What's the stupidest thing you ever did that you would admit to?

[98XJSport]

I took my good 4-way lug nut wrench out of my jeep and brought it to work with me to work on another vehicle. The next day, I drove my jeep to pick up some junk, on the way home something didn't sound right. I pulled over, my drivers rear tire had all loose lug nuts. I could take them all off by hand. No big deal, Ill grab my 4-way and tighten... oops. Had to drive the last ~25 miles home in the dark, no stores open stopping every mile or so to tighten them back down by hand. :dunce:

 

[IceNineKills]

Too many to count LOL... but One really sticks out, even though I will more than likely get flamed...

I was staying at a friends house for the month of Jan while I was relocating and to get to their house you usually have to do some 4 wheelin up a mountain road, with some rather steep inclines that, while in the summer aren't a really big deal, in the winter with ice and snow they are downright treacherous. The neighbors there are kinda unfriendly towards them and they certainly didn't like me because I lived there. Sort of a hostile situation.
Now, there is one short but pretty steep incline, the last one, before the road kind of flattens out and it's steady cruising from that point. My 92 XJ was up at the house because I had taken my 85 GMC sierra down the mountain to help move some stuff. Usually, my truck does alright on icy roads because it has pretty good tires. My jeep I usually had to chain up to get up there because my back tires just suck. And this road is usually so bad that even if I had amazing tires i'd still have issues. So, I get to that last little hill in my truck and I don't quite make it up. After a couple of tries I got to almost the top and just stopped, and since backing down an icy hill in big ol' 3/4 ton truck when you have a small tree to run into and a pretty decent ledge to roll off of just isn't fun, I got the *bright idea* to just put the truck in neutral and pull it up the rest of the way with my jeep. So I went and grabbed my jeep, hooked up my tow chain to my tow strap and then to my truck. I put it in reverse, 4L, and started to go back. It only dug holes in the ice with my chains. Then (I smile as I say this) I tried again, only to destroy any hopes of that thing called "friction" which is just no match for weight and gravity. So my truck started to slide back wards, taking my jeep with it. It was definitely one of those moments where you evaluate the status of your eternal salvation, because My immediate thought, besides "holy crap" was the truck was going off the first ledge, then going off the much larger cliff, into the trees and inadvertently my neighbors property, who by the way, the whole time was circling the scene in his yamaha rhino whatever (I wasn't worried about him, I was packing my 45. and two clips in the truck). But ya know what? that tree I mentioned earlier stopped the truck. Great, cept the truck stopped my jeep. So, I got out, and saw that for the truck I need a new tailgate, a new bumper and a wiring re-do, and as for the jeep, I need a corner lamp and a header board that was busted before anyway. Not really that bad considering I hit pretty hard.
Moral of the story: Steel bumpers for both rigs. big ones with a winch on them. Live on flat ground. Keep 4 wheelin a recreational activity and for crying out loud don't try to pull an elephant up an icy hill with a monkey!!!

 

[4LowandGo]

You had me scared there for a minute! Did you have to clean up any s@#$ stains off the seat

 

[the_bandit87]

I once closed the hood when the hood release cable was removed. What followed was a dissasembley of the front end (headlights and buckets) to get at the nuts that hold down the hood latches thanks to some advice I got on here.

 

[Bubba Dolphin]

I was nearing completion on a near-off restoration of a '64 malibu, when I decided to drive half a block and fill up with gas. Well.......apparantly, I had the tank straps on the wrong way-I still don't know how that happened-I was about 100' from the drive way when I heard a thud and then a grinding sound. Yep, you guessed it, the tank had fallen off and was dragging behind me with only the fuel line keeping it attached. It's a good thing I had had the tank powder coated, or else I'd have sparked. 20 gallons would have been one heck explosion. Then I dumped the excess fuel into other vehicles, then the last was put in a drum and lit it on fire. Oh well, live and learn, and double check your work.

 

[85xjproject]

well one of the stupidest things i've ever done was while working in the warehouse of the carpet company where my friend work, it was a light job day and we had nothing better to do so the boss before he left told us to change the lights bulbs that were out in this tall old warehouse. The lights were the long fluorescent tubes, and the only ladder was an old wooden one that shatter with my "large" self being on it, so i told my friend to get the forklift, put a pallet on it and drive me around to change the bulbs... i got every one done but one and it was in a narrow squeeze for the fork lift so my friend squeezed into the spot i began to change the bulb sending my thumb through the bulb, my friend freeked out and killed the forklift and because of all the boxes on either side he could not get out, he crawled out through the back and got me a rag for my hand and got it restarted 10 min later, the boss was not too happy with this one... not to mention the forklift jousting (thats another story)

forklift jousting...do you mean with the 12 foot carpet pins!hahah woula loved to see that!!

