Under another thread, "terrible gasket", I mentioned a little incident that took place after a little differential repair was completed...........

"Spent the rest of the evening cleaning up the garage.....................Has anyone else ever clipped the edge of the oil pan when pulling out and flipped it over?
Good thing I had a few beers in the fridge! "

Had a few people chime in about their personal incidents and thought this would make a pretty interesting and funny thread.

Let's hear em'!<!-- / message -->

 

No, the worst I've done is let the transmission tip over and spill new gear oil all over the concrete floor where I had to lay down to put in a new clutch. I just wallered around until I was done, took a shower at the shop and hosed the floor down with gas once I got my truck out.

 

Changed the oil in my girlfriends parents car that she used and forgot to put the oil pan plug in and poured 5 qts on the floor. She thought it was hilarious when I slipped and busted my a$$ trying to clean it up. We were 50 miles from the nearest place to get any oil. I/we had to get all cleaned up go to the auto pars store buy 5 more qts of oil come back and finish the job. 15 minute oil change turned into a 4 hour job. Best of all she still married me.

 

My biggest messes seem to involve automatic trannies. Probably because they hold a LOT of fluid! And it stains really well.

I mentioned the whip snake of death in the terrible gasket thread. Here's another:

High school autoshop, circa 1980. I was kind of an outlier in the class, as most of the guys taking the class were there to slack off and avoid taking "hard classes" whereas I was one of the "geeks" taking all the advanced college prep classes but wanted to learn practical stuff as well. And I love to learn - I would stay and wrench in the evenings until he threw me out. Anyway, the teacher kinda took me under his wing and gave me lots of opportunities and made sure I learned.
Anyway, working on a Ford Fairlane, getting ready to pull engine. Have it on blocks, nose well up to allow easy access. Were pulling trans with engine. Had engine loose and on hoist, just needed to detach tranny. Crawled underneath, detached mount, and then pulled the driveshaft out of tail housing. Without draining tranny first. Must dumped 2 gallons of fluid on the floor. I soaked a lot up with my clothes and hair, but the puddle was still 20 feet.... Teacher watched the whole thing and was near tears with laughter.

Me: "What the.... You knew that was going to happen! Why didn't you warn me????"
Him: "You learn the best from your mistakes. Bet you'll never do that again!"

He was right.

 

I was using a drain pan with wheels and an extended handle to drain the oil out of my Peterbilt truck with a 3406 cat motor. Oil was good and hot and I pulled the plug and let it rip. When I wheeled my creeper out from under the truck, coveralls hooked the handle to the drain pan and it followed me out from under the truck. By the time I got untangled and the pan back under the truck I had about 8 gallons on hot motor oil on the floor. Boy does hot oil flow fast-out the drain hole and spreads across the shop floor like a flash flood.

 

Wish I had something like that back in high school!

Mine, eh...I had to pull axles out of an F-450 to get new rotors on. Of course, the smelly diff fluid came pouring out everywhere, in the middle of a hot shop, in 90 degree weather. Uck.

 

In high school I worked at a lot that sold Ford and Dodge vehicles, washing cars and doing odd jobs. The main tech in the service dept. tore down a Dodge 5.9 that came out of a customer's Ram that had never had an oil change at about 45,000 miles. He told me to take the cylinder heads to a local wash rack to power-wash off the 1"+ layer of sludge that had built up on the rocker arms and valve springs.

Well, when I came back 30 minutes later, the cylinder heads were clean, and I was covered in the oily gunk from head to toe. After everyone was done laughing their asses off, the dealer gave me a new change of clothes, and I just threw my old ones away.

 

Now that's funny!

 

Well, not exactly truck related, but...

I was planning on changing my lower-unit oil in the boat and had 5 quarts of gear oil sitting on the window sill in my kitchen waiting for a nice day to come along. My parents came over for a visit and brought their dog (a spaniel). We decided to go out for dinner and didn't want the dog to get into "trouble" while we were gone, so we used a folded up cardboard box and a few chairs to "lock" him in the kitchen.

WELL, he got hold of those quarts of oil i had forgotten about and chewed the tops off spilling the contents out all over the kitchen floor and, of course, he decided to roll around in it... THEN he broke out of the kitchen and proceeded to run around the house like a lunatic. We came home to find him laying on my couch, drenched in oil with a S*** eating grin on his face.

Ended up throwing out half my furnature, just couldn't get the smell out.

 

LMAO!!

 

That's funny!!

 

Too many fubars to list.

my biggest pita was once I was rebuilding an engine and was just about ready to put on the intake manifold and button it up. I blinked and my contact lens popped out and slid down the slot in the lifter valley down into the bottom end. Got to tear down an engine that day.

Tons of fun... flushed and refilled my godmothers car with fresh antifreeze. Forgot to tighten up the hose clamps. Got a nasty call that afternoon.

And yes, my wife did run over my precious steel oil drain pan that I had since I was a teenager. Oil all over the driveway, garage, garage door and tires. Plus have to pound my oil pan back into useable shape. Still have the oil pan, barely kept the wife.

