Wrenching Confessions: What self inflicted idiocy have you achieved?

If you've ever read the old Bentley manual instructions on timing a Spitfire camshaft and distributor, they are at best merely confusing and at worst the most evil piece of writing ever done. That's because the cam sprocket can be flipped 4 different ways. Then the dizzy 'dog' is offset... well, anyway in my younger and dumber days I nearly set myself on fire when the damn thing was backfiring through the carbs.

The best (worst?) story I have thankfully wasn't my doings. I got a call from a guy who knew I worked on the older Honda single cylinder bikes, he sent me these two guys who had tried to rering a 125. So when I get the bike, the ignition housing is off and there's a dot of red fingernail polish on the cam gear nowhere near the stamped 'O' mark. As I turned the engine over, here comes a matching dot on the cam chain. Ooooookayyyyy. They had tried to pull the top end and couldn't (more on that in a moment) put their homemade timing marks together and promptly bent the valves.

So I get to looking and the front frame downtubes HAVE BEEN CUT WITH A HACKSAW. It appears they could not discren how to remove the front mounts to tip the engine forward to pull it out so they CUT THE FRAME. I asked one of them 'How the hell do you think they built it in the first place? Honda didn't weld the frame together around the engine.' I decided I wanted no further part of that particular project.

Berked the threads on the hub trying to press it out to do a wheel bearing change. Ended up going to the junkyard and picking up a knuckle and hub assembly for less than the cost of a bearing. Should have done that in the first place.

Wife told me her Scion xD had been making a funny growling noise when she turned the wheel. I immediately had thoughts of troubleshooting a power steering issue or replacing CV joints. I was kinda at a loss when I discovered her car has electric power steering (no pump or fluid), and the noise couldn't be recreated in a parking lot, only at speed. It occurred to me briefly that the noise sounded a bit like cavitation...

So a day or two later when she told me the oil light popped on and off, everything now made terrible sense. A fresh oil change cured the problem. Here's why I almost let my wife melt her engine:

Her car had been rock solid ever since we got it new in 2008. I had slowly extended the oil change intervals to 10k miles with no issues. I had grown so complacent with this reliable little car that I stopped periodically checking the oil level at all in between oil changes. My tiny brain didn't figure that a new job that tripled my wife's commute time would have an effect on the oil consumption. My heart stopped when I popped the drain plug off and MAYBE two quarts of oil came out. Lesson learned, and thankfully no ill effects...

Start with my latest...

Clearance on the top of my lift posts is a bit tight so when we needed to remove a bolt to remove the cylinders for new seals we used a 36" crowbar to make a little space. My job was to keep the cylinder from dropping while my brothers job was to remove said bolt. I thought it was implied that he retain control of the crowbar after removing the bolt...

Earliest I can recall is at age 17 I rebuilt a C6 transmission...correctly! Almost correctly! Stacking the fiber and geared rings went well until I put the thick ring near the piston rather than near the snap ring. A geared ring got into the groove for the snap ring and placed small aluminum particles throughout the transmission.

Other notables:

Use the correct firing order when reassembling an engine to prevent 3 teardowns to recheck everything.

Remove the radiator before trying to remove the waterpump on a 69 Mustang.

Never leave a can of spray paint on the dashboard of a truck in Texas during the summer.

Freshly poured concrete is indistinguishable from freshly rained on concrete.

If you MUST used vice-grips instead of a steering wheel, make sure they point UP to begin with.

Bruce

DuctTape&Bondo wrote: Berked the threads on the hub trying to press it out to do a wheel bearing change. Ended up going to the junkyard and picking up a knuckle and hub assembly for less than the cost of a bearing. Should have done that in the first place.

I have done exactly this. Presses and I are not friends.

Last Thursday while getting my set of wheels for my summer tires cleaned up two of them slid down my driveway, it is fairly steep, totally screwing up the face of both wheels. On the plus side I got to learn how to rattle can wheels.

I about chopped the tip of my finger off wednesday night trying to put the convertible top up on a 70's SL benz. berkeleying car