 

[OLAK]

Driving my buddies car back from Portland we noticed a weird noise coming from the rear that would change pitch when we turned. Totally clueless as to what it might be, we drove on, with it getting worse. We did notice that the rear brake drum was getting smoking hot, so we knew there was something going bad there. We had to make the last ferry so we were screaming down the highway at a high rate when the rear wheel and associated parts passed us. With my skills I brought the vehicle to a slow smoking stop on the side. My buddies got out and were consoling themselves with a beer when the oil draining out of the axle was ignited by the remains of the redhot bearing and the car caught on fire. Rear tire was never located. Car was saved by fast acting truckers with their extinguishers. Now I know the symptoms of a bad wheel bearing :shocked:

 

[IceNineKills]

You had me scared there for a minute! Did you have to clean up any s@#$ stains off the seat

LOL Just about. Afterwards I was halfway between super ticked off that I wrecked both my vehicles in less than a minute, ticked at the neighbor who was being a punk (I could have killed him with my bare hands I was so mad), and just amazed that I was still alive.

 

[amcinstaller]

buying my 86 daytona turbo z. out at a friends parents house, got into the wine, wasnt drunk just a little less worried. stopped at an intersection, about midnight, i wonder......apply park brake, rev it up, spool the turbo, dump the clutch and the front wheels immediately begin to apply all season radial undercoating to the car, quite liberally. look at the tach, oh i have to shift, hit second, keep going, look the speedo, hm, 120 km/h never seems a little fast compared to the not moving im doing...... release brake, car launches forward still spinning the tires, painting a new black rubber crosswalk. get to the bottom of the hill a few kilometers from anything still, and think man, that was fun! im gonna do it again!! apply brake, rev, dump, spin, CLUNK!!......shit....... look for cell phone, double shit, its still at the friends parents house 3 kilos away. i was lucky though, the one passerby of the night came by minutes after i cratered. while i was waiting for my ride home (a not very impressed pregnant girlfriend) i decided to see what went wrong. tried to push the car down the hill, no go. push back up, quiet dull thud, and the car starts to roll down hill. sweet, ride it out, steer car around corner to gravel road. walk back up the hill and collect my CV shaft that became sheared off at the wheel. 120 bucks later, i have a new axle with no core charge return. coulda been 50 bucks cheaper..... oh well, sold the car a few weeks later with a bad grinding noise when the clutch was not pressed, but it was masked by the cracked exhaust manifold noise. definately lost money on that one, even though i only owned it for 2 months.

youd think id know better on that one, but long before i owned that car, i had a 80 amc spirit. with my summer tires, i could do brakestands after a light rain. well, burning off rubber is addictive, so of course i had to do it every chance i got. one day, i was driving along and BANG!! then the car has no push. uh oh, looks like im changing a tranny instead of heading out of town to visit my friend. as it turns out, it was the rear end. pulled the rear, popped off the cover and pulled 14 pieces of spider gear before i gave up looking.

 

[OverTheHillsATTW]

Lol omg great stories! Well here is another. At 16 I didn't have a vehicle so I would drive my mothers 98 VW Jetta wolfsburg. Well A friend and me are going down an extremly steep hill about a mile when I decide i'm going to "save gas" and shut the car off... lol well long story short the brakes and steering both didn't work and it was an automatic....

 

[IceNineKills]

HAHAHA that's amazing, i've done that one before. i've also seen people try to push start many an automatic. a couple of days ago me, my brother, and our two friends decided to go off roading in a 2wd stock silverado. Before we left, I said we should bring my 4wd truck, just in case he gets stuck, because if we didn't, then we would probably get stuck by default. My friend decided it wasn't necessary. After walking the 2 miles back to pavement so we could hitch a ride to my house to get my truck, my friend realized that his truck is destined for street use LOL

 

[xj2win]

