What's the sketchiest vehicle you've driven?

Showing my age but in the early sixties I traded some car parts for a 52 Ford sedan. My intent was to drive the 52 through the winter to keep my 41 Ford hot rod out of the snow, slush and road salt of Michigan winters. The car had 3 to 4 inches of missing metal from rust in the quarter panels, doors , and front fenders and numerous holes from rust in the floors. The car had no front bumper or grill and a wide piece of 1/4" plate bolted to the bumper brackets. The flathead actually ran pretty well. I cared nothing about the car it was cold even wet but got me around, push started other cars on cold mornings and pulled people when they got stuck.

my dad was embarrassed to have it around the house so often had to park it in the street in front of the house or better yet in the alley so it couldn't be seen. In the Spring my sister in law's sister and husband were enduring some hard times. I sold them the car for $25 although I don't remember ever getting paid nor asking them for the money. It was a sorry sight but got him back and forth to work until times got better for them 

Sketchiest vehicle I have driven was my 64 Nova. 4 wheel, non assisted brakes, worn out suspension that wasn't very good when new,very slow ratio manual steering with a tiny steering wheel, 6cyl springs all powered by a nice 350 with far too much power for this car. You really had to pay attention when driving it, and plan ahead when braking. It challenging to drive, kind of fun it an adventurous kind of way.

My 86 Comanche had a horrifying death wobble that would engage after any sort of highway speed pothole impact.  Or running over a quarter.  I eventually figured out that stabbing the brakes hard enough to lock the wheels for a tiny bit of time would settle it down, until I hit the next quarter on the road.

It also had carpet and floor mats instead of a floor pan on the drivers side.

I think the sketchiest thing I've ever driven (and owned) was a '71 VW Super Beetle that I bought many years ago for 600 bucks.  It had a pretty nice silver-gray paint job and was sharp looking, but underneath lurked some sketchy rust repairs, primarily in the front strut tower area.  It was all covered up with bedliner and the only outward clue was an improvised strut bar made from a piece of steel conduit hammered flat at the ends and bolted in place.

In spite of that, I kept it a few years as my first "second car" and it really was fun to drive around town.  Not so much fun on the interstate, so we kept to the backroads.  Going over bumps, it often made an ominous creaking noise in the area of the lower right corner of the windshield.  The engine was a bit sketchy too, and it provided me the opportunity to learn what a helicoil is when I pulled the notorious #3 spark plug.  Even so, I have some fond memories of that car, not the least of which is bombing through some pretty deep snow without a care as to traction, which was abundant.

Sold it some years later for $325, if memory serves.  There are times I wish I still had it.

1970 Ford Pirsch fire truck - Always started but sometimes it took some coaching.  Didn't handle too well.  It didn't stop too well either but ran great and still pumped it's heart out.  I drove it to house, car and brush fires.

It started losing air pressure sitting still.  When it failed the pump test the decision was made to not fix it and let it go.  I drove it the final 4 miles to the county auction line with no rear brakes.  It was a sad day.

 That was SKETCHY!   

Woody (Forum Supportum) said:

My father bought a 1964 Chevy C10 from a coworker for $750. It had a 230 straight six, three-on-the-tree, and a body that was made of old license plates, pop rivets and Bondo. 

I was driving it home when I was about 17, hit a bump, and one of the rusty rear trailing arms broke in half and the rear axle was hanging by one side. I found myself with four wheel steering, no seatbelts and a fuel tank inside the cab. I've never spun a steering wheel so fast and so far in my life. Somehow, I missed the giant oak tree, had it towed home and swapped in some fabricated trailing arms to get the still sketchy remains back on the road.

As luck would have it, I just stumbled upon a photo of the TWO sketchiest vehicles I've ever driven, although this version of the truck bed dates this to before I had my driver's license. The '64 C10 is just to the right of the '74 Subaru. I'm pretty they're having some kind of rusting contest in this picture.

This was taken on the day that I learned that you should ALWAYS pay a little extra for comprehensive insurance coverage.

A HS friend and I decided to take his dad's boat out for a cruise. Friend didn't know how to drive stick, so I wound up a the wheel of my friend's dad's rusty '77 F250 4X4, pulling a trailer. I think it had a 4 speed, a large V8 and 1st was a granny gear. I was completely puzzled by 1st (never having driven a truck before) and for whatever reason it never occurred to me to just start in 2nd instead. Rolling up to a stoplight, the brake pedal sunk to the floor. I pumped it a bit, slammed it in to 1st and killed the ignition to maximize engine braking. We stopped in time and then inched to a nearby parking lot. Brake fluid was leaking out of a rusted line... friend's dad owned a repair shop, so he sent one of his guys out to swap the brake line out in the parking lot. The bleeder on the caliper was seized of course, so he just cracked open the fitting at the caliper to get most of the air out. We made it there and back OK. 

Had a '77 MGB that I replaced the rocker panels on, welding as best I could (poorly.) I parked it on uneven ground, two wheels on a curb to jump start a friend's Mustang, and could hear pinging noises of some of the welds snapping. I rebodied the car shortly thereafter. 

In the mid-1980s, I got my brother a job with a developer in Juneau.  This guy was an Irishman who owned a bar besides doing subdivisions.  I’ll call him Paddy.  Guess it would not be too much of a stretch to say that Paddy was frugal  - that is probably too nice.  He was cheap.  Very, very cheap and he had a tendency to collect very, very old equipment.

After my brother had been laboring for a few weeks, Paddy decided that he needed someone to drive the dump truck and picked my brother.  This was not your normal 10 yard dump truck.  It was an early 1930s Euclid with tires that were at least 8 feet tall.  Somewhere in its life, it had lost its doors.  One night, Paddy told me it had been used in the Hoover Dam project.  There were some things Paddy told me sitting in his bar I took with a grain of salt.  This, I believed.

The Euc (as it was known) was well used.  In actual fact, it had been completely worn out for 30 years.  You didn’t drive the Euc, you herded it.  Two turns of the steering wheel might prompt the beginnings of turn.  The brakes were more of a suggestion than a command.  The hydraulic ram for the dump bed took at least 10 minutes to raise the bed with the motor at full song, 2,000 smoky diesel RPM.  Someone along the way had built a carrier for a 5 gallon bucket of hydraulic fluid since the pump and the ram leaked... they leaked a lot.

After driving the Euc for a couple of weeks, my brother was heading from the site to the burn pile with a load of spruce stumps, flying down the road at 20 MPH.  Unfortunately, he didn’t herd quickly enough and the Euc drove itself into a 4 foot deep drainage ditch and rolled.  My brother jumped when he saw what was going to happen and escaped the wreck.  He was fine after landing in the mud.  Unsurprisingly, so was the Euc.

Paddy got his D-7 Cat – the one that used cables to control the blade – and his Bucyrus-Erie excavator and rolled the Euc back on its wheels.  With a few gallons of oil dumped back in the engine, it was back on its undead way.

For a while, my dad owned a 1963 Thibault fire truck built on a GMC 960 chassis.

Similar to this one only all white:

400 gallon water tank full, not bad. Empty, easy to drive. Half empty, scary until you get used to it.

Step on the brakes, truck slows down, water sloshes forward, truck speeds up again.