Stupid things you've done while working on your vehicle

jph0913 said:
Too soon...
But I know a guy on the board that had his injection pump rebuilt, and spent 3 or 4 nights bleeding the injectors, broke THREE banjo bolts in the process, only to find out that the pump was reassembled wrong. That did suck
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Here is what you ment to type:

..I know a "guy" that got his inj pump built by a fellow board member that said he knew how to.. then the "guy" tries to install it .. breaks THREE banjo bolts in the process, kills two batteries, then leaves dead truck blocking shared garage for 3 weeeks while he is away on honeymoon to only come back and find out pump was built WRONG.. PRICELESS

Post to prove it :)
http://www.nc4x4.com/forums/showthread.php?t=14032
 
well since we are sharing...
Ken brought over his bug to rebuild the carb.... It gets rebuilt, and we cant get it to run right. So we took a break, and ran some errands. When we return, all the wires to the distributor are burnt up. Some jackass (me) left the key in the run position while we were gone. Burnt up the points, a couple wires, and the dizzy.....oops, my bad!


I learned that points ignition systems dont like to be left on for 2 hours, who knew???? I didnt know what points were before this incident.
 
Rejetting a Kawasaki Vulcan
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I rebuilt a 95 vulcan a few years ago. Did some body work, put a few coats of paint on, and was cleaning out the bowls. I put on the panels to take a test ride(just couldn't wait a day). I stop at a stop light and gun it off the line. I about spun my assend right around myself and realized the carb drain bolt was loose when I put the carb back in and it just came out. Basically a gallon+ of gas slowly dripped all over the paint before I did the clear coat and what the gas didn't drip on I spun all over at the light. F'd myself pretty hard for a lack of patience. Lesson learned
 
I know another board member that installed this NEW shinny power steering cooler but it was to tall for his hood so he had to cut a hole in the hood for it to stick out a little..

well did he follow that old rule of measure twice, cut once.. NOPE..
So now he has two matching holes in his hood

man that one gave me a good laugh
 
I had a v8 ZJ with the K&N cone air filter. One day I decided to wash the engine. I covered the air filter with a Wal-Mart bag so it wouldn't get wet. Gunked the engine down, gently hosed it all off. Decided to fire it up to steam off the excess water. I'm sitting in the jeep revving the engine wondering why it doesn't sound right and rev very well... get it and look things over and I forgot to remove the bag covering the air filter.... It completely collapsed the filter and ruined it! doh!!
 
raleighjeepguy said:
I rebuilt a 95 vulcan a few years ago. Did some body work, put a few coats of paint on, and was cleaning out the bowls. I put on the panels to take a test ride(just couldn't wait a day). I stop at a stop light and gun it off the line. I about spun my assend right around myself and realized the carb drain bolt was loose when I put the carb back in and it just came out. Basically a gallon+ of gas slowly dripped all over the paint before I did the clear coat and what the gas didn't drip on I spun all over at the light. F'd myself pretty hard for a lack of patience. Lesson learned
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:Rockon:

I was sitting at a stoplight one fine day. Smelled gas. I think, "hmmm must be running a bit rich." When I get home and park it a realize there's a giant puddle of gas forming under carb from a cut fuel line.

:wheel:
 
Trannys are heavyer than they look....

So after replacing they clutch, then replacing my pressure plate. I realize that its my slave cylinder? (the thing that pushes on the pressure plate) that has gone bad. So for the third time I pull the tranny. It wasn't very hard the first two times... seemed pretty light. So i have a bright idea.. I can man handle it.. Bad decsion. I pull the tranny and it lays on my chest. No problem, Ill just bench it and set it off to the side... Nope not happening, no leverage. So ill slide out from under the jeep. Nope to low... I end up sitting there for 20 mins as I call a buddy to come get the damn thing off of me
 
Too many! That's what happens when you get as old as me.
1. Sitting under my Jeep welding, because too lazy to crawl in and out. In shorts, sitting Indian style. All is well. I am up all night, get it together, head to Crackers Neck. Sitting by the fire the following evening, my legs start to burn. I am on fire. My wife repeatedly soaks a wash cloth in cold water and holds to my legs, you can see the steam roll off it heated up so fast. That one took about a month to heal. Of course I hit it every chance. still have a nice scar from it.

2.Again, under my Jeep, I am grinding off a weld a buddy had layed down for me when trying to get it ready to wheel. I have the 4" grinder locked on. Wife comes out, she is headed to the store to get milk. As I am grinding, I am pretty deep into the weld, I must have got it cocked sideways, and it jerked it out of my hands. I am scrambling to get out of there, and it catches me. It gets my wrist, my side and my back. what saved me was one, I had on an old thin tshirt and it wound up in it and just sit there humming, but locked up, and my wife having mind enough to unplug it. I just lay there, face still covered till she un wound me.

3. Changing out a drive shaft, a 48"er to be exact, and drop it on my head. CV end of course.

4. Grinding outside, and right beside Leslie's Honda and on another date, my Olds. Both have little bits of metal embedded in the passenger side glass.

