we were trained at the shop I worked at - I followed it and never let a car leave with the oil cap off, some coworkers didn't do this and did let cars leave without caps.
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May 1, 2015 17:15
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Kerosene19 posted:A few years ago I was doing a head gasket job on my 87 Supra, and I decided that after having done this a few times I would replace everything possible with new. In my haste to do so I failed to consider that the threads might be seized and managed to twist off the heater union on the back of the head. I managed to knock the 20-year-old one clean off on my Blazer while pulling the valve covers. It was only on the intake manifold instead of the head, but still kind of a bastard to remove on a vehicle you need to drive to work. Plus I couldn't chisel it out (it was pot metal with the consistency of cheddar cheese, just crumbled if you tried to turn it out that way), so I ended up having to get a special fuckoff-huge extractor to remove it. Then at some point I must have knocked some crud down in the valley and into the oil pan, because I got it all back together and running; the very next day it lost oil pressure on my way to work, never ran again without horrendous mechanical screeching. Aside from not fixing the oil leak that eventually lunched the bearings, the only boneheaded thing I ever did on the Protege was jacking up on the rear lateral links, giving them both a nice twist.
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May 2, 2015 01:01
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this is a 1/10 on the difficulty scale, but these two words should speak to most of you. Distributor Rotor.
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May 2, 2015 01:10
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DICKPOCALYPSE NOW posted:this is a 1/10 on the difficulty scale, but these two words should speak to most of you. On a similar note, crank and crank and crank and crank and why isn't it starting???? Oh, that big obvious connector between the distributor's pickup and the ignition box? That doesn't need to be plugged in, does it?
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May 2, 2015 02:42
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sprayed ether into my bud's hilborn scoop to start his Vega after it sat and wasn't starting, then looked in it to see if the carbs were opening while he cranked it didn't need those eyebrows anyway
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May 2, 2015 02:59
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I tipped the damned needle bearings over in some microscopic ujoint caps probably 20 times last night, all because I was a dumbass and ignored my own advise on here about holding them up with a wad of grease. Then they were stuck in there and couldn't come back out without damaging things so I painstakingly stood them back up with a piece of baling wire and tried again (and again, and again, and again) until I gave up. Worlds biggest pain in the rear end ujoint install. Then I bashed it apart, it magically stood all the bearings up perfectly instead of smashing them, and they fell over again immediately upon trying again.  Raluek posted:On a similar note, crank and crank and crank and crank and why isn't it starting???? Oh, that big obvious connector between the distributor's pickup and the ignition box? That doesn't need to be plugged in, does it? Didn't get the crank sensor plugged in entirely on my dads ranger after the swap, thus spawning an hour of dinking around with it, knowing full well it was the cps (but thinking it was broken, not plug failure to latch) while the professional mechanics that run the shop swore up and down it was grounds, the ecu, grounds, the ecu, the ignition coil, the ecu, maybe the ecu, possibly the ecu needs to be the one from the donor motor (same exact motor), probably the ecu, oh and it might be the ecu. It wasn't the loving ECU, I just didn't manage to get the CPS plug pushed on far enough to latch and the seal pushed it back off the pins. kastein fucked around with this message at 18:11 on May 2, 2015 |
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May 2, 2015 18:08
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DICKPOCALYPSE NOW posted:this is a 1/10 on the difficulty scale, but these two words should speak to most of you. On old rovers theres a nylon circlip that holds the distributor shafts together. if you yank hard on a seized rotor it'll break the circlip rendering the distributor worthless. The pro method is to take a rubber mallet and hammer the rotor until it cracks, then remove. I've made lots of fuckups over the years, but the most expensive was chipping the paint on a freshly painted 70' 454ci vette. I was doing assembly and vacuum systems on the headlights. Hit the button and *tink* chipped the loving nose. None of the body parts were test fitted prior it paint either.. Right after the painter repainted the loving nose and headlight cover, the lead MASTER TECH chipped the nose installing the hood. gently caress this was nearly 10 years ago now.
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May 3, 2015 00:16
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In addition to all the familiar ones that you guys have mentioned here's a pair Favorite from a friend:  Favourite I've done: 
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May 3, 2015 01:39
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The dumbest thing I've ever done is switch a pair of spark plug wires and then try for half an hour to figure out why it seemed to idle the same but run horribly.Friar Zucchini posted:
Burning Delo 400LE is absolutely the best smell in cars. It smells like toast or something. atomicthumbs fucked around with this message at 02:46 on May 3, 2015 |
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May 3, 2015 02:40
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atomicthumbs posted:The dumbest thing I've ever done is switch a pair of spark plug wires and then try for half an hour to figure out why it seemed to idle the same but run horribly. Goddrat it, this.
