My wife calls me today and says there is something wrong with her daily driver. Sounds serious enough, but I am in luck, I just finished installing a supercharger in the 928. I still need to check the timing, but I tell her that when I get home from work, she needs to come out to the garage with me so she can keep the the rpm's at 3k so I can check timing, and she can use my DD tomorrow.

Well, car starts just fine. We let it get up to temp, then she hits the gas. 3K rpm's in loud in the garage, by the way. I adjust the timing and tell her to let off the gas and kill the car. She does, but we smell something bad, burning. Start to see smoke coming up from the hood. She jumps out of the car and out of the garage. I grab the extinguisher from the back seat.
Of course, I go and start sticking my face right where the smoke is coming from, cause I'm smart, right?

Lots of smoke and a horrible smell coming from the back of the engine on the passenger side. Well, I just changed the fuel lines over there. Did I screw one up? I was so careful, but here we are.

Then the wife starts screaming "FIRE!", she could see the glow of the flames reflecting on the garage floor. She instantly runs for the house. I see very small flames through the smoke, shout an expletive, and hit it with one short burst from the chemical fire extinguisher. Flame was instantly out. Still it was a little bit scary. Mostly I was pissed at myself for screwing up the fuel lines.

I went to go see what had become of my wife, she was on the phone with the fire department, of course. She grabbed the kids and and moved them to a safer place in the house, they were asleep. Did I mention this was after 10pm? The garage is not attached, by the way. It has to be 20 feet away from the house, but she has never claimed to be good in an emergency. Anyway, two fire trucks and a police car came. Real nice guys, loved the car.

After they left I had a chance to start wiping up the chemical residue. That stuff is nasty. I barely used any, it still gets everywhere. While I am cleaning, I am also checking the fuel lines, need to know where I went wrong. Can't find my mistake. I used all the right stuff, tightened everything well, no kinks. I finally get my light down deep in back of the engine. There is something down there that looks burnt. Can't really get a good look at it.

Jack up the car and can't f'in believe it. The ashes of a paper towel were resting on the headers. I don't know how it got there, I guess I was wiping something up and dropped it down. Didn't even know. It was probably oily, it smelled so bad there had to be something on it.

So, cleaned up the engine bay, and started the car back up. Ran fine. I probably still need to check out some boost issues, but the car is fine. Much ado about nothing. Really no damage done, even looks fine. I will certainly be more careful with my cleaning rags in the future, however.

 

Glad it was a non-event... event. Lucky bastard! Clean up that chemical residue. It will do nasty things to bare metal.

 

Holy ****! That sounds like a scary event. Smart wife to prioritize the emergency response issues. Lesson here also is the need to have a fire extinguisher if you're tinkering like most of us do. Glad to see a positive ending. Cheers!

 

Wow...definitely an oh s#£t! Moment...

 

My nomination for best thread title in a while. And glad it turned out well!

 

Glad you got it under control quickly and there was no real damage.

Just out of curiosity, let know how much the FD bill is when it comes.

 

The same.

 

Whew whew whew. Watch those rags!!!

 

Several threads here on choice of agent and how to attack engine fires, then there is the question of how to mount the thing, search. I think it goes by name of halotron now, was Halon, but heavy gas which is bad for ozone is more effective and doesn't corrode the metal. IIRC, no clean up problem unlike the chemical ones. No personal experience with either It is much more expensive, if you can get it.

 

I have been thinking about what caused the fire. I am now leaning towards blue painter's tape. Many of the supercharger pieces came wrapped in it to protect the finish in shipping. It may have been a bundle of the tape that I removed after test fitting the pieces.
I suspect that might be it because the smell was really bad.
depami, I do not anticipate a bill from the fire department. This was not a false alarm, nor did they use any supplies. My firefighter friend explained that these are known as "good intent" calls, and typically are not billed, unless you live outside of certain zoning.

 

Glad to hear that there's a happy ending to this potential disaster.

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As much as I know I'll hear noises about this, almost all fires in the garage that don't involve large flaming pools of gasoline deserve WATER as the extinguishing agent. Pretty much the ONLY exception is those pools of gasoline, where the spray of water will spread the fuel faster than it can be cooled by the water. Got a fuel hose leaking into exhaust and a resultant fire? Garden hose and massive amounts of water from it. Turn the key off in the car first so the fuel pump stops, very important, but otherwise that big nozzle on the garden hose is the weapon of choice. IMHO.

 

I think the overarching reminder in all of this is....

working on your car, in your garage means you should have a plan for extinguishing the fire.

Glad the OP was safe

 

what we learn from it is to look around where it was worked on, tools often found under the hood or under the car

 

The most important question: what kind of supercharger? Sorry, I can ask that because nothing bad happened, right?

 

Sounds like you at least got a little cardiac work out on that one.