5. Once saw a guy changing an axle in the woods, on a hill. His friend took the tire from him and layed it down, kinda,.... it rolled down the hill for what seemed like a mile before it stopped. it hit so many trees it took a while to find it.
 
Brake fluid is flamable.

Swapped a rear axle out in the CJ, hooked brake line back up, bleed brakes, wipe everything up with a shop rag and left rag on fender well under hood. Took it for a ride. My buddy behind me, I pull up to a light and he starts yelling out the window, FIRE! FIRE! as I'm making the turn onto the next road.

I stop and jump out in the middle of the 4 lane road. flip the hood up to see that rag burning on the headers below the Brake MC. CJ owners also know that the Fuel lines comes right thru there and goes from Hard to rubber as it goes from Frame to Block mounting.

I run to back to get the Extinguisher which is buried under soft doors and other crap. My buddy reaches in and grabs the burning rag and flicks it out of the engine bay. I hit it with the Extinguisher and check under the hood to find semi melted fuel line and scorched wires. My buddy burned his hand pretty good too. That was a good friend. (RIP Patrick, not from that incident).
 
My first job was in high school at a jiffy lube, went to work one saturday at about 7 and had been up all night the night before. I ended up falling asleep with the oil pump locked to on while adding to a little honda by the time somebody noticed woke me up and I turned off the pump I had added 15quarts of oil and had to go back down and drain the extra out.

Just a few weeks ago I was changing a front axle seal on one of the newer silverados with the clip and you have to take down the long side of the axle I tear it apart put it all back together and siliconed it up and then noticed the new seal still sitting on the top of my toolbox
 
Futbalfantic said:
Trannys are heavyer than they look....
So after replacing they clutch, then replacing my pressure plate. I realize that its my slave cylinder? (the thing that pushes on the pressure plate) that has gone bad. So for the third time I pull the tranny. It wasn't very hard the first two times... seemed pretty light. So i have a bright idea.. I can man handle it.. Bad decsion. I pull the tranny and it lays on my chest. No problem, Ill just bench it and set it off to the side... Nope not happening, no leverage. So ill slide out from under the jeep. Nope to low... I end up sitting there for 20 mins as I call a buddy to come get the damn thing off of me
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Wimp, I've changed out 700r4's/4l60's using the bench press method twice now :flipoff2:
 
A couple more to share

After a full throttle assault on the ''step trail'' off of welder, I noticed a smell of gas. Turned around, come back down onlt to have 4cyl. tj stall out on a rock(never turned off switch) I hopped out to look for the source of the smell. I poked my head in the wheel well above the rear tire and was sprayed in both eyes , by some high pressure gasoline. I realized the pump was still running and there was a tear in the line. That really sucked rinsing my eyes out with muddy water.


This one is really funny

8 rigs+ 5 days+Crossville (Dried up river bed that goes for miles) This trip was a true adventure and imo a real test of endurance, both man and machine.Once we entered, the plan was to stay 5 days. On day 4...my buddies were driving a severely broken xj back to the tow rig about 9 miles back into town. The xj was limping back on 1 wheel drive(left front)
Very curvy 2 lane back road w/ extreme switchbacks and guard rails on BOTH sides. The last U-joint let go on a switchback. No traffic to speak of so the choice was made to drive lead jeep to retrieve tow rig as pulling broken jeep with 4cyl.tj was not an option. We leave one guy behind to stay with xj. We could not pull it off the rd.(guardrails)Plus w/ no traffic, we thought it would be fine. Off we go to get the tow rig. The guy that stayed behind ends up falling asleep while sitting up,waiting for us. An older gentleman happened by and noticed our sleeping friend. Did he try to wake him? NO...he instead called 911. So as we returned and rounded the curve, imagine our surprise and horror to find 2 fire trucks, 2 police cruisers and an ambulance surrounding the xj. The old man had called 911 and reported a murder! Could you imagine how our sleeping buddy felt waking up to all that!
 
I have learned it takes less than 2 hours to remove a Ford TTB and 2 years to get a D60 under it.
 
Kustom Fabrikated said:
My first job was in high school at a jiffy lube,...
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that one reminds me of a buddies story. This one's too god for me to even take claim for.

A buddy (who was a mechanic at his dads shop) had a friend come in to learn how to change his oil. so he sat back and instructed him. pull plug, pull filter, drain... etc. and told him to put oil in as the last step. I don't recall if he sat and watched this part and let it play out, or if he wasn't paying attention to the apprentice, but the guy put too much oil in. don't think he filled the entire crankcase, but too much none the less.

anyway, the young padawan learner asked how to get the oil out.... wait for it..... He couldn't help himself and told the guy to wipe the dip stick off, put it back in pull it out and wipe it off and repeat until the level went down............. 30 minutes later he had to stop the kid cause he couldn't take it any longer. :lol:
 
When I went to Forsyth Tech, some of the guy's in one of my classes had a really bright idea (among many).

They had drained the gear oil out of a tranny (I guess just to put fresh oil in it), to refill it they ran a long hose from the fill port up to the bottle. They had the small 1 quart bottle with the small spout, it was taking too long since the gear oil is really thick, so one guy came up with a bright idea.

