Fantastic facial scar from about a quarter sized chunk of aggressive basal cell carcinoma on my cheek. Got like 19 stitches from just below the left eye to a bit above the jaw. I was the youngest there by 30 years for mohs surgery and they debated a skin graft as "your skin is a lot firmer compared to most of our patients". Now have had a second spot cut out but can say those are the only times I've had stitches (edit, I don't count inside mouth/wisdom teeth).
Got my thumb stuck between a jack handle and the bottom of a Land Rover bumper. Luckily it was on the flat portion and not the sharp edge. Still the jack handle cut into my thumb and I was stuck there (of course working alone with no one home). No amount of pulling on the jack handle or pulling on my hand would release me (or screaming, I tried that too).
I didn't know what to do, and was probably in shock a little so I called 911. While they transferred my call around, I heard a pop, and didn't want to look down because I thought for sure that was the sound of my thumb coming off. Turns out it was just the sound of my thumb being freed due to being crushed enough that the truck was finally resting on jack stands. I think it took 7 stitches, and a while at physical therapy (yes for my thumb), but it now works mostly like normal, just doesn't have the same strength or bend like my other thumb.
Not my proudest moment for sure, but I am much more careful now.
The humorous thing is that my roommate worked for the 911 call center at that time, but had just ended his shift. Someone called him to tell him there was a 911 call from his house, so he might want to go home.
The only time I ever needed stitches was when my car rolled off the back of a car port pinning me between it's gas tank and the top of a chain link fence. The web in between my thumb and first finger got ripped open by the fence. Aside from some serious bone bruising on both legs and my hand opening like a change purse whenever I moved it I was no worse for wear.
Oh yeah. Last year I beat my high score with the door skin of a Siata Daina GS
No external scars, but did damage my knee pretty bad once.
I was a senior in high school. My parents insisted I take a AAA driving class, to help with their insurance rates. The instructor car was a Dodge Omni. A bunch of us in the class thought it would be funny to pick the car up and turn it sideways, basically wedged against a fence. We all stood at the back bumper and lifted. Rotated the car and went to put it back down. Remember how the Omni/Horizon had those bumpers that stuck out from the body? Well...apparently, I momentarily forgot. I had one leg a bit more forward than the other, with that leg partly bent. So when the car came down, the bumper came down squarely on top of my knee. Didn't break anything, but went to my senior prom on crutches, and it took about 2 months to get full feeling back.
I did this to myself in 2014 at the Great Lakes Divisional rallyx competition. Was trying to pry some fan shroud around a fan blade, not realizing yet that it was the motor mounts that had sheared. I had grabbed a flat-head out of my staging bag. It came back at me. This could have been SO much worse..
Luckily the scar nestles right in where my nose meets my cheek so it's not noticeable.
I've got two pretty good scars on the inside of my left bicep.
First one happened when we were drinking in the attic above my friend's detached garage. The attic was accessed via one of those spring loaded trap door ladder/stairway things. One of the springs had the (very sharp) end of the hook at the end facing outwards, towards the ladder, which caught my arm as I grabbed the floor of the attic above the ladder and swung down into the garage on my way to take a piss. Cut me pretty deep from below my elbow almost up to my armpit. Definitely should have gotten stitches, but didn't.
Second one was actually not as bad of a wound, but could have very easily turned out a LOT worse. I was working on a prototype a couple months after starting at my current job and had a shaft chucked up in the lathe that needed just a hair sanded off of it. Had a slightly too large long sleeve button down shirt on that day and was wearing a pair of cheap cotton gloves (BIG no-no, but I was in a rush and not even thinking about it) and was running a strip of sandpaper up and down the shaft.
Either my sleeve or the glove caught between the shaft and sandpaper and before I could even realize what was going on the glove and my sleeve start wrapping around the shaft. The glove got sucked off my hand and my arm started retreating up my sleeve. Time froze for just a split second, as I'm looking down at my shirt wrapped around this piece of metal spinning at hundreds of rpm, just slipping over the shaft. My first reaction was to rip back with my left arm as hard as I could in a motion similar to yanking a pull starter.
Next thing I know I'm standing there in my undershirt with half of the button down laying on the floor and the other half spinning on the lathe. Ripped right in half down the back and tore the buttons off the front. Ended up with what was essentially a super nasty rug burn and big bruise on my bicep where the left half of my shirt must have been ripped over it. Total time duration of the past two paragraphs was probably <2 seconds, but felt like an eternity.
Some of you may remember my old animated avatar (damn I miss those):
Four bolts, one titanium rod, train track staples tracks from where they bolted it all together. My right calf is missing a chunk of meat. All thanks to a drunk driver who punched the drivetrain of my '90 Lincoln LSC through the firewall and into my front seat.
In my late teens I was working on my Saturn Dragon Wagon. I don't remember what I was doing, but I reached in through the open window with my left hand to start the car. I immediately realized the flaw in that plan as the automatic seatbelt snagged my arm pinching it between the track and the mechanism and dragging it the entire way around the door frame.
There was... tearing.
It's healed up nicely in the past 15 years but it was gnarly for a long time.
