Dumbest car thing you ever did

Oh gees.....Where to start.

Well, the first one was betting my buddy I could jump my truck further than he could jump his. We both had old dodge ram pickups. I got mine at a city surplus action for $500 and I know my buddy didn't pay much more than that for his. We were out in the country coming back from a day of hunting and we got to a dirt road that had a bunch of pretty sharp crests. So being 19 and fearless, We decided to have a jump off with the loser buying dinner. Well, I ended up winning in more ways than one. My buddy jumped his truck and didn't give it enough gas and it landed on the next crest. He ended up slightly cracking his frame and blew 2 shocks. We had to limp it back to my buddies farm and stick weld it back together.

In reply to FSP_ZX2:

I was backing out of a friends driveway/alley in my '72 Mustang after picking him up, and with another friend in the back seat. The rear window was tiny and mostly obscured by his head. The driver's mirror was also tiny, and there was no passenger mirror. So he had his head turned around telling me "all clear"...about that time I backed into a light pole, doing faster than I should have. I 1' almost square chunk of bondo & newspaper fell out of the quarter panel behind the rear wheel, which was good, as it allowed me to reach into the now-stuck-closed trunk and retrieve all my stuff.

Next car was a '70 Ford XL convertible that my friends decided would be great for car-surfing. That included climbing all over the hood/windshield/trunk while doing 70-80 down the road, as well as propping themselves between the open door and rear door jamb while skidding along the pavement.

3" Body lift. Very dumb.

I bought a beater Escort wagon to get me through the winter. Saw a nice big snowbank in the parking lot and decided to try drifting it into the lot, since, "worst case scenario, I just hit the snowbank". Except halfway into the slide, I remembered that there is a curb and an island there. Bent both passenger side wheels and screwed up the alignment. I can't believe that's all it did- I came in HOT.

Admittedly, I was in my mid 20s at the time...

ETA: I just remembered one from when I was 16. My first car (well, my first running car) was a Bradley GT kit car. Neat looking, but horribly slow. I was at Whitlock Auto Parts getting something, and when I left, there were all these people checking out the car in the parking lot. I decided to try and do a burnout as I left. Instead of spinning the tires, I sheared all the bolts off the axle where it connects to the transaxle.

I learned to drive on an 01 nissan xterra that was my moms, she let me take it during the week to drive to work. One day driving with my buddy I told him we could pick up some easy HP by running race gas. We pulled into the local Sunoco and filled her up with 105 octane. It ran like a bat out of hell for about 20 minutes, then it went down on power and I got a flashing check engine light. I had been tinkering with cars and anything with an engine I could get my hands on from age 13 but being 16 at the time my auto knowledge was still limited. I went home with my heart in my throat assuming that I had killed it. After finding out I was grounded I was given the task to call the family mechanic to come look at it. Turns out I had fouled out 3 of the 6 plugs...

Age 16, I decided to see just how much traction Eagle GT's had on an ice-covered Road. In my dad's Z28. Nothing about that event ended well.

My stupidity with cars tended to be either their purchase, or sale, or something in between.....

I was 17. Parents were gone so I took my mom's car, without permission, to pick up a girl. My brother, who was a semi driver at the time, came home while I was out to pick up my date. I had no clue he was supposed to be home. I also was apparently far too focused on the girl to notice the damn big rig parked in the driveway. I drove right in to it. Wrecked mom's car. Girl not impressed.

Joe Gearin wrote: Unfortunately, it's a pretty long list..... I once asked my mother if she'd ever been airborne in her car----- before she could say anything I had taken the "jump" where they were laying new asphalt over the old road. The car got air....her head smashed the roof. I got grounded. Yes.....I was 16. I also managed to disable my Dad's GTI by understeering into a curb. A day later the control arm bushings in my 66 Chevelle gave way after an off-road excursion. My Mother, disgusted, had me clean the garage thoroughly. I decided to park her Buick outside so I could sweep the garage floor. Then I forgot to close the driver's door as I pulled out of the garage. I ended up damaging her door so badly it wouldn't close AND I screwed up the garage door rail to boot! They still bring that one up!.......and yes.....this also happened when I was 16. (seeing a trend here?) there's plenty more......but you just asked for one.

I did the door thing to my Mother's Rambler when I was 16.

Oh god, long story incoming.