*bright idea*
Poke hole in bottom of quart bottle of gear oil, insert blow nozzle to pressurize bottle and make gear oil flow faster. It worked great for a little bit, then turned bad...

The bottle exploded, covering the entire engine, and the 4 or 5 guys standing around the front of the car. Thought it was quite amusing myself...

Another college classmate pulled a REALLY stupid trick. Something had broken on his go-cart (racing cart), well he figured he'd bring it to school to weld it back together. He wasn't a very proficient welder (pretty bad actually), but he was going to do it himself.

After he welded on it for probably 20 minutes, I walked over and asked what was taking so long, he said it just was hard to weld. Turns out he was welding the ALUMINUM bracket he had back together with a MIG (and steel wire). DOH!!
 
Hmmm

Sounds like you two guys are ratting out on each other. Funny that despite the errors - everyone still knows who to call when things need to be fixed. The other thing is none of this appears to have happened when wrenching with a group. So if you had not told on each other - we might have never known.
 
I had a Merc Tracer w/ a blowd headgasket. A buddy felt guilty for convincing me to buy it in teh first place, so he was busting ass to quickly replace it.
Well, we got it all back together, after checking the timing notches lining up etc. Cranked, great, sounded great, but wouldn't catch.
WTF? We checked it all, went through the timing as first suspiscion, but it sounded good (no crunching, no backfires) so figured it had to be good. After a lot of head scratching, broke down and re-read the FSM...

Doh! we put the crank/cam timing backwards... timing was exactly 180 deg out! That sucker would have cranked all day w/o ever firing, lol.
 
dont even get me started.....i could probably fill 2 pages with all the dumb:poop:/almost killing myself/having to do stuff multiple times, that i have done lol....

doin an axle swap on my yj right, one of the MANY MANY times....ended up using cinderblocks as jackstands....had em in the center on both sides of the belly pan...all 4 off the ground....pull the rear axle and as soon as i got everything unbolted BOOM front falls to the ground....gravity duh, threw the balance off....sooooo had to jack it back up and get it reset....get the front unbolted and in the process of undoin the front driveshaft(from the tcase for some odd reason) so im under the jeep....all of a sudden i hear a cracking sound, look over and literally watch a split form and continue through one of the cinderblocks, before i could scramble out the jeep just dropped and stopped about 1/2 inch from crushing my chest...it was actually sqeezing me against the ground(thank god for the other block that was there)...had to wait there for 30 min like that yellin for my dad who lived next door due to my phone not being in my reach........moral of the story=use real jackstands at all 4 corners, and always have your phone in ur pocket
 
...and then there was the kid in autoshop who brought his junk in to change his oil. Pull drain plug, catch oil, pull filter, everything's going well. New filter installed, he lowers the car and starts pouring in oil. He was quite a few quarts in and, you guessed it, the oil puddle was gettting bigger and bigger. He never replaced the drain plug.
 
One of my favorites.
my buddy had an 81 Chevy C10 pickup that was his daily driver. He called me over to help get it back together so he could go to work in the morning. Dont remember why now, but I know the intake manifold had to be changed. Well we start about 10Pm by the time we get to re assembly we realize the gasket kit only had one side in the box, Off we head to Charlotte to the all night autozone. Turns out they dont have any intake manifold gaskets for a 350 chevrolet in stock (who would have ever guessed?) But the store on the other side of town does (even farther north) so we get up there get the gaskets and get back to York sometime around 1:30 AM (with a 4AM rack call for me) I am bolting thee carb back on and remove the wood screw that is holding the secondaries locked open, because it is in the way of attaching the back vacuum line (brake booster). In a move of brilliance I miss the entire intake manifold as I set it down and somehow drop it down the dizzy hole.

Drain the oil, no luck
Fill it up with oil jack up truck so it leans towards drain hole and drain again no luck.
Fish with magnet in oil pan NOPE.
So we proceed to start ripping the IM off again and look all over the top end.
Sometime around 4 we unbolt the motor mounts, drop the oil pan and sure enough, there it was, wedged in the sheet metal baffle


GRRRRRRRRRR....

Damn I miss that dude.....
 
One of the stupidest things that I've done (when working on a vehicle) was trying to put the winch on the front of my K5. I set the winch tray on the bumper, set the winch on the tray to start aligning holes (holding onto the winch)... apparently I slid the winch a little too far towards the edge of the bumper, and the winch tray falls on my foot. Probably 25 lbs of tray, approximately 3 feet of drop... it hurt for a while.
 
Back in high school I had a 71 Dart with a 318 and a 3 on the floor. Being what it was my friends and I decided to make a mini General Lee out of it. We went all out. Push bar, K-40 whip on trunk, Dixie horn, even some old mag wheels that looked pretty close to the Vector wheels on the actual General. Now it was time, weld the doors. An easy task right? It was, until we realized we had just welded both the doors shut and the windows were still up. DOH! Now I get to bust a window out of my car just so I can get in.
 
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