Wrenching Confessions: What self inflicted idiocy have you achieved?

I put the Koni/ground control set up on my old s13. Get it buttoned up and on the ground and notice the front of the car sitting 2 inches higher than the back, and that was with the adjuster all the way down.......I had the coilover sleeves on upside down on the front struts. Carp.

About 10 years ago I picked up a 91 FWD laser turbo for 300 bucks. The rings were shot and smoked very badly. Yanked the motor, sent it to the machine shop for cleanup/honing/good lookover. Put it all back together, fire it up, and oil comes out of it like a faucet between the engine and trans. Turned out there was a small thread in freeze plug just above the rear main seal that I forgot to put back in. Poop.

Live and learn I suppose.

Ooooh, good one yesterday. Doing oil change and coolant temp sensor for friend of the family 96 Saturn. Get done, start it, hood still open. There's an annoying high pitch squeak, sort of like a HVAC blower. One side of the car to the other, up, down, trying to find the source, fan speeds and AC on/off don't have any affect, can't quite tell where it is coming from but it is constant and loud enough to easily hear.

Touch the hood prop rod and presto, quiet. Drop the hood and shake my head at the five minutes of searching that just occurred.

calteg wrote: Went over to a buddies house to help him change the carrier bearing on his Tundra. He's an overachiever, so he's under the truck, halfway done by the time I get there. I walk past the truck, parked on his inclined driveway, and head inside to grab a beverage. I come back out just as he breaks the last driveshaft bolt loose. With no wheel chocks, the truck rolls (harmlessly) over him, he flattens out, and the truck rolls halfway down the street. He had to change his shorts afterwards.

I did that as well on my s10, frame compressed my chest. Neighbors heard a girl scream really loud. lol

I blush to admit this one: I was installing a three piece oil ring setup and was not exactly up on how they worked, everything I had rebuilt before used a one piece oil control ring. The 'rails' seemed too tight in the bore due to the 'expander', so I snipped a bit off the tip of the expander and wondered why the damn thing smoked worse AFTER I rebuilt it than BEFORE. Dumb dumb dumb.

Good one today, but home DIY. Replacing washer on leaking bathroom sink trap. Unscrew and remove the trap, it's full of water, reach up and pour it in the sink. I had to laugh at myself with the results 2 miliseconds later.

glueguy wrote: Good one today, but home DIY. Replacing washer on leaking bathroom sink trap. Unscrew and remove the trap, it's full of water, reach up and pour it in the sink. I had to laugh at myself with the results 2 miliseconds later.

AHAHAHAHAHAAA

I can laugh... because I did it too!

After reading about leaving the oils cap off, I promptly ...left the oil cap off. Who knew a 22R could spit that much oil every where? Well, my engine bay is rust proofed until spring.

glueguy wrote: Good one today, but home DIY. Replacing washer on leaking bathroom sink trap. Unscrew and remove the trap, it's full of water, reach up and pour it in the sink. I had to laugh at myself with the results 2 miliseconds later.

I did that one. Wife still talks to me about it.

glueguy wrote: Good one today, but home DIY. Replacing washer on leaking bathroom sink trap. Unscrew and remove the trap, it's full of water, reach up and pour it in the sink. I had to laugh at myself with the results 2 miliseconds later.

I'm glad I'm not the only one whose done that

I've totally done that.

I also had my neighbor call me in a panic that her toilet wouldn't stop running and was overflowing. Gross, I thought. But it turned out to be the tank side that was overflowing - someone had adjusted the fill tube wrong so it would overflow out the handle hole before flowing into the bowl. Her general panicked tone had me flustered so I rushed around looking for a container and started "bailing out" the tank to keep more water from going on the floor. After a few minutes of that, my head cleared enough for me to reach up and flush the toilet which sent all the water into the bowl. Easy peasy.

The wife's car wouldn't start this morning, it's 10 degrees out. So, she wakes me, I go down to the street, get my big old diesel truck, start it, bring. It up to the house, and proceed to hook the battery terminals up backwards. I'm still asleep, so I don't notice the sparks coming out from under her hood (nothing happening under the truck's hood. She says that there are sparks under her hood, so I check things and yes, they are backwards. I fix them, she starts right up! Back to sleep for a couple more hours. And I need to warm up, since I only threw scrub pants and a thin secs jacket on to go outside in (as I said, still asleep).

I once removed my intake manifold off of my old '86 RX-7 to perform an "emissions removal", and to clean out all the EGR junk that was in there.

I don't know how the nut made it down into the engine, I don't know how I didn't notice a nut missing when I put the manifold back on, I still cant think of where the danged nut came from but I can tell you that my Apexi exhaust really was "free flowing" because I found the flattened nut at the end of my tail pipe.

Engine rebuild the following weekend. I already had the parts on hand because of a leaky internal coolant seal.

I'm ashamed to admit this one, but what the hell-

New to me truck, I already emptied a bottle of windshield washer fluid on a previous trip north. As I was leaving the following morning for another 3 hour haul, I took out a new gallon and poured it in... to the coolant reservoir.

