Stupid Things done while working on a 914., C'mon..... Fess Up! Options

[ClayPerrine]

There was a request for a thread on stupid stuff done while working on a 914.

I will start......


I had my six up on my lift working on the rear suspension. I remember looking at the clock and it was about 6:50pm. I stood up to do something (I can't remember what now) and the next thing I know, I am sitting on the floor and my head hurts. I touch my head and I am bleeding. (IMG:http://www.914world.com/bbs2/html/emoticons/ohmy.gif) Seems I raised up under one of the rack arms and cracked my head open. I look at the clock and it shows 7:55 PM. (IMG:http://www.914world.com/bbs2/html/emoticons/dry.gif)

At that point, I decided to call it a night.


When I told Betty about it, she had a fit! (IMG:http://www.914world.com/bbs2/html/emoticons/mad.gif) Her response was "What if you had been holding a cutting torch!!!". Now she insists on checking on me every so often when I am in the garage and it gets quiet for a long time. (IMG:http://www.914world.com/bbs2/html/emoticons/biggrin.gif)

Ok... Who's next?

[zymurgist]

A few non-914 adventures from "Ace Mechanic"...

When I was a kid, I had a '73 Toyota Celica. It was a real basic car... when you opened the hood, you could actually see the engine. Anyway, so there I was, adjusting the valves in my parents' driveway on a nice sunny day. I had a big socket wrench on the crankshaft pulley bolt to rotate the engine so I could do each valve in turn. I finished the job and started the car. My effort was greeted by a loud KA-THUNK! I was thinking, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot... then it dawned on me that the socket was still on the crank bolt. The socket wrench swung around and went right into the radiator. Fortunately, the damage was minor and I was able to get a friend to braze the hole up for me.

The Toyota had these trick aftermarket alloy wheels on it, as well as fog lights up front. This car was really stylin' for an 18 year old driver. These cool slotted wheels were held on by your standard acorn type lug nuts suitable for use with steel wheels, which were, in reality, totally wrong for the application. I found that out the hard way when I was driving along the road and one of the rear wheels came off. The car came to an abrupt halt, skidding along the metal shield that covered the brake drum. I thought that was a peculiar failure mode, put the wheel back on, and went about my business. This is where the stupidity comes in. Rather than perform even the most rudimentary causal analysis, I continued to drive around with the wrong lug nuts more-or-less holding the wheel on, until it happened again. This time, the emancipated wheel rolled out into the street and into the side of an old lady's car. She wasn't too happy about that, even though there was no damage to her car other than a black mark where the tire had struck it. ("You can buff that out, ma'am!") The cops came and we both told our stories... of course, I conveniently left out the part that it had happened before. He wrote me a warning and I went promptly to an auto parts store and found some lug nuts that would fit inside the holes and provide lots of thread to hold the wheels on. The wheels never came off again, at least not of their own accord.

I replaced the balancer on my '77 Corvette a few years ago. Got a trick puller tool from Summit Racing and pulled it off, no problems other than lots of grunting, getting a 20 year old part off the engine for the first (but not the last) time. Bought a new one from a Chevy dealer. Balancers come unpainted so you can paint them factory orange, factory blue, or whatever color your engine happens to be. Well, I had a can of blue spray paint that I had used to paint the valve covers. Apparently it had been sitting around for a while so the nozzle was clogged up. I thought, hmm, this is peculiar, and started messing around with it. PSSSSH! I nailed myself right in the face with blue paint. Fortunately I wear glasses so I didn't get any in my eyes... but I spent some time with mineral spirits cleaning off my face and my glasses (and I didn't even have a spare pair at the time).

Then there was the time that I finished installing $1100 worth of stereo equipment in the Corvette (and this was like 10 years ago when $1100 would buy lots of goodies), and I had barely enough time to finish reassembling the interior before a friend and I were to leave for Hershey for the day. We were running very late, so as soon as I got everything together, I started the engine and off we went. Mind you, this was a car that had been sitting over the winter, and I did not bother to check the oil. Well, that turned out to be a really hideous oversight. A week or so later, the engine developed a rod knock... apparently I had run it two quarts low and that sealed the fate of that engine. This incident kicked off a 3 year restification project on the Vette, because once I had the engine out, I found other things that needed to be done on a 25 year old car with 100,000 miles. (DWD syndrome apparently applies to all kinds of cars.) There was an upside, though... I used the opportunity to replace the 180 hp base motor with a 390 hp small block.

Fast forward to my first Porsche... so there I was, trying to track down an electrical short in my '70 911. I found that one of the red wires that attaches to the battery has a short to ground. I disconnected the wire and started using a multimeter to check continuity between the end of that wire and various locations under the dash. I unplugged the connector from the ignition switch, and I found that this wire apparently connects to multiple terminals in the connector. I then noticed that the connector has a cover on it, and I started wondering if there was a short inside the connector... so I unsnapped the cover, ever so carefully, to avoid breaking a 30 year old piece of plastic, and BAM! All the wires fell out of the connector. So there I was, with a 911 that still had a short, but now I also had munged up the wiring for the ignition switch. There were like 12 terminals all arranged in a circle, and I was wondering how I was ever going to figure out which wire was supposed to be in which position. I was eventually able to fix that with a lot of help from the guys on the bird board.