Ridiculously expensive "blonde" moment thread

This one was a free repair (yay!) but expensive in a different way. Driving the Lotus home after I'd bought it. I pulled into a gas station somewhere in the middle of southern England. Filled the car up and then suddenly it wouldn't start anymore - not even a click from the starter motor. Borrowed a voltmeter from an AA mechanic who happened to be there and tested the battery - it was fine. Now what?

I phoned my Dad and he tried to give me some diagnosis over the phone, but we couldn't figure anything out. He even downloaded the service manuals to see if he could find something I should look at. (Keep in mind I'd just gotten the car THAT DAY and didn't know my way around it yet! Also I had NO tools.)

While I'm waiting for my Dad to call back the AA guy finishes whatever he was doing and comes over for his voltmeter. Offhand he says "have you checked the battery terminals?"

Yep - totally loose, no contact. Ten seconds with a wrench and I was on my way.

Have you figured out the expensive part yet? Well, it was the 45-minute call to my Dad in Canada, from the middle of England, on my German cell phone. Worked out to about €2/minute. Ouch.

Actually that wasn't the only such call on that trip either. I lost an ignition coil the next day in Holland. No fix for that though - I had to limp it home on two cylinders from there. I think my phone bill that month was well over €100.

J

Jensenman wrote: I guess I'm sorta glad to know I'm not the only one who has shot his own car.

I've wanted to on occasion

pinchvalve wrote: I was working under a car without safety goggles and sure enough, a flake of rust went straight into my eye. After spending all night in the emergency room getting it out - with a needle! - I never forgot garage safety tip #1 ever again.

been there, but I was using a grinder and did not know I had a problem until the next morning. Went to work with everyone staying away as if I had the plague. About 2, I went to the eye doctor and had it removed. Always wear eye protection after he removed the rusty metal and had to scrape the rust out.

confuZion3 wrote: 2000 BMW Z3: I heard a funny noise coming from the engine compartment. A friend of mine and I diagnosed it as a bad bearing somewhere in there. I continued to drive it. Well, after the water pump bearing disintegrated, the cooling fan hit the radiator, broke the fan shroud and then exploderated. I had to get the car towed and the fix it myself. That sucked. That cost neigh $500.00 in parts, a $70.00 tow, and a month of driving the Miata (which broke while the Z3 was out of commish - see next story).

Are you saying that a 2000 BMW has a belt-driven radiator fan?

I've gotten rust in my eyes, brake cleaner and even a tiny droplet of super glue - I was gluing up a fine crack in a radiator fan housing and I blew on it because it helps thin out the blobs of glue so it dries faster. Somehow a tiny droplet flew into my eye and it burned pretty bad. I've heard getting carb cleaner in your eyes is so bad you'll wish it was break cleaner instead.

This didn't cause an expensive problem but once I was in a hurry to wash and tarp the AE92 before going on vacation, it was about to rain so I was in a hurry. There was a wash bucket near the car. I thought, "Hmm, better not run over that bucket." Then I fired up the car and ran over the bucket. It got caught in the wheel well and spiderwebbed the paint on the front air dam on the way there, which really pissed me off. It seems to have "healed itself" over time though.

I once also drove the Samurai away with tools resting on the back bumper, at night. Luckily I heard them fall.

My sister had a 91 Jetta GLI and my dad probably told her to put oil in it. She went and bought some oil and dumped it into the cooling system's pressure tank, then went and asked my dad where to put the oil. She is a red head, not blonde.

She also drove the old 88 Subaru GL Wagon 4x4 down the railroad tracks to get to the other street faster. My dad was replacing those CV joints/boots every other week it seemed.

Of course I have my share. I drove my 53 CJ-3A with a pontiac 3.8L V6 in a buddy's field and bottomed out the front axle and bent the oil filter and lost all the oil. The stupid part was when I failed to notice the large amount of oil below the car when I want for a second drive. That was the last time it moved under its own power. Dad sold it in pieces and still has the title, the guy never finished paying for it 10 years ago. I was probably blonde at the time, now brown.

Mine was not so much of a blonde moment as it was an act of trying to save my car from a horrible accident.

Driving on the toll road to UCF at 6am in the morning. Still pretty dark out and no other cars on the road. Truck flys by me and I see it swerve out in and out of lanes and figure it is a drunk driver. I get to this spot where the truck had been swerving and came up on a plethora of huge lawn stones. These stones were bigger than softballs and weighed about 10lbs or so. They were strung across both lanes of the highway and it was nearly impossible to avoid them. They came up on me so fast and so quick and I couldn't see them in the dark that my only reaction was not to hit one with the wheels in fear of some catastrophe. Well I straddled one of the rocks which led to disaster. Destroyed my oil pan, tranny case, k-member, one rear rim, bellhousing, and put some dings in the exhaust.

Incentives: I put my headers on, got a new oil pan, ported and polished ls6 oil pump, ls2 timing chain, cam, new power steering rack.

Pics:

The oil in the coolant tank thing reminds me of a guy who drove a darn near new (~10K miles) Taurus into our drive one day complaining of really crappy brake feel. Sure enough, the brake pedal felt like it was connected to a sponge. Mt shop foreman came and got me, said 'there's transmisison fluid in the master cylinder'. Whaa??

