This popped into my head for some reason this morning, and didn't seem to quite fit in the self-inflicted idiocy thread, though it's not far off.
Hoping this'll be a thread of solutions folks have put together and in retrospect would never let leave the shop like that again.
The thing that brought the topic up for me was thinking about the individual throttle body setup I built for the 2002's last incarnation. It used the base part of an E21 320i manifold, about the first 3", but instead of using the big 180-degree runners and a plenum, I welded pieces of 2" dia, 1/8" wall aluminum tubing to flanges that I cut out of bar stock. The inside of the tubing conveniently exactly matched the BMW manifold, and luck continuing, the outside of the tubing neatly matched the jubilee clamps on a set of GSXR1000 throttle bodies. Spiffy!
I had to bore the injector bungs on the manifold to use modern injectors instead of the CIS units, but the angle and spacing were correct to use an E30 fuel rail. Tidy!
Here's where I point out a salient thing: The injectors were mounted to the stub manifold, which was bolted to the head. The throttle bodies, meanwhile, were on clamped rubber joints.
To my credit, I had taken a burr on a dremel and attempted to put something resembling retaining grooves for the ribs on the rubber joints, but it was less than optimal.
The (exciting) result was that every once in a while, it would spit back while starting, and pop the throttle bodies right off the ends of the stub manifolds.
The exciting part, of course, is that to a MAP system like the way I had Megasquirt configured, no throttle bodies looks just like wide open throttle, and of course the injectors are still right there, pointed down the intake ports. And then I'm frantically grabbing at the ignition key to shut things down.
That happened two or three times while that setup was on the car. The thing that always hits me with a shot of delayed-reaction adrenaline is when I think about what would have happened if they'd fallen off while driving.
So, that's the sort of visceral reaction that makes me swear that everything that leaves my shop in future will be better thought out and better executed than some of what happened in the past.
Anybody else got any formative experiences?