The car was a 1987 Nissan Maxima, the issue was a failed water pump. I managed to get a friend with a garage to give me some space to work on the car as I wasn’t about to shell out $200 for a shop to replace a $30 part. He also let me use his tools since I had only the most basic set as a 17 year old kid. Haynes manual in hand I was ready. How hard could this be? Well turns out when you’re 17, have almost zero patience and nothing more than a few oil changes and brake pad replacements in your DIY repertoire, pretty effin hard.

The first issue came when I tried to cheat, and not remove the timing belt covers. The lack of space between the front of the engine and the strut tower was super annoying and this seemed like a tedious process I could skip. I got about 3 of the 5 bolts out of the water pump before gave up on being able to remove it this way. So I went back and started removing the covers, oh but what’s this? You can’t remove the lower cover without removing the crank pulley. Crap. Well maybe I can cheat there too, I’ll just bend this cover a little, and bend that… crap, why won’t you come out already you giant piece of junk! The lower cover was a mangled mess from trying to remove it without removing the crank pulley. I guess I should figure out how to remove that crank pulley.

Okay how the hell do I do that? The Haynes manual didn’t really give me a good explanation, just said “remove pulley”. Thanks a lot. My first attempt was to use a ratchet and a hammer, since no air tools were to be found. The ratchet was barely longer than the crank pulley, and I wailed on it, broke the ratchet, and no sign of movement from the bolt. Okay, plan B it is. Let’s apply some leverage to this, I found a cheater bar and a long piece of pipe in the far dark corner of the shop and with those I thought I was making headway, things were turning! But when I looked, it was turning the engine over instead of removing the bolt. Well crap. How do I keep the engine from turning? Nothing in the Haynes manual on that. Let’s see.. when the crank moves.. hmm, oh! The timing belt! I’ll just lock the timing gear into place and the belt will keep the crank from turning. (This was not one of my more brilliant moves)

With the timing belt locked into place I applied all the force I could to the pipe, the pipe gave a little, then “shhhhlip” it moved quite a bit, but again, the bolt stayed in place while the crank turned…. and the cams didn’t. I didn’t think anything of this though at the time. I had the anger of a thousand suns burning in me over this stupid bolt that wouldn’t move. It was late. So I called my brother, he picked me up and I went home. Angry, hot, and caked with 12 years of engine grease and grime. This was the end of day one.

After a troubled nights rest, tossing and turning thinking about the car, I awoke to try this again. I asked my dad before heading out if he knew how to keep the engine from rotating. He wasn’t very mechanically inclined, but remembered a buddy of his in highschool taking the starter off and wedging a screw driver into the flexplate to keep things in place.

Armed with this newfound knowledge I was confident I could get this done today. And things seemed to be going better. I removed the starter with little difficulty, save for dropping years’ worth of road grime into my face when I pulled it free. After finally getting all the crud out of my eyes, I found a nice hole to slide the biggest flathead screw driver I could find through. There that should hold. I went back to the pipe, still attached to the bolt, where I left it in defeat the night before. I pushed down on the pipe with all my might, it bowed, then finally it moved, and that was all I needed, I was able to readjust the pipe and get the bolt to move more. Holy crap, I was on cloud nine at this point. This bolt was done for. I put a ratchet on it and pulled it all the way out. Time to get this pulley out of the way.

Grabbing hold of the pulley on both sides I pulled it straight towards me. Nothing. I pulled again, this time bracing my legs on the inner fender structure. Nothing. I tapped on it with a hammer, sprayed it with some WD40 and waited. My third attempt was met with the same results. My celebratory mood quickly shifted to anger. I hated this car. What was meant to be a simple 2 hour procedure was anything but that. So I did the only thing my 17 year old brain knew to do. I picked up a hammer, and laid into the pulley with all my strength to try and free it up. It only took what seemed like an eternity of pounding, but I felt it wobble and then break free entirely. But this process hadn’t been kind to the pulley, 2 giant chunks of the side wall were missing in action. I didn’t care at this point, I had bested the stupid thing and as long as the belt was lined up it shouldn’t be an issue, I thought to myself.

With the pulley finally out of the way I was able to remove the now completely mangled lower timing cover. I thought I might be able to get away without putting one back on when I put it all back together. Maybe make it easier to service in the future.. Yeah that’s the ticket. With all the stuff I had done at this point I almost forgot why I started. Oh yeah, the water pump, this 30 dollar part from Autozone.