Five scars of special note. One on my palm and one top of my hand when I drilled through it with the washer still attached to the drill. Took one of the tendons with it on the way out. Two scars provided by those where were tasked with serving and protecting me. One running up and down the center of my eye lid, separating my eye lid into two halves. One on my upper cheek when an under privileged urban fellow cut my face open with a razor ring. Even now, I have a VERY special place in my heart for cops and under privileged urban gents.
I tried to drive a motorcycle through a barbed wire fence wearing nothing but shorts and a tee shirt. Does that count?
41 years later, I've still scars up and down my left side that look like I lost a fight with a blender.
Oddly no car scars. Bicycles and knifes.
I'm honestly not sure if I have the scar anymore, but 9 years ago I barrel rolled my car down RT28 right near Fontana Dam (near tail of the dragon). Something in the car cut right across my eye from forehead down to cheek, possibly removed my contact (somehow that one went missing), but did no damage to my eye. I had a ton of aches/soreness in the following days and various cuts and bruises elsewhere as well, but all of that healed up very quickly.
Sadly, my passenger did have some serious injury. Watching your passenger get cut out of your car with the jaws of life while the medivac searches for a place to land is truly a life changing event. That is a night I will never forget, and I am so thankful that despite lots of medical crap to deal with he was ultimately ok in the end. Things could have gone a LOT worse.
RE: the thread title... I do have a tattoo reminding me of this day as well
My only real visible scar is: I dropped a 9" angle grinder that was spinning right in my thigh once. It went through 2 layers of pants and produced a decent size hole in my leg and spread some flesh about. They only stitched it with 3 stitches to allow it to flex or something. The scar is really wide.
I probably have fifty on my hands alone, but scars of note:
ACL reconstruction circa 1987. 8" scar on my R. knee.
Trying to go undr a piece of inductrial equipment I was repairing, didn't notice the corner of the 16ga. guard sticking down, hit it with the top of my head and slit and peeled the skin back for a huge gash and 7 staples. Not only did the doctor call another one in to see it, but they both complimented me on a job well done. I actually posted a pic of it here when it happened, but it's in the photobucket bin. Racing motocross in 1976 I took a handlebar in the mouth. 14 stitches below my lower lip, and it's pretty ugly. Been bit by dogs 4 times on my face too, but they're smaller and mostly not noticeable.
Oh, crap, I forgot about The fuel tank removal incident from November.
The outboard side of my left thumb is still numb, incidentally. I cut that sucker deep.
Non automotive related scars, I have onyl half a left eyebrow because of an incident when I was six, me and amy mom and a friend of hers were walking along some railroad tracks in a park and her friend jokingly said "TRAIN!!" and I jumped down off the tracks facefirst because, well, six. I remember my mom asking me to please not bleed on her new car (she had just bought it, her first new car ever) and later we had her sister in doctorin' school remove all the stitches while I laid back on her living room couch.
Also have a righteous scar on my upper lip, also left side, from an incident when I was ten or eleven. Who knew spiral notebooks could be so laceratey. Nearly thirty years later and it's still plainly visible unless remain clean-shaven, which thirty years later means having to shave twice a day.
Not that I would call them cool car scars, but I have several doozies from a terrible car wreck that happened back in 1997. A long scar under my jaw line that goes from my right ear to underneath my chin where they put my jaw back together. Then another long scar from the base of my breast bone straight down to my pubes where they did exploratory surgery to find/fix everything else. And lastly some odd shaped scars and bone structure on each hip where the external fixator came through the skin.
The only car repair related scar I have is on my right forearm where I burnt the piss out of my self reaching an oil filter from underneath a car through a small gap between the catalytic converter and the subframe. It was one of those burns that blistered almost immediately.
In reply to HippieWagon:
First and last time I take somebody to the ER during the Challenge.
I have a scar on the web between my thumb and index finger from the time a manure spreader I was fixing fell on it.
I just remembered this one.
When I was 17 or 18 I had a Chevy S10. I decided I was going to lower it. Got it up on jackstands and crawled under the front. The wrench slipped while trying to remove something came back and hit me right in the mouth breaking my two upper front teeth in half. This was on Christmas Eve. After I finished lowering it I went home and told Mom that I knew what I wanted for Christmas. She asked what, I smiled real big and said my two front teeth.
That repair lasted for many years until I got excited during a game of charades and busted them out again while trying to get my team to guess that I was walking the plank. They didn't get it. I still have pieces in my lip and still have broken teeth.
Oh god! Don't even get me started. From the stealing a toilet at a fraternity party in a drunken stupor, to the trying to guiltoine my leg off while cutting an exhaust system off story, to nearly blowing myself up, while working on my Shelby and then needing shoulder surgery... so many sad, sad scar stories.
In reply to Tim Suddard:
I seem to remember your wife posting a gory picture of your hand in the not too distant past. Maybe not automotive related though.
mostly healed up now but for awhile i have couple from grabbing a hot soldering iron with my thumb and index finger working underneath the dash
Nick, that cut hand was trailer restoration related, which is a totally different hell topic from the one we are discussing.
TurboFocus wrote: mostly healed up now but for awhile i have couple from grabbing a hot soldering iron with my thumb and index finger working underneath the dash
Ouch! I stepped on a soldering iron barefoot once, I think while I was working on my CL175 (no idea why I was working barefoot.) Didn't leave a lasting scar, but I had a nice brand on the sole of my foot for a while.
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