Ahh it's taken me a good 4 hours to read this and I'm so thankful it's still around! I needed a good laugh and this thread sure did the trick lol

I have quite a few stories for you guys!

Blew my first truck up, it was a '78 Chevy K10 w/ a 350. My mechanic friend and I swapped motors. No biggie. Blew the replacement motor up a year later, right around Christmas 2012, like 3 days before. (Ran out of oil...2nd time...). Decided to just change it in my back yard, with the help of a friend. "This shouldn't take long, me and Bob had it going in 2 days". Got the motor out with an engine hoist (still in my back yard...). Couldn't pull the crane back and we were thinking "Wth can we do". We decided to rock the hoist and pull it back at the same time we rock it with a big piece of wood under the back wheels so that wouldn't sink. Got the front forks out from under the truck, and TIMBERRR! The hoist tipped over, almost collapsing right on to my buddy, but luckily he dodged it, and the motor landed right on my brand new starter It doesn't stop there! We rolled the truck down to the end of my driveway, and decided to put the new motor in right there. We were trying to position the engine on the hoist, and buddy picked up the new 350 by the harmonic balancer and was setting it down on the hoist.. well the motor slipped and pinched his fingers between the stand and motor! LOL! Ahh, good times of doing backyard/driveway motor swaps

And another time, I was working on said K10, with the first engine that was swapped in it. I put 305 heads and a mild cam in it. I had the timing "advanced a little bit" but it was waaaaaaaaaay retarded (twisted the dist. the wrong way). I honestly had no idea what I was doing, I never messed with any of that stuff before. I was on Youtube one minute, then outside ripping my engine apart the next. Anyways, had another buddy help me trying to get it started. I figured ahh might as well give her a shot of gas. Had my buddy turn the key. It fired up so I instantly went to give it some gas (I was under the hood...). Opened the throttle up and was greeted by at least a 4 foot flame out of the carb! It's safe to say I lost some arm hair and off the side of my head. My bud thought it was the funniest thing in the world... till he gave me a ride to the parts store and his truck reeked of burnt hair This was Feb. 2012.

Seems I always have projects involving engines in the coldest times of the year.... and No garage to work in

 

This ones on me... Flipping the rear axle on my 68" Jeepster Commando. There were no perches on the other side for the springs to set in. Only the U-Bolts were holding on the axle and we just installed a newly rebuilt rear drive-shaft (a bit longer because of the flip). We took it for a test drive and everything seemed all right until we tried out the new brakes. I was going down a moderate incline and stepped on the brakes and BANG!!! the axle rotated down and the new drive-shaft snapped off and was bagging extremely load against the bottom sheet metal floor of the Jeep. When we got to the bottom of the grade, I got out and looked under the vehicle and saw the diff pointed nearly straight at the ground with a mutilated new drive-shaft. I was 17 or 18, hadn't much money working for $2.65 an hr. washing dishes at a popular supper club. Ah...... those were the days.....

 

made out with my ex in my garage it was fun in the moment but got expensive later thats why she is my ex.

 

The dumbest Thing I've ever seen done in a shop, was while I was still in the army and stationed at Camp Dodge. I was in the motorpool working on my truck. this shop had a pit and a lift setup. where you could move a floorplate to cover the pit in order to work with the lift. This warrant officer was working under an army blazer in the pit when he did something to activated he lift. flipping the blazer into the pit and almost hit the Warrant. Needless to say all the pits where filled and only the lifts where used after that.

 

Nine years, and still going strong. Wolfie, you da man

 

The reason for SNAPON Tools...

It was back in the seventies, I thot I'd help a buddy who was whining about needing a new water pump on a Monty Carlo that had seen many better days....

I said "(S) man, they only cost twenny bucks - and we can do it right here at the curb..."

I DON'T remember why the balancer bolt had to come off. Something was in the way of something else, and it looked simpler to take it off. But like all the rest of the bolts on a Maryland car, it was rusted and planned on staying right where it was.
AUTOMATIC tranny, of course.

So I figured I would put a socket on a 3/8" SNAPON T-Handle with a short length of pipe to brace it against the frame and just crank the starter to bust it loose...

(Hell, snapon tools are tuff, and besides nobody had a 1/2" breaker bar to do the job)


It took me ten years to catch up to a SNAPON dealer and truck.

In the meantime, I had a 3/8 inch "J" handle


Yeah, they honored the warrantee. It was still embarrassing...