Things went a lot easier at this point, I removed the last few bolts I couldn’t get to with the cover in the way (thanks Nissan engineers). I got the new pump on and sealed to the motor with the new gasket. I filled it up with coolant and didn’t see any leaks, so I put the upper timing cover on. I installed the crank pulley, and got all the belts lined up for the accessories. The starter was the last thing to go back in. This was it, almost 20 hours later I was done. I turned the key, the lights on the dash came on, a good sign. Then I turned the key. Something wasn’t right, it turned over, but wouldn’t catch, then smoke started coming out of the open air filter. What. The. Hell. Then it clicked. I was so pissed off from all the times this car had tried to prevent me from fixing it and so eager to have it done. I had completely forgotten about the timing being thrown completely out when the crank had slipped while the timing gears where locked.

With no telling how many valves bent I called it. I was done. I was so upset at myself. How could I have been so stupid? All that time, all that energy, blood, and sweat. Wasted. I put the tire back on. Lowered the car to the ground. Had my brother come pick me up again. I called a tow truck the next day and had it towed to a shop. I purchased a used engine for $300 and had them install it. By the time it was done, I had paid way more than the $200 to replace the water pump. Hell, I had paid 1.5 times what I purchased the car for. But teenagers are dumb, and I was no exception to the rule.

Dumbest car thing I ever did?

Failed to purchase a rust free Corvair convertible I could have easily afforded.

At 15. I got to drive my Dad's new Pinto SW company car home from the lot. At an uphill stoplight, I got to learn how to use a clutch. Rolled back into a Jag grill. The driver was a little drunk, and Dad convinced her she had been too close.

Later that night, I snuck out with a friend and drove the Pinto around the block. When we got back to the house, I could not get the keys out (not knowing there was a button to push).

At 16 I backed Dad's Vista Cruiser into Dad's 230SL in the driveway. Dad was standing in the driveway at the time. Sometime later I got some air in the Vista Cruiser crossing an intersection. Broke the motor mounts and cracked some plates in the battery. (However mitigated by Grandpa totalling the VC after we gave it to him.)

Drove my $300 Mercedes 190 sedan 300 miles with a 50mph death shudder in the front end. As long as I was accelerating past 50 and got to 60, it was OK. Later drove it to Mexico with three friends. Parked on the beach and drained the battery. Luckily it push started on the sand, but then the generator bolt fell out and I had to borrow a bolt and mismatched nut from someone, lay on the 150 degree ground with the massive sunburn and jamb the nut on.

Changed the head gasket on my Alfa and the tank was STILL empty. Drove another Alfa (with new wife onboard) from Monterey to Oakland with only the underdash handbrake.

At work I didn't notice the nut go into the cylinder of a Lancia Scorpion that came in for it's 5000 mile service.

Not really my fault, but we also changed the clutch on a car and the rear axle shaft remained broken.

Rolled a Ford Courrier on a forest service road. A very thin tree kept us from going any further down a very steep embankment.

Understeered into a telephone pole after going through two of those cable/phone boxes and a series of mailboxes. Last i looked we were doing 90 in an early 90's Acura Integra (I wasnt driving). The impact was enough to bounce us back in the middle of the road. Speed limit was 35...

Pretty much any time my friend Bobby and I went out in his IROC. If you lived in Pensacola between September of 2001 and February of 2002, we're very very sorry.

If you lived in Bothell, Wa between 1999 and 2001 and harbor ill thoughts to Mazda RX7's as a result, I'm sorry for that too.

I'm sure there's more...