Jim Henderson

 

Nothing stinks worse than a boats lower unit oil

 

2 out of the last 3 times I changed the oil in my truck the drain plug bolt has dropped out, flipped upside down and stopped up the hole in my drain pan. hot oil flows over the pan all over the shop floor. thought I was smart the last time had a magnet ready fished bolt out forgot about the darn washer. magnets wont pick up copper!

 

While spinning wrenches in the Marine Corps, I had the privilege of working with a group of guys for a couple of years. As time went on and our camaraderie grew stronger, we started playing pranks on each other in tried & true cold war style arms escalation style.

At one point, I was setup to do an annual maintenance to one of our tactical 5-ton trucks. I slid under my 5-ton & pulled the engine oil drain plug...releasing a steady stream of oil into one of our cut-off 55 gallon drums that we used for a drain pan. As it was first thing in the morning, I opted to hit our soda mess (in the tool room) for a nice, cold Mountain Dew.

No sooner than my feet hit the shop floor, and our shop Sergeant starts sputtering & hollering like someone had dropped a HMMWV on him. The entire shop came running to find out what was going on. As soon as I came around one of the other 5-tons that was in the bay beside mine, I saw two things. The first was my shop Sergeant futilely trying to wipe something off of his entire right-hand side. The second was something that could only be called "an ocean of oil" whose perfectly shiny, black surface was only marred by the fading outline of certain shop Sergeant.

I ducked back around to the other side of my 5-ton & confirmed that my drain pan was still in place...but, I could not help but notice that the oil slick was definitely centered under my truck. Further investigation showed that I had fallen victim to some foul play. The end of the 55 gallon drum that I was using as my drain pan was from the top side of the drum. As such, it had a screw cap in it. That screw cap was nowhere to be found.

Three things happened that day. A.) Most of us spent the entire day trying to contain & clean-up the 20+ quart oil slick. B.) All top-end oil pans were summarily destroyed & banned from the shop. And, C.) We all got to listen to several lectures over the next week or so ranging from shop safety, horseplay, and on to everything HAZMAT. Those lectures did, of course, contain many references to accidents, fines, death, mayhem, torture, etc.



On the severely less messy, but every bit as problematic side...in another chapter of our arms-escalation games...

One of my teammates had the habit of leaving his steel toed work boots sitting in front of his wall locker in the shop. I took the liberty of pulling the laces out of them, split the majority of a tube of silicone sealant between the soles of his boots, placed them back on the floor in front of his locker, and fastened them to the shop's asphalt floor with about ten 16-penny nails each (got to love distributed air systems & nail guns).

I did this on a Friday afternoon at the beginning of a 4-day weekend to ensure the maximum curing time for the silicone. That following Wednesday, I watched in gleeful anticipation as my unsuspecting colleague discovered his "stationary" footwear.

He did not just vow revenge. He hounded me for months. 5, 6, 7 months slid by, and he still brought up the fact that when I least expected it, revenge would be his.

I eventually thought it was all just bluster, and that he really did not have the heart or will to continue the prank escalation race again.

That is until some 8 or 9 months later. I had just gotten back from a two week vacation. My first day back at work started like any number of other days. That is until I went to slide my toolbox onto one of the handcarts we used for toting them around the motor pool. On that particular day, my toolbox made a relatively silent transition from its resting space onto the handcart. I almost did not even notice, but something in the back of my brain brought it to my attention.

Leaning back down, I picked up one end of my toolbox...to hear nothing. The weight was there. So there had to be tools inside. But not a peep could be heard from within.

I pulled out my key, unlocked the box, and flipped open the lid to find everything sitting right where it usually was. The top tray showed all my 1/2" metrics lined up nice & pretty. The 1/2" standards were lined up in opposite order right along side of them. The 3/8" standards & metrics were all lined up as well. As were the deepwell sockets on either side of the removable tray. Even my ratchets were in their usual resting spot...remarkably and yet eerily the same as I had left them.

As I reached in to remove one of the ratchets, I found that it was firmly & securely fastened to the bottom of the tray with clear silicone. Almost every drawer revealed more of the same. All of the tools were in their proper places, but each was either stuck to the toolbox or its neighboring tools.

The bottom drawer was different. It refused to open. Being littered with a collection of the bigger tools (hammers, pry bars, etc.), it was not uncommon for it to get stuck & require some TLC to get it to open. In this case, it wouldn't budge. Not even a little wiggle.

After the laughter of my fellow mechanics kicked in & faded away, my buddy pointed out a small hole in the back of my toolbox. He had drilled through the back of the toolbox & into that deep bottom drawer. He had then rigged a WD-40 straw onto a spray foam container & completely filled that drawer with spray foam.

I can honestly say that it took me weeks to get most of my tools freed from the silicone and/or spray foam death grip. It might have even been a month or so before I could get all of my sockets to fit onto the ratchets without a bit of a fight.


But, for the close to two years that he was with the unit, his feet still got wet almost everytime it rained.