Think your msitake is bad? THE BIGGEST IDIOT MISTAKE OF ALL TIME!!!

[BottleRocket]

This has to be the first time this has EVER happened, if not, i feel sorry for people as stupid as i am. well i was installing my new cobra intake and TB to replace my old stock one, but i have a strut tower brace on my car and i had to take it off to get the lower out more easily. after i finally got the upper intake on, i was just in a hurry to get all the vacuum lines and plugs on the intake so i can get it running. i tried to start it but it wouldnt stay started. there had to be something wrong. well, my first mistake was i read the wrong firing order in chiltons (the old 302, not the 302HO order) so i had that ******* up. but here is the winner. i was in such a hurry to hook up all the vacuum lines i pulgged in my hose that goes to my windshield washer resevoir! it was hard like a vacuum line so i just threw it on one of the plugs . i had to unhook the line when i took off the brace. when i was trying to figure out why it was running like trash, i took the upper off and water came rushing out of it. i was confused, i didnt know where all the water was comming from. so then i looke over and said to my friend "where does this one go to?" he was like "oh thats your washer resevoir..." holy $hit! i couldnt believe i did that! no wonder why it didnt fit well on the vacuum openings. then when i got all the crap out of my motor it still ran like crap becaues my MAP sensor wasnt plugged in again , but now it runs great.

 

[MustangPunk302]

cant top that yet.. hope i never do too

 

[BottleRocket]

i wish someone had a camera to get my reaction when i saw blue water pouring out of my intake....

 

[sawbones25]

When I rebuilt my motor last winter a couple friends were giving me a hard time because I had masking tape on everything marking where it went...
But when I put it all back together, it was a breeze because of it.

At least there was no permanent damage. Chalk it up to learning, I bet you don't do that again...

 

[Gearbanger 101]

LOL!!!

Just kidding droptop, I've done some pretty stupid things when working on my car too. I once added about 9-liters of oil in my car before I finally realized that I forgot to put my drainplug back in. (couldn't understand why the dipstick kept coming up dry)

 

[baglock1]

ROTFL! Oh God, that is classic.

 

[TheMusclestang]

I have 2 great stories of stupidity .

One time I did a intake gasket on a 351w ..... put on a 4bbl in place of a 2 bbl . That all went fine . But when it blew up 2 yrs later from abuse , I took it apart for rebuild . I remove the intake and see a black mass of crap just sitting there in the lifter valley about 5 inches long x 2 inches wide . I pull it out and didnt recognize it at first , until I saw where it once had a cap on it . Then it dawned on me .... oh that resembles a tube of RTV :o


This next one wasnt my doing ...... I worked at a Jiffy lube several years ago . Well one of the techs decides its too difficult to do a fuel injection cleaning on this 2 yr old honda prelude . So he's gonna take a short cut . To heck with hooking up the machine . Just take off a vacuum line , put it into the bottle of cleaner , and crank it up . It will suck the cleaner in by ittself .

Yes indeed it did . Sucked it in so fast it waterlocked , throwing a rod through the pan Needlesss to say he was fired , and the honda got a new engine , compliments of jiffy lube .

Oh heck I just thought of another ..... I did a 4 wheel brake job on this E350 van . Guy was rushing me really hard , he was passing through and was late .

I Took it out for a test ride . I go to stop and .... man this feels mushy ..... hmm ..... get back to the shop , and the gas attendant is holding up 2 drums Do you need these ?

 

[TheMusclestang]

oh and another !

my 1st job fresh out of high school , in a texaco . Did a oil change on a chebby 350 pick-up . Brand new truck . 1st oil change . Im all excited .

Was a busy day , and I was rushing again . Crank it up , sit there looking at the guages , hmm , the oil pressure sure takes a long time coming up on these new trucks ..... I get out , look under it to see if I left out the plug .... nope . hmm . Look at the guage again , still no reading . Look next to my toolbox , and there sits 5 quarts of oil

Boss comes out , sees me putting in oil ...... AFTER it was already running for a minute ..... gives me this look like * you hadnt better hurt that motor * and shakes his head , walks off .

Luckily it ran fine .

 

[65ShelbyClone]

Well, I cant match any of those, but I changed my TB a while back, but didnt change the gasket. When I started it, it ran really bad and died soon after and I was unable to restart it. I guess that gasket I didnt replace was damaged and let about a gallon of coolant go through my engine. After I blew it out and got it running again, I gunned it down the street and left two wet stripes from my pipes about 50 feet long.

Doh!

 

[TheMusclestang]

Originally posted by 65ShelbyClone
my pipes about 50 feet long.

Is this your pick-up line at a bar

 

[billetunderwear]

Don't worry about it droptop. We all have little bus moments. I screwed up bolting on my catback. I had the flanges at the h pipe backwards and didn't know it. When I took it to the muffler shop to get the clamps removed and get everything welded, the guy stuck my car on the lift, took one look at it and gave me the Jerry's Kid stare. He could have joked with me about it, but no. He has to look at me like I just fell out of the 'tard tree and hit every wheel chair on the way down.