I can relate to nearly every story here, but since none of you seem to have hit a pedestrian with a car, I'll go.
To set the scene, I'm 17 and driving a 1984 Dodge Aries K. This car had been in the family for a short two years, but being an 11 year old K car, it was in a perpetual state of failure. It had been passed on to me primarily because I had shown great promise mechanically (compared to my family members, not people who have actual skills) and it seemed cheaper to those in charge to let me drive the car that needed to be fixed as I was likely to fix it out of necessity saving the family money. In retrospect, a solid plan.
The brakes were going. It's surprising how long you can nurse a set of worn pads when you don't want to do the work and are blissfully unaware of the consequences of not stopping.
My mom had a business about a mile from home and both of my sisters worked with her after school. It was a short drive, brutally hard on cars, but it did have the side benefit that nothing HAD to be fixed on my Mom's car as they could just walk. On this day a flat tire had the three of them in pedestrian mode. Our paths intersected as I drove home from my after school job shoveling dirt from one side of a building to the other, and I decided that a nice kind loving son and brother would stop and pick them up, and I wanted to be that guy.
The K car was seldom running well enough to reach the posted speed limit of 55mph, so I had quite a line of irritated motorists start to pour by me to the left as I eased onto the gravel shoulder. My right side was bounded by a ditch capable of concealing a platoon of artillery, and in front of me, my family.
I stomped the brakes. They engaged in the technical sense, I was slowing, but my finely tuned sense of closing speeds knew I was in trouble. My left foot joined my right in a effort to double the braking force and sparks began pouring from the interface between the bare backing plates and the tortured disks.
This was not going well.
I couldn't move into traffic, those people were innocent. The ditch wasn't an option, rusty K-Cars and their occupants can't survive that kind of fall. If I could get my mother and sister to move just four feet to their right I could sneak by and avert catastrophy. I honked. I laid on the horn with the same force I was still putting into the blazing brake components. They turned. They recognized me. My older sister flipped me off. And they kept walking.
I had done all I could do. Escape avenues closed, my legs locked pedal to the floor, I was going to ride this one in. My younger sister was trailing the other two by a couple of feet. She was going first. I liked her the best and grief for the future battled with the terror of the present. Would she fly over the hood like in the movies? Be sucked underneath as I'd read about in the paper? The closed casket would be my fault.
And then I hit her.
In the last 18 inches of motion before the brakes dragged the car to a stop, I hit my sister. It pushed her forward, off her feet, and onto the gravel between the other two. Miraculously she stood up. My mother pointed at me, and calmly with an anger she was famous for, said "you're grounded" and kept walking.
The next day, after school, I rode my bike to the parts store and spent $12 of what should have been my hard earned gas money on front brake pads and did my earliest version of a brake job. The disks were dangerously grooved, the pedal was soft, but at least I could avoid people again, and that was good enough to get me un-grounded and back in the road.

Forgetting to "reset" the rear calipers so the parking brake would work and then letting my Jetta wagon roll off ramps after lowering the rear wheels... and into a closed garage door... with the hatch open...

It was one very expensive oil change and rear brake job ($3200 for new garage doors).

At 17 years of age, failing to convince my father that my first car should be a 1967 911s soft window targa. It was about $6,000 back then.

In reply to t25torx:

You should write a book.

So many things!

Recently I thought I'd be clever and avoid retiming the engine by zip tying the timing belt to the cam gear, until I split the hub of the pulley by slightly misaligning the key.

Once a long time ago I started en engine when I intended to just sue the starter to spin it over, while I was attaching a clutch fan to the water pump, sending it flying through the radiator.

I almost dropped a Camaro on myself trying to jack it up on a hill when I was 17. Only one point hit my finger, and I still have it (the finger).

I pushed the same Camaro around in a parking lot and a guy was jumping into the hood having fun getting "hit" by a car until he went into the windshield and shattered it.

etc...

I was 16 like everyone else in this thread, of course. I had driven to the local McDonalds with my girlfriend. When it came time to leave and go 'park' elsewhere, I decided to take the shortcut out of the parking lot by pulling forward through the space. There was a curb there, but since the lot had been repaved many times over the years, the curb was only about an inch high and I knew my '78 Cutlass Cruiser would clear it no problem. I failed to consider that, perhaps, the adjacent parking lot had not been repaved quite as many times and there was in fact a 6" or so dropoff. So the front end promptly fell off the small cliff and the car high-centered on the low hanging dual exhaust - since I had built an x-pipe but didn't have the greatest fabrication skills so all the pipe was below the lowest point of the floor. Horrible grinding sound. Stopped. Tried reverse. No progress. Tried forward again. No progress. Got more panicked. We're really stuck. Dad is going to kill me. Gave it more gas. Did a one-wheel burnout for a little bit and then tore the exhaust loose and broke free. Shamefully drove 5 miles home with open headers. It was super romantic. We dated for like 2 more years. Go figure.

1. 18 years old. '66 mustang with over-built 289, lowered with "shelby" suspension, Michelin XWX hi-performance tires. Out drinking all night with my buds, then donuts until the sun came up. Still slightly drunk. I know, lets all drag race. There was this turn in the road on the highway I lived on, it was a nice, gentle turn at the 45 mph speed limit. Not so much at 110 mph. Somehow I managed to understeer my way around that turn using up both lanes of the road and not dropping a wheel. I never drank and drove again. All I could think about after it happened was how upset my grandparents would be if I killed myself - they were great people who raised me and didn't deserve that kind of heartache.

