Great story Mike! My husband is also a Canuck engineer...has that same pinky ring. Albeit his is not permanent like yours.

 

I have a few.
How about cleaning the engine on my 65 Shelby clone engine with some steel wool and then later discovering a nice steel wool thread had embossed on the impeller of the oil pressure pump and frozen it up. Lesson there is to keep steel wool away from the engine.

How about replacing one of the two starter contacts on a Toyota Landcruiser starter, which on the V8 lives underneath the intake manifold. 10k miles later, I did that 3 hour job again, this time doing both sides of the contacts.

How about that time I lowered my Mustang leaf spring suspension by inverting a few of the leaf springs and screwing it together with a 1/4" bolt? I must have been insane.

How about the time I welded a crack in my steel mustang a arms with the rubber bushings still in there? Rubber became past tense immediately.

How about the time I tried to remove my Ford 289 crank and pistons out the bottom of the block! Got them half way out and then everything got stuck. I ended up gouging chunks out of my pistons to get it out. Reused them anyway. (To be young and on a budget) That engine was not very balanced, while it ran.

I'm sure there are more.

 

With about 35 years of wrenching on various stuff, I have too many "mistakes" to even remember. Here are some of my favs:

When I was 15 I decided one summer day to tear the family chainsaw apart, just to see what was inside and whether I could put it back together. I could, but there were a half dozens parts left over when I finished my re-assembly. Guess they weren't really necessary, because I never put them back in and the saw worked fine for years.

In college, I was replacing the rear brakes on my 2002 and had both sides up in the air -- on jacks, not jack stands. Needless to say, a few hard tugs at some part and down came the car. Not fun.

 

There are some great stories here!

Adrienne, long time no talk! How is the new car?

Cheers,

Mike

 

Hi Mike! New car is nimble, fast, and VERY YELLOW!! Oooh! You got a Turbo!! I hope you are doing well!! I have been busy with my new job, so really out of touch with Rennlist. Gotta change that, I know....

 

I had a 968 that I had been changing out gaskets on the motor for weeks, and I was in a "hurry" to get the motor all buttoned up. Since I had pulled and installed the balance shaft sprockets a thousand times, I rushed through this part of the job fighting nightfall....so that I could get the belts installed on the car.

When I installed the sprocket on the lower balance shaft, I noticed that the balance shaft seemed to be binding and did not spin easily by hand (no belts on the sprockets yet). My assumption was that I had been kind of "generous" in applying gasket sealant on the shaft's front support housing and that some of the sealant may have contacted the balance shaft. Couldn't be much and as soon as the motor turned over, I believed the sealant would break loose and all would be fine.

Buttoned it up and took it for a test drive. Noticed that the belts were really whining, which is usually a sign that they have been set too tight. This did not compute since I had been very careful to set the belts loose (remember that I had done this many times in the past).

Returned to the garage and pulled the belt cover. SHREDDED belt everywhere! What a mess. My guess was that the "tight" shaft had seized and in the process torn up the belt (though the belt was still installed?).

The culprit: In the hasty install, I had "cocked" the woodruff key that indexes the sprocket to the balance shaft. In its cocked state, the key was half out of its slot and was sandwiched between the sprocket and the front housing shaft seal. As a result, the sprocket was about 1/4" out of alignment with the rest of the pulleys and sprockets. The shredding was from the huge side loads imposed on the belt as it had to bend out to track in the incorrectly set sprocket.

I did not feel like an idiot. I knew that I was one! Fortunately, the episode cost me a new balance shaft belt, a shaft seal, and about 90 minutes of cleanup to remove all the belt "dust" that was everywhere. The greatest damage was to my ego. Thank God that no one knows about this!!!

 

I just came inside from trying to help my 18 year-old neighbor install new pads on his beat-up old Honda. Gadzooks. He was trying to install the new pads with the metal side toward the rotor. And he had no idea there was another pad on the backside. I showed him how to retract the single piston ( a floating caliper, I think), but I couldn't get the caliper to slide over on both of the new pads. He put one old pad back on so he could button it up and get some real help tomorrow. I'm a doofus.

 

Good thread topic... and I refuse to add to it until someone does something worse... still waiting....

All my stories are funny though... but I ain't gonna admit nuttin'...

 

Oh... I just remembered an old one. When I was 16 years old (several weeks ago), I was hired as the lube monkey at Kramer Motors Volvo in Santa Monica. Every car that I serviced was treated to the 150 psi grease gun on all the fittings, including the u-joints. I knew they were lubed when the grease would splatter on the tunnel. Oddly enough, we had LOTS of u-joints to repair after my service. It was years later that I learned that there were these little hand pumps for u-joint lube. Oooooops. And my apologies to any Volvo owners that were unlucky enough to get my service treatment.

 

I was really hoping to forget about this but it's just not fading away.
Major Brain Fart this past spring.

I live on a hill, driveway is mostly flat but road to driveway is fairly steep (it only goes to my property line, undeveloped beyond my property). Wanted to pressure wash under the car before taking it in for alignment. Didn't want to do it in the driveway (you see where this is going don't you?). Took it out on the road and proceeded to jack up the rear of the car (car is facing downhill) with nothing but 2 pieces of wood in front of the front wheels. After the rear wheels are off the ground the car (naturally) starts pushing the pieces of wood down the hill dragging the jack with it. I try lowering the jack but it somehow got wedged up in the engine compartment and wouldn't lower. I'm following the car and the jack down the hill trying to lower the jack and steer the car with said jack into my driveway where my Cayenne is parked (not in the garage as it usually is).

This is actually the better of the 3 options I had. End result, 993 right front corner met the Cayenne's right rear bumper above the exhaust pipe, still dragging the jack.

993: smashed RF headlight, RF fender severely dented requiring new fender, hood (slightly) dinged. Jack bent the daylights out of a O2 sensor when the car started down the hill and the jack shifted on the engine.

Cayenne: scrapes on rear bumper cover and tailpipe.

AC Jack: All 4 wheels were sanded down about 1/4 way from being dragged on the asphalt

To top it off my wife had a girlfriend visiting us from Florida that weekend. If I had any pride before that I don't have any now.

Jeff96-993, I think you can post now.....

 

On my first 911 back in 1990 -- 1980 911SC Targa -- was attempting to adjust the seals on the Targa top to reduce the wind noise. Had it pretty good ... took a test drive, still had some whistling, at a red light, unlatch it, fiddle with the seal a little, light changes before I can latch it up again ... honking behind me, so I make the left, with right hand on the wheel and left hand planted firmly on the top holding it down. Get up to maybe 25 mph, looking to pull off into next side street and latch it properly when it suddenly gets sucked out of my hand. I watch, fascinated through the rear view mirror, as the top sails about 30 feet up in the air, swoops down makes a hard BOUNCE right on the driver's side corner (there's an adjustment for you), and slides about 200 feet down the street on the top side, spinning lazily. Miraculously, no one hit it.

I run down the street, get it, and drive it over to my mechanic.

First words out of my mouth were "Look at what my wife just did!"

He pounded it back into shape with a mallet and I never worried about the wind noise again.

 

Spent all day replacing the front valance on my old 911. Tired as can be and took her out for a spin and picked up a pizza.

Pizza smell is killing me when I get home and I go to back the car into the garage. I wasn't paying attention to the garage door and it stuck after only going halfway up. The ROOF of the car luckilly caught the rubber moister barrier on the bottom of the garage door and didn't hurt the metal or paint.

The garage door wasn't so lucky. The bottom panel got bent to heck and back and had to be replaced. How the car survived without as much as a teeny scratch is beyond me. I remember not even wanting to get out of the car too look!

 

Haven't screwed up anything big on the p-cars yet! But here is a real good on on the Audi.

I was attempting to change the timing belt on the 2.7 V6 in my allroad a few years ago. If you have never worked on one of these things, they are a real test of your patients. You basically have to pull the front of the car off to work on it. The procedure call for you to place a pin in the crank to hold it at TDC and use a lock bar for the cams to keep them in position.

All is going well but it's hot out and taking me forever to get it done. I finally get everything back together and in a moment of haste, I decided to hit the key to start it instead of turning the motor over by hand to make sure everything is OK. I thought, what could go wrong.

Did I forget to tell you that these are interference motors? That means if the cam timing is off, even a little bit, the pistons smack the valves. As you probably figured out by now, I heard a very ugly sound when the motor fired. I turned it off immediately but the damage was already done. I was sick to my stomach. It bent and broke the valves on one side of the motor and these motors have 5 valves per cylinder.

These motors are designed with a cam gear that can freely rotate when the center bolt is loosened. This allows for the cam timing to be set precisely and not by the teeth on the timing belt. What happened was, I loosened this bolt a little too far which allowed the cam to spin (from the valve spring tension) behind the cam gear. I just cranked the center bolt back down after I had the new timing belt on and never realized the cam had moved.

That was one expensive mistake!

 

ARGH, 2.7t's are the devil! Pick for reference, but we mine in the freezing cold.

 

Just thought of another one. My first 911, a 1966 model. Loved that car, I learned on that car many times. One time, I had the wheels off to do brake work. Was in a hurry (always my downfall......see my prior posting). Night was approaching and I had to pick up my girlfriend at 7:30. Slapped the wheels on the car (rears) and hastilly drove down the lug nuts. Ran into the apartment and got cleaned up and then jumped into the car and raced out of the apartment complex. There was a freeway on-ramp about 50 yards from my driveway. Made it up the ramp and then was in the acceleration lane......accelerating.....and ca-thunk the car dropped down onto the right rear brake disk as I watched (out of the corner of my eye) the right wheel roll past the passengers door (at about 50 mph) and watched it go air born as it disappeared over the side of the freeway.

Lesson learned: ALWAYS make certain that the lug nuts are fully seated in the bolt holes of the wheel and not "caught" on edge on the chamfered portion of the nut.....as my 5 missing nuts had apparently been.....for at least 100 yards!

I retrieved the wheel, and spared up three nuts from the three remaining wheels to bolt the loose tire back onto the car. Then I limped home.