As far as with my Jeep, probably the dumbest thing I've done was thinking I could torque my wheel spacers to 90 ft/lbs with a 3/8 drive ratchet. I tightened them up as hard as I could turn with it and called it good.
Thank goodness I was just going hunting and doing 25 on a dirt road later that afternoon. Something didn't feel quite right, so I stopped and got out, looked everything over, and nothing was out of the ordinary. I start driving again, and something still feels very wrong, I roll down the drivers window and the front tire has at least a good inch of wobble in it. I stopped right away, got to take off all four wheels with the stock jack and torque up the wheel spacers, put the tires back on, etc. Well I was about twenty miles from home, so it became an endless cycle of driving, stopping, taking the wheels off to tighten the spacers, putting the wheels back on, and driving another couple miles. By the last stop to tighten them before getting home it was dark, and I forgot the key to my wheel locks in the field that I pulled off into, only to realize a few miles down the road when the wobble got really bad that I didn't have the key to get them off. :banghead: By some miracle, I was able to make it back to the pullout and find the key in the dark, and finally limped it home.

The next day I bought a 1/2 in. torque wrench and threw away my wheel locks.

 

[xj2win]

I once closed the hood when the hood release cable was removed. What followed was a dissasembley of the front end (headlights and buckets) to get at the nuts that hold down the hood latches thanks to some advice I got on here.

Do you have a hood lock? I did this same exact thing when I was aligning my hood last week, you just have to duck under the front end, reach up to the cable near the middle catch, and pull down on it hard, both sides will pop open. :thumbup:

 

[IceNineKills]

...The next day I bought a 1/2 in. torque wrench and threw away my wheel locks.

Seriously. Wheel locks can be either your best friend or enemy. Like when I had my ford focus it came with wheel locks but the key wasn't very strong, and they were the type of wheel locks that are all the lug nuts not just one for each wheel. I tried to rotate my tires and went to tighten up one of the lugs on one side of the car and the stupid key broke in half. This was at 9:00at night. Plus I had one wheel which wasn't tightened yet. This being my only vehicle at the time, I had to just enjoy the humor of the situation LOL

 

[Blaine B.]

Last night I was in my buddy's garage. I turned on the garage heater.

About an hour later it was brough to my attention that my keyless entry remote was nothing but dripping plastic and goo.

It could have been much worse though, usually I keep my phone atop the heater when it is off. Clean your workbenches off folks, don't use the heater as a table top!!

 

[srimes]

I built a 350 for my s10, but advanced the timing too much and blew a head gasket. At this time I had an intership for a semester and lived 4 hours away from home, so I had to fix it on the weekend. Got it mostly done 1 weekend and came back the next to finish it up. Turns out waiting a week and wrenching after a long night of drinking can make you forget where you were, and I did something out of sequence. I started setting the valve lash before putting the intake manifold and carb back on, and to make it easier I used a remote starter button so that I could bump the engine over to the right positions. This was a problem because I had a mechanical fuel pump, and the disconnect hose was tucked out of the way and pointing at the starter! I got about half-way done with setting the lash, and when I went to bump it over I heard a small "wompf" and there was an 8 inch flame comming from the starter. Well, that lasted the 3 seconds that it took to melt through the wires on my remote starter button and the engine started cranking over on its own, very quickly as the plugs were out and it had a high-torque starter, which caused the high-flow mechanical fuel pump to do its thing. In less than 10 seconds from that the whole engine compartment was engulfed in flames, from the ground to up around the hood. They must've been reaching 10 or 12 feet in the air. The fire extinguesher I had in the truck didn't even slow it down, and my cousen ran out with one from the house which didn't do anything either. I jumped the fence and got the garden hose and went to work, and a little bit after that it stopped cranking over and I was able to put it out. Good think I was working on it in the front yard and the fire didn't spread.

 

[proskier101]

wedling shock mounts to the rear axle and accidently grazed the weld with my pinky knuckle...took the sint out right down to the tendon(i looked at the gash and moved my pinky and saw the tendon move..so i cleaned my finger then went back out to the shop and realized there was a jug of race fuel about 4 feet from where i was welding....not a good night...

 

[Red97XJ]

in high school, i went out to start/warm up my lifted cj 5 with the 304 v-8 and a 3 speed. since it sat up a bit, I didn't want to get in, so I reached in, shook the shifter, yep SEEMED like it was in neutral, hit the key, and thanks to being cold, she fired right up and the choke ran her about 3,000 rpm! It was actually in first hear, hit me in the shoulder (my hand was still on the key) and knocked me out of the way (thank GOD) drove over my parents privacy fence, again, thank God, bounced over fence and turned, got speed up across yard, slammed