They are both yellow caps located 12" away from each other, and neither cap has any words on it- just illustrations of sloshy fluids doing something. In my haste, I didn't check for the presence of wipers.

I spent the next 2 hours siphoning and refilling... and swearing .

I just realized today that my RX-7's coolant is mostly water and the hydrometer test said that it was only good down to 20F.

It's been, ah, colder than 20F the past few days.

Maybe if I ignore it, nothing bad will have happened.

To remove the front KIA badge from my DD you have to pop out 4 push pins from the upper grille area. I did this yesterday at work to strip it down and re re re repaint it, and I apparently left the pins on the cowl.
Pull it in today, somehow 3 of the 4 pins are still there. I popped the hood and two screwdrivers were just relaxing under the hood.
Would've been awesome to have to buy another radiator because something fell into the fan from the engine bay and shot into the rad, got very lucky this time.

I had just finished working on a Mercury Capri XR2....the little convertible fwd turbo. Apparently I had laid my cellphone on the roof before the test drive and now it is gone gone gone. Great, well I only went a few miles, so I grab my work cell and hop in the car. As i'm creeping down the road I dial my phone and listen for the ringer. I hear a faint ring (i usually have my ringer set low), so hop out of the car and start looking in the ditch, but the farther away from the car the fainter the ring. I call again while heading back to the car and find the cell......wedged in between the trunklid and rear wing.

Well, I looked... looks like I have a Prestone margarita in the radiator and the lower tank is a dumpling.

Well, I'd been meaning to replace the radiator anyway.

Coil went bad in the DD. Pull the coil off it's mount to start pulling plug wires. Between cold, very old wires and my own impatience, wire one snaps off at the coil connector. Time for new wires - naturally they're $150 for the set. Oh yeah, the coil was another $150. Apparently I'm a pain in the wallet. I could have picked n pulled it for a bunch cheaper, but it's the DD and down time is more damaging than parts costs.

I, everytime I have rebuilt one, leave the oil pump drive key out of the marine gear I am the engineer for.

I know it goes there, I know when I am supposed to put it in, but I always remember one step late.

I have been repainting my front badge over and over in the last few weeks in hopes I could get them to turn out okay if I did it enough.
It is a 2 piece badge, so I took one piece off, cleaned up both, primed and sprayed them, and it looked pretty damn good (alot better than usual)
Being the impatient berkeley I am, I didn't wait for the top piece to adequately dry before trying to push it back onto the base with the epoxy, so I smudged the E36 M3 out of the decent top coat that I had on there.
Stripped it and did it again but the epoxy I used is ridiculously strong so it's not coming apart again.
Oh, and it didn't go onto the base evenly either, there's a raised edge on one end.
Awesome.
I rushed it because I wanted to get done so I could leave, and instead had to stay much longer.
Need to learn patience when painting.

glueguy wrote: Good one today, but home DIY. Replacing washer on leaking bathroom sink trap. Unscrew and remove the trap, it's full of water, reach up and pour it in the sink. I had to laugh at myself with the results 2 miliseconds later.

I can do you one better. Our kitchen faucet was getting loose so I grabbed my faucet wrench and stuck my head under the sink. The trap was in the way of me getting an eyeball on the underside of the faucet, so I pulled it off and handed it out to my wife. I guess when I said "can you dump this out?" I should have been more specific.

Knurled wrote: Maybe if I ignore it, nothing bad will have happened.

IT LIVES!!!

I recently the heck out of my knuckles on a computer heat sink while pulling out the main line from the power supply.

Those little fins are sharp. I'd also like to know what kind of elf hands people have to be able to work inside a computer case.

Doing a RH axle seal on a 3.0 maxima today, got frustrated that my tapping was only making the seal move back and forth, instead of making it go into the bore as I wanted.
Gave it a much angrier "tap" and knocked the bastard in too far.
Time to go to parts and get another one=/
Glad it was at work and we had plenty in stock!
Also, why the hell are the tensioners so damn hard to get to for the power steering belt on fwd nissans!?!
I do at least one set of belts on these cars a day and it's still a pain in the ass.

I had a 1970 Chevelle SS 396 back in college( I believe this was in 1990). I couldn't always get the driver's door unlocked from the outside, so I would unlock the passenger door and crawl into the driver's seat. On one cold morning, I knew I had no chance of getting the driver's door to open, so since it was freezing out, I was in quite a hurry, so I unlocked the passenger door, jumped in the car, and closed the door. I then proceeded to make my way over to the driver's seat, when I stepped on the dry-chemical fire extinguisher I kept in the car (since it leaked every fluid quite profusely....remember, I'm in college, so I have no $ to fix anything correctly). Anyway, fortunately for me, the nozzle was facing into the carpet, but when that thing discharged, and the magical white power dispursed, I realized quite quickly how fast the oxygen disappeared from inside the car....needless to say, I was in all out panic mode when I lunged for the door handle on the driver's door, and after wrestling the door open, I literally fell out of the car and into the street gasping for air.....man, I wish I still had that car.