Dumbest things in a car? Well I've done something like this:

FSP_ZX2 wrote: When I was about 14 or so I offered to detail my Grandpa's car in exchange for a few bucks--he had a 1970-ish AMC Ambassador Wagon. Green, with "woody" sides. It was a very long car. Very long. I got it all done, and was very proud of my work, and decided to move the car off to the side of the driveway. Our driveway was 'L' shaped and had a big iron basketball post adjacent to one side. I backed into it. I learned a lesson about not using side mirrors to back up.

Except I was backing my AE92 around a long van to the bottom of a loading ramp, which I checked was clear before getting in the car and thought that nobody should go there unless they're entering the service bay. But a Sentra had parked there since I got in. Just cosmetic bumper damage on both cars, still haven't been able to fix mine though. I was around 18.

Bobzilla wrote: There was the moment I put 700lb front springs on coilovers on a daily..... that weighed 2700lbs. and tried to take the wife on a sunday drive an hour and a half each way.

650lb springs on a 2300lb car here. Was around 21 when I did that. Still running them.

Other than that, nothing that caused nearly as much havoc as the other stories on here, even though when I was in university I would get into a street race almost every day and would save up gas to attend uncontrolled track days where Initial-D-worthy passes were the order of the day. Guess I was just better at hooning

More recently I was in a mud arena event and thought I could reverse just a little without looking back too much to help make a 180deg turn on super-slick mud, when every second counted. Nope, smacked a fat palm tree, crunched the rear bumper and a taillight

Dumbest non-car thing I've ever done? That's easy. Decide I'd lie to my parents to avoid taking a bit steaming dump on what they'd been working on for most of my life, and tell them that living in the Caribbean seemed to be OK. I knew it was clearly worse but I had only seen the tip of the iceberg. I was about 8. I'm still poor and single.

Sometimes I think we're too dumb to run this planet.

The only reason I didn't do any dumb car stuff at 16 was because I didn't own a car until I was 18... Until then, when I had to get around I'd borrow the Birth-control-mobile - my dad's white Dodge Dart with the straight-six which repelled all women (dad put 225,000 miles on it, until a load of concrete block in the trunk caused the automatic transmission to literally explode a 4"-hole through the case, but I digress).

Very first car was a 1969 Chevy Impala, another female-repelling car (that dad helped pick out... hmm) Poop brown with a 6-cylinder and 2-speed automatic, it got by, just. One day it quit while driving it and I coasted to the side of the road. When I tried to start it - even knowing zero about cars - I knew something was wrong because the starter was having no problem spinning it. To make a very long story short, turns out that Chevy used a fiber-based cam gear as the "fuse" in the timing system and it had worn through. Didn't have the money to have it fixed so set out to fix it myself - "how hard could it be." Learned all sorts of things along the way but the most memorable one was that when you try to pull a straight-six's cam out the front of the engine (while it's still in the car) two things happen. One, the lifters try to fall out, effectively locking the cam in the block - which is just as well since if I'd managed to get it out straight away, the lifters would have likely fallen into the pan. The other learning point was that pulling out that long camshaft was stymied by the radiator, frame, and bumper. I think I had to jack up the engine just enough to "re-aim" the cam's exit path.

Another time I changed the plugs and with it all back together it absolutely would not start. I checked the timing per the Haynes manual and no luck. Same with the distributor and sparkplug wires, they were all correct and it was still wouldn't go. Called a mechanic friend who guessed - correctly - that some previous owner had removed the distributor and put it back in offset, then offset the plug wires to "fix it."

My brother had a Datsun 510 and he rebuilt the engine, forgetting to tighten the timing chain gear bolt on the nose of the cam - scratch that engine.

I ended up buying a Datsun 1200 that I learned inside and out, what a great car, and ended up owning, rebuilding, driving and racing around six of them. I'll leave out the story about me leaving the lug nuts loose and getting about half a mile from home...

16 driving my Dad's '59 VW Bug with my friend Tom, car has no gas gage just a reserve valve. Dark road the car bucks and I didn't know if it was on reserve or just run. Pop the hood, unscrew the gas cap and hold a match over it to see inside.....

Blue flames dance around the lip so I start hollering for Tom, he's a blur 1/4 mile away and heading out!

That would have been a tough phone call.

Sold my blue 1964 Galaxie 500 convertible 352 4spd for $400.