At the time Ford was using a red/pink tinted brake fluid, I guess so it could be more easily seen through the translucent master cylinder reservoir. The owner saw that the level had dropped a little, so he dumped another red fluid in it: transmission fluid. Hey, if it's red it's gotta be the same, right?

We had to replace every piece of rubber in the brake system.

I had another customer who did something similar to dirtybird's rock incident: he saw what he thought was a paper bag in the middle of the highway. It turned out to be half a cinderblock.

914Driver wrote: My wife aways says "Who asked whom to marry who?" Big one. I'm not even blonde....

That is why the man automatically loses every single argument. It is always his fault because of this.

GameboyRMH wrote: Are you saying that a 2000 BMW has a belt-driven radiator fan?

Believe it or not.. but up until the E90 series.. the only 3er with an electric cooling fan was the lowely 318ti This was probably because it was designed as a 'city" car and they felt that the mechanical fan would not cope with the heat when idling for long periods of time in traffic

I have had a couple of blonde moments.. none of which were too expensive to fix.

on my first car, a type 4 poweed superbeetle, I neglected to fully tighten a sparkplug after a tuneup... shot that sucker right out of the head and mangled the last few threads.. and of course it was one of the back cylinders, just to make it harder to fix

Same beetle.. I discovered the hard way that heater hoses do not hole up to oil and pressure when used as oil cooler lines. Thankfully when one did burst, it dumped all the oil down the head exchanger, immediatly filling the cabin with oil smoke before the oil pressure light ever came on.

Fiat spider: Discovered that you need longer lug bolts when going from steel rims to aluminum. Did not make it 3 miles before I lost half the bolts and one wheel fell off (as the car came to a halt, thankfully)

Also learned to check the oilfilter housing for old sealing rings before installing the new filter. I think my neighbors driveway is still stained.

Hyundai Excel: When you are a starving college student and trying to save money changing your own oil and had to scrape all your money together to get said oil.. forgetting to put the drain plug in before filling the engine really hurts.

Hyundai Tiburon: Oil drain plugs need to be tightened properly. When they come undone, you look like a ww2 fighterplane going down.

I seem to have a lot of stories involving oil.. I think I need to be more careful in the future.

I asked some cast iron B!#ch to marry me.

The rest of the list is too long to post here. It would be hard backed and the size of a dictionary.

All this reminds me of something my grandfather told me "Experience is a harsh taskmaster, she gives the test first and the lesson after"

On the Dart, I once accidentally dropped a screw into the distributor while adjusting the points. Instead of pulling the distributor out and shaking the screw out, I forgot about it and cranked the engine over. Luckily the engine had a nylon distributor gear, although it took me quite a while to figure out why the timing was acting like it was controlled by a random number generator.

Like wow, every time I started thuh car thuh little needle that says temp just jumped all thuh way to thuh red part. Like totally! I don't understand. Maybe thuh dialy thingy just doesn't work. Man, it's been that way for a long time, like, wow, and it does it every single time. Like oh my gawd- I'm sure thuh dialy thingy just isn't workin'. Man, the car runs awesume and even handles itself well here on thuh Garden State Parkway and, oh, baby, oh my gawd, fer shure, what was that loud bang? And why are thuh cute little red lights on thuh dash board lightin' up, like, and now thuh car doesn't seem to be runnin', mostly, and oh my gawd that's a bitchin' hole in thuh side of thuh engine, like, wow, but maybe the AAA dude can fix it like oh my gawd.

Well, all right, so I was pretty young, and there was a lot more swearing, but it was still monumentally stupid to drive the car for MONTHS after the oil had completely run out. I was stupid enough to assume the pegged out temp gauge was just shorted out, and never even checked the oil (or lifted the hood).

Blown motor 2:00 AM in a drainage ditch on the Garden State Parkway.

mad_machine wrote:

GameboyRMH wrote: Are you saying that a 2000 BMW has a belt-driven radiator fan?

Believe it or not.. but up until the E90 series.. the only 3er with an electric cooling fan was the lowely 318ti This was probably because it was designed as a 'city" car and they felt that the mechanical fan would not cope with the heat when idling for long periods of time in traffic

I have to disagree, many E46 cars came with electric fans, though there seems to be no rhyme or reason why some cars (like mine) got mechanical and some cars got electric. In theory the manual cars got electrics and autos got mechanicals but mine was a 5-speed.

nickel_dime wrote: I asked some cast iron B!#ch to marry me.

/end thread

ok.. was just reminded.. not sure if it qualifies as a blonde moment or not, but I once killed a Ford 429 due to a lack of coolant.

It was in old box truck we had at work. Great truck if you did not mind single diget gas miliage.. had enough torque to pull a house and was seriously overbuilt for the weight we put into it.

So, I take it out one freezing cold morning to do a job 50 miles away. I got ten miles down the road and it was running great until it started acting sluggish.. then bang and nothing...

Seems the temp gage was actually broken and would never rise above the middle spot.. ran the poor thing till I put a rod through the block. Shame, it was a fun truck, with a 5 foot long exhaust system and almost no muffler, you could rev it to redline (at 5 grand) and when you shifted, it would let out an ear piercing backfire.. great for waking people up