Just wondering what wonderful road debris the members have "collected" cruising down the highways and byways.

I was heading into work at 3:30am in my DD (Mazda Protege' 5 ), brain and car on cruise in the fastlane, no one ahead, a couple of cars to my right flank. Came up on an area of highway without street lights when..."What the Fu... ...WHHAAAMMM ! A metal 5 gal bucket, right in the middle of my lane! Sparks flying from everywhere, thought I took out the passenger front tire by the way it was handling. Managed to get it to the shoulder (funny how people get the hell out of your way when you're showering them with hot metal), got the car stopped, saw smoke coming from the passenger front... "SHIIIIIIIIT!" . Popped my head under the front end and found a crumple metal bucket half full of some kind of expandable foam crap (I'm guessing 8lb. density by the wieght of it) wrapped around my control arm, and tearing the shit out of the sidewall and cv boot . Tried backing up...no luck, wedged tight. Ended up having to jack the car up and use the handle to pry it loose (don't particularly care to have my head under a car w/o jack stands ), and cut the shit out of my thumb in the process (someone call a WAAAAMbulance ).

Time for a new tire, and cv boot .

Hitting objects with your car beats the shit out of coffee for waking your ass up!

Other item "collected" :

Queen size matress (I-15 in San Diego just north of Balboa)

Damn near collected:

Gas Grill w/propane tank attached


So what's yours?

I once hit a 5 gallon bucket of lard. Yes, lard. Was basically just like your situation. The bucket was plastic though, and for the most part exploded all over my hot engine. Such a lovely smell..

QUOTE (Buzzard1 @ Aug 4 2005, 08:07 PM)

Just wondering what wonderful road debris the members have "collected" cruising down the highways and byways.

Nothing more dangerous than an odd plastic bag or two and an empty (thankfully) styrofoam cooler.

I have dragged more than a few orange cones across the finish line. Does that count? The course workers are selfish. Not only do they make you give back the cones, they tack on 2 seconds each to your time.

I get excited to tell this story!

We were in a rented Ford Probe, FLYING across from Miami, to Naples... guess what I hit at 90?

Big alleygator.

I was doing about 110and I had just passed a car a minute before, and I say to my buddy, "What the.." and I nail the brakes... and *BABOOP!!* old bastard took it hard to port.. hehe poor thing.. it messed up some stuff under the car, my heart was beating like a hummingbird... and we were laughing uncontrolably a couple minutes later, when the cop drove up, called the station, and told us to stand back..

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! Oh my God! It's a slaughter!

I hate to report that he didn't hit anything important and he wasn't sure about us laughing harder but like, what can you do?

It was a rental..

M

cats cant squat low enough to fit under a passing 914 ...... thump thud thud thud.

I've repeatedly collected the road in my Mustang. Yes, the road. You see, I got these new camber correcting control arms, that also lower the front about 1.5 inches. The end links of my sway bar were not set up for a lower car, so the ends ended up higher, which put the middle lower. (it's an odd shaped bar, with a funky bend in the middle to clear the engine) So not only is the whole car lower, but the middle of the sway bar is lower in relation to the car. Now when the suspension comprpresses, the bar gets even lower!

So I'm driving along, minding my own business, when I hit a dip in the road... *WHAM* Sway bar hits the ground HARD. This bent the sway bar, making it even more likely to hit the ground. Recently I had the hood open, and found chunks of asphault all over the engine. Oops.

(I recently got larger diameter tires and it hasn't hit since, but a big enough dip would probably still do it. A new sway bar is on my list)

with the fans and the scoop under the car my car behaves like a street sweeper, i had to pull the scoop to get the shift bar out ( it broke ) and about a pack of cig butts feel out from between the 2 scoop pieces

Geez, let's see. My 65 T-Bird, a bat (NOT the baseball kind). My Dodge Pick-em-up, a coyote. My Nissan (just a week or so ago) a bird hit the windsheild. Made a mess. My 914, a deer. Over the years, misc racoons, and 'possums. A few cars here & there (in my younger days, of course ) I've had owls run into the side of the car more than once. It's funny to look back & see it sitting in the road shaking it's little head before flying off. I cna't think of any man made objects that I wasn't able to dodge.

Hmmmmm....

Most unusual one I can think of is from the 70's.

A college friend of mine was in Miami at a concert and while he was tripping and driving home, managed to hit a dead horse at 2:00 AM.

He didn't see it until the head crashed into the windshield

Don't think he was quite right after that... not that he was before.

actual debris: sofa cushion (flew out of the p/u in front of me), bags, a couple of syrofoam coolers, nothing harmful...

animals: armadillos galore(they thought my civic was the coming of god and they would run out in front of it), possums, raccoons, a deer in my old p/u(no damage done to the pickup, just broke the plastic around the headlight... deer didn't make it though) and 1 bobcat.

One more reason I like driving a pickup truck. If you hit it and it's good to eat, you can just toss it in the back.



Picked up my first 914, driving home, midnight, Chevy p/u pulling U-Haul autotransporter with 914 on top. Car ahead makes superquick swerve to avoid move......not possible in truck with loaded trailer. I ran over an 8 foot aluminum ladder lying on the highway. Bumpity bump. No problem.

Running down the highway at rush hour, there wasn't time to see the tire carcass in front of the pickup in front of me. He cleared it, but I didn't!

Semi trailer tire treads can make a mess out of a fiberglass front end. If we hadn't adjusted the coilovers up 1.5" just before, we would have lost the radiator, too! (Yes, it wasn't a teener... just a lowered Accord.)

Wow, we have a lot of animal lovers here. I figure it's a type of Darwinism, only the ones dumb enough to cross a road without looking both ways get squished.

I remember reading (PP BBS I believe) about a guy driving his 914 down in Texas, and picked up a steel pole that was laying on the road......through the floor board!

i killed a wabbit....

long dark 2 lane road...going about 95....
high beams and pilot lights on..... great view out the front......plenty of light.....

but out the side is another story.... a rabbit went kamakazi and flanked m front right tire out of nowhere.....
ran from the side of the road and then thump thump....

Company has a 20' straight truck for deliveries. One Sunday night, on the way out to start a long run, the truck pulls into the gas station off the highway and thumps a low flying seagull. Don't really think anything of it until some 5 year old kid in the parking lot is grabbing his dad's arm, laughing and pointing to the front of the truck. Turns out the gull went headfirst into the grill and got jammed in there ass and wings straight out. Not such a nice grill ornament.


I thought this story was more on the thread topic as it was a stuck in/on/under the vehicle story, rather than a run over a thingy story...

We used to have rolling food fights. Out on the road, a truck, a bus, and a couple guys in hoochie mama cars.

You pull over at KFC, and load up on individual serving mashed potato grenades.

Do not fire bottle rockets at moving vehicles, from other vehicles. You will be charged with 'Firing Deadly Missiles'.



M