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May 3, 2015 02:59
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I took a mapp torch to a stuck tie rod lock nut a few days ago. Turns out if you heat up the inner tie rod enough, the loving rack boot has a tendency to melt to the rod. Make sure you push the boot back as far as you can if you're as stupid as I am. Looks like I need a new boot 
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May 3, 2015 06:34
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Priam posted:I took a mapp torch to a stuck tie rod lock nut a few days ago. Turns out if you heat up the inner tie rod enough, the loving rack boot has a tendency to melt to the rod. Make sure you push the boot back as far as you can if you're as stupid as I am. wrap a wet rag around the tierod up against the boot next time, that'll keep that from happening. atomicthumbs posted:The dumbest thing I've ever done is switch a pair of spark plug wires and then try for half an hour to figure out why it seemed to idle the same but run horribly. Did that on my old subaru, spent an embarrassing amount of time trying to figure out why it would almost start, sputter, then die.... It did run amazing after the tuneup, though!
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May 3, 2015 13:02
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Just recently. Fuel pump died, but instead of siphoning out the gas, gently caress it, drop the tank, pour the gas into a couple of 5 gallon buckets. I also did the why wont this fucker catch on my boat? Crank and crank and cranked. I went crazy, checked the compression, checked fuel, rebuilt the carb.... turns out I needed to just seat the wire to the coil better. It wasn't quite in far enough
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May 3, 2015 15:54
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Eighteen, out of gas in the beater, but the Project of Theseus Chevy has three-quarters of a tank. Don't have a hose to siphon it out. I took a nail and hammer, poked a hole in the bottom of the gas tank, and drained it that way. I'm trying to find the words to describe how my grandfather reacted when I told him, but it's hard. It was a weird mix of towering rage, absolute astonishment at my stupidity, despair for the failure of his genes, and laughing his rear end off.
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May 3, 2015 17:27
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You can always wire wheel that spot clean and then solder the hole back up. If you don't wait for the fumes to dissipate before striking the torch, it will pop all the dents out of the tank for you and give you another story for this thread, too.
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May 3, 2015 18:01
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BrokenKnucklez posted:I also did the why wont this fucker catch on my boat? Crank and crank and cranked. I went crazy, checked the compression, checked fuel, rebuilt the carb.... turns out I needed to just seat the wire to the coil better. It wasn't quite in far enough Oh boats... that reminds me. I was doing a tuneup on a twin engine boat. Older boats with twin big block chevys had one that counter rotates. They have different firing orders, guess how well it runs when you use the normal chevy firing order on both of them.... 
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May 3, 2015 19:02
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kastein posted:You can always wire wheel that spot clean and then solder the hole back up. If you don't wait for the fumes to dissipate before striking the torch, it will pop all the dents out of the tank for you and give you another story for this thread, too. Reminds me of my death-wish coworker who would put a lighter up to the empty bottles of washer fluid concentrate after refilling the big tank, the fumes would light off and make a funny noise. Except for the one time where the oxygen mixture was just right to make it explode instead.
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May 3, 2015 19:39
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kastein posted:You can always wire wheel that spot clean and then solder the hole back up. If you don't wait for the fumes to dissipate before striking the torch, it will pop all the dents out of the tank for you and give you another story for this thread, too. That's basically what we wound up doing. It didn't matter anyways. The four years I worked on the Truck of Theseus only resulted in it being able to move under it's own power for about three months, in two-week increments. It was my granddad's old truck, and he offered to help me buy something that actually ran and was reliable instead of fixing up a truck he had written off as scrap, but sentimentality outweighed sense at the age of fifteen. I wound up selling it to someone who wanted spare parts when my parents gave me the boot in the middle of their messy divorce. e. Oh but there's a whole list of boneheaded stuff involved with a kid's first automotive project... * Original 350 SBC lunched it's valve seals, and I had no idea the fix was easy, so I just kept pouring more oil in. Until the day I figured "Nah, it'll get me home." It did, and spun every bearing on the way. * "Do you want this 50k mileage 400 SBC that's had documented regular maintenance, and we'll have to reuse the carb off the 350, or this 150k mileage 305 SBC that comes with a carb and only smokes a little?" "The idle set screw is stripped on the old carb and I don't want to gently caress with it anymore. Gimme the 305!" * "Dash? Who needs a dash? I have zipties." * Body panels salvaged from five other different trucks, and no two panels had matching color. In my defense, the idea was to paint it... a really garish copper color with color-changing metal flakes. So glad I never did even start that. * "How hard can rebuilding a TH400 be?" * Cross-threaded the fuel filter housing onto the carb (Quadrajet) and instead of backing it off and trying again, just wrenched the drat thing down and call it a day. * No two tires of matching size. Including on the drive wheels. * Two fairly solid doors to replace the cancer-ridden old doors, and bonus, electric windows! Except I never did get the window controller wired up, so all I had was a sliding back glass. * A friend "who knew about cars and stuff" told me black pepper was the best cooling system stop-leak in the world. No, not really. * "This thing is running like crap! I know, I'll ziptie the secondaries on the carb open, it'll run better then." I am ashamed of how stupid I was as a kid. rndmnmbr fucked around with this message at 22:22 on May 3, 2015 |
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May 3, 2015 22:00
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Replacing a burnt out low beam headlight on a Toyota. I ordered a set of the right bulbs, and then got mad when I removed the bulb and it was one number off from the model number that I had bought. I sent my wife to the auto parts store to get the correct ones, and the dudes there helpfully suggested that I had probably removed the high beam bulb instead of the low beam  (they were correct)
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May 4, 2015 04:40
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Conventional wisdom says never to drain burnt transmission fluid, as it's probably the only thing keeping that transmission together. So of course, I ignored that conventional wisdom. A week later, transmission falls completely out of gear in the middle of a busy intersection. Sold said car for a steep loss due to a lack of money, patience and garage space. 
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May 4, 2015 06:02
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Rushed to install a front-mount intercooler on my last S13 to go meet up with some dame, finished and lowered the car to pull out the jack without putting the front/left wheel back on. Bent up the bottom row of the IC when it made contact with the jack.
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May 4, 2015 18:30
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rndmnmbr posted:
This reminded me of one, not a car but a boat motor. My dad used to have a 25ft Hurricane ex-coast guard rigid hull inflatable ocean going rescue boat with a mercruiser(v8?) motor. The mechanical fuel pump failed while we were in alaska, so we got a new one, I tossed it on and took the boat out for a test drive. Ran fine for a while and then started stalling out if I tried to do more than idle in gear. Limped my way back to the dock, opened the engine compartment(that flipped forward and you used as a seat) and bilge was full of gas. Apparently I over tightened the bolts and cracked the fuel pump, so it was just dumping gas into the bilge. Still have no idea how it did not ignite and blow the whole thing up.
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May 4, 2015 19:05
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On a similar note, brass fuel fittings are soft! Don't crank down on them with a wrench trying to feel for that "snug down" point that steel on steel gives you, with a foot of wrench leverage. I was not a clever 16-year-old.
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May 4, 2015 19:07
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Raluek posted:On a similar note, brass fuel fittings are soft! Don't crank down on them with a wrench trying to feel for that "snug down" point that steel on steel gives you, with a foot of wrench leverage. I was not a clever 16-year-old.
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May 4, 2015 19:15
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InitialDave posted:It gets better when you then realise you've used the ring end of the spanner. I haven't managed that one yet, but I'm certainly dumb enough to pull it off one of these days. I do have a set of flare nut wrenches, though.
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May 4, 2015 19:39
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InitialDave posted:It gets better when you then realise you've used the ring end of the spanner. I did that doing the transmission lines on my 81 cutlass......good thing it was only for the trans cooler. I cut that line and installed a piece of high pressure hose, two clamps and never looked back.
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May 4, 2015 20:58
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I learned my lesson about cleaning gasket surfaces the hard way. Cracked two water pumps in a row by missing two different chunks of old gasket+rtv combo. I was still a teenager and in a rush to get that bitch on. Lesson learned: don't try to rush that in 105F heat with 95% humidity, in the sun. I see people smearing RTV on things that just need a paper gasket and I want to smack them. Recently, I was at the very end of rebuilding the 4.0 in my TJ. Running on little sleep and facing a deadline, I didn't get the clutch alignment tool into the pilot bearing. Lead to a couple hours of "the splines are engaged, why won't it go the rest of the way on?" . It went right on after I made sure that I got the end of it into the pilot bearing.
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May 4, 2015 21:02
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rndmnmbr posted:* "This thing is running like crap! I know, I'll ziptie the secondaries on the carb open, it'll run better then." I like the way you think.
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May 5, 2015 00:28
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InitialDave posted:It gets better when you then realise you've used the ring end of the spanner. Every loving time I've ever done brake lines: Goddamn that flare came out nice! alright time to cut it back off, SLIDE THE loving FLARE NUT ON THE LINE THIS TIME, and do it again. Wait now it's too short, I guess I'll just buy more line now...And then... Alright, don't want to round this brake flare nut off, time to use the ring end, line wrenches suck. ... time to unscrew it again so I can get the wrench off the damned line... At least I have an inline flaring tool now so I don't have to dick around with that stupid goddamned clamp bar style tool that slides around and makes lumpy, lopsided flares unless you get lucky *and* are a Zen master of brake line flaring.
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May 5, 2015 00:53
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