-Dave

 

[chevyeater]

the tape will never let you down. unles your'e a ricer. then all theirs has no's on them.

 

[Michael Yount]

My older brother used to race a Maverick with a small block in it. It pretty consistently ran mid-13's. One night, grudge night at the local track, he was set to race a fellow school mate who had a 340 Duster that ran low 13's. This guy had a big mouth and had let everyone know just how bad he was going to "dust" my brother's Maverick. So we pulled every trick we could think of to assure the quickest e.t. ever hoping to run with the Duster. Ice bags all over the intake; "cool can" filled to the brim with ice; checked and adjusted tire pressures; everything out of the car we could unbolt (including rear seat and passenger front seat).

Pulled the car to the line, it seemed a little soft in the burnout, but it's too late at that point. Staged the car, lights came down, and off they went. Duster ran a 13.42; the Maverick blistered the track with a 17.58!!!! We ate a bunch of crow, and then set about trying to figure out what went wrong. My brother just kept shaking his head and saying "it just wouldn't rev". As my brother pulled the air cleaner off he calmly called me over to take a look. Seems the shop rags I had inserted into the carb to keep anything from falling in were still there - although they were quite a bit further down the throat of the carb. I forgot to remove them when I put the air cleaner on. How it ran at all, I just don't know. Thank goodness it was a carb - with today's throttle bodies, it certainly would've been sucked completely into the intake.

 

[cup]

well i have one...... changed over to a tfs street heat intake. had the top half apart........ put paper towel in the intake port of the heads to prevent debres from taking out a valve..... long story short. i got in a hurry and left it in there. had to pull the heads, pull the valves to get paper towel out.

moral of the story. you can be anal or you can be in a hurry......but.. you cant be anal AND in a hurry.....because you will screw up.

 

[BottleRocket]

Originally posted by 65ShelbyClone
Well, I cant match any of those, but I changed my TB a while back, but didnt change the gasket. When I started it, it ran really bad and died soon after and I was unable to restart it. I guess that gasket I didnt replace was damaged and let about a gallon of coolant go through my engine. After I blew it out and got it running again, I gunned it down the street and left two wet stripes from my pipes about 50 feet long.

Doh!

ive done that too. when i was inatlling my LTs, they just didnt want to go in so i had to take out my TB so the flanges would clear. we finally got them in and started it up, but when i gassed it, the pedal would stick a little. i figured something got stuck in the TB so i took off the tube and all this coolant came running out of my TB . i had to go get a new gasket for that damn thing then too. LTs are harder to intall then they look....

 

[scorp69]

well, while doing an oil change on a car, I started filling up the car with oil from where the dipstick goes. I thought to myself, man this is taking a long time for this quart to finish.

 

[BottleRocket]

i didnt know anyone made a funnel that small

 

[seijirou]

This isn't a new one, but when i finished doing my heads intake and header install on my capri, I whipped out the haynes and followed the firing order that the little pictures gives...
Well the car would run, but it ran like ****.. and I couldn't figure it out for the life of me.
so I start looking the motor over, and, being a 92 intake on an 86, the little pcv crossover tube that sticks out of the upper intake plenum i forgot to plug, since 86's don't use that.. well it was absoluty dumping oil out, it must have dumped half a quart on my headers.. and I was like... WTF _how_ could I be getting this much blowby?
Well I spent 4 hours scratching my head and finally drove it up to the track 10 miles down the road (all in first gear because it was making about 20-30 hp so it couldn't accelerate in anythign but first) and asked some of the 5.0 guys to come take a look...
Well they all got 5 minutes of good pissing themselves laughter before any of them could calm down enough to speak to tell me

 

[Red_LX]

While not quite as good as some of you guys' stories, I have a couple...

I know a guy with a '90 GT who had a Flowmaster cat-back put on his car. He told me he'd had them on his car for awhile, and one day he was under the car looking at something and looked at the mufflers and thought to himself, "I wonder why these say "INLET" on the back of the muffler?" Turns out the shop that put them on, put the mufflers on backwards Strangely enough though, he said he got them turned around and felt no difference in performance.

As for myself, when I was changing my car over to 11" brakes on the front, I finished one side of the car and started on the other when a socket I needed broke, so I had to call it a day and get a new one. Next day I started on the other side and put it all back together, but was having trouble getting the spring back in, so I chucked the upper spring isolator and put it all back together without it, figured it'd be fine. Drove the car for awhile and noticed that the passenger side was way lower than the driver's side...Oh yeah, it still had the isolator on the driver's side I left it like that for several months actually, the damn spring on the pass. side clacked every time I went over a bump. I eventually took the pass. side back apart and put the isolator back in.

I have other stories that go with that brake changeover but too many to write here....ugh....

 

[lilcuzmm]

is tb throttle body cause i didnt know that those had coolant running through them??

Well, I cant match any of those, but I changed my TB a while back, but didnt change the gasket. When I started it, it ran really bad and died soon after and I was unable to restart it. I guess that gasket I didnt replace was damaged and let about a gallon of coolant go through my engine.