Oh and by the way - (this was refreshed in my mind when I was up in a tree lately cutting branches with a chainsaw)

The most horribly fascinating thought you can ever have is while watching something that you cannot prevent, and thinking:
"THIS IS GONNA HURT..."


~Don't ask

 

I don't have too many garage gone bad stories, aside from these two:

Back in 2011 when I was doing the 20B conversion on my RX7, it was finally the day to drop the engine back in. My automotive mentor Lynn and best friend Matt were working the crane and I was underneath, guiding both engine and transmission back into place. Mind you, this was the first time I had ever reinstalled both at the same time and ever since, I always do them separately because it's pretty difficult to get the two mounts lines up at the same time you're doing the 4 transmission crossmember bolts. So I got the transmission located with a couple of bolts and gave the go ahead to lower it the rest of the way while I tried jiggling the mounts so they slip into place. Soon as I blink, my hand is trapped between the engine and cradle, 500 pounds on my index finger. Thankfully, Matt gets the engine up after a second and there's zero visible damage to me. My fiancee at the time (now my ex-fiancee, long story) was not happy with me nor Matt then.

Earlier in 2015, I was giving another friend a hand swapping the clutch in his M5OD'ed Ranger. This friend definitely wasn't the brightest crayon in the box. Simple directions like "go up" were just too confusing, and he dropped the transmission right on my left hand, the crossmember stud right in the palm. But again, not even a bruise.

A couple weeks later, I nonchalantly hit the RX7's passenger window and break my hand. Metacarpal in my pinky finger, same bone and same place I broke it a year prior. My girlfriend at the time was not happy.

But such pales in comparison to the antics of my dad. I heard this story from my mom. Sometime in the late 70s or early 80s in Putnam State Forest in Indiana before I was born, my dad hit a deer. Being the clever guy, he put it in the back of the 70s half ton GM truck and brought it home (he lived way out in the woods). Sometime that evening after a few beers with my uncle Carl, they got the idea to string the deer up over the rafters of an in-progress addition using the truck to hold it up so they could butcher it with a chainsaw. All went well untill my dad hit the bowels...

Both of them were covered in deer s**t, instantly liquified and mixed with the remaining bile and blood, flung everywhere by the chainsaw. My mom was not happy when they came back in the house.

During another one of my dad and uncle's backwoods booze-fueled adventures, my uncle saw a brush pile and thought "let's jump it!" It wasn't a brush pile, it was an overgrown, rusty barbed wire fence and he didn't quite make it. When they came back in the house, my uncle's pants were covered in blood from the center. And since my mom was the only one that was sober, she had to drive him 45 minutes away to the nearest hospital in Bloomington. Since he couldn't sit down, he was lying in the back of her 60s Buick station wagon, with 1/3 of the trip being rough gravel county backwoods roads. I still can't figure out how my mom could keep a straight face at seeing my uncle having torn his ***** open.

I'm either extremely lucky or extremely unlucky, I don't know which.

 

You're still alive, sounds like that gene skipped a generation

 

Just tried to see problems and possible results to one of the cars but I still couldn't think of it.

 

 

I think her name was Tonya..or something

 

Back last fall, I'd just gotten my new '17 F150. I was installing the tonneau off my '12 on it in the barn. I'm an olde guy, and can't quite jump up in the back like younguns, so I had an aluminum step set up on the floor to get up in the box. Was almost done, and was walking to the back of the bed, hitched the britches up, and stepped down, face forward. Completely missed the step, left leg went under the tailgate, and down I went. Managed to twist myself around to where I landed flat on my back, and bounced the back of my head off the concrete floor. I think I might have knocked myself out for a few seconds. Knocked the breath out of me, hurt my back, and just laid there for awhile. I just knew I broke something, luckily didn't. I remember slowly moving my right hand up to my shirt pocket for my phone. I just about called 911. My dog? He took off running and hid somewhere for awhile, never even came to me to see if I was still alive. So much for loyalty. And of course the coffee cup I had in my hand, half full, went flying, right into one of the open drawers of my tool cabinet. Limped around for a few days, and bending over didn't happen for a day or two..

 

Heck I just saw this again and these last few posts make lighting that gasoline to see if it was good seem absolutely brilliant!

 

Fixed a Chevy.

 

Yeah, I've done that too... more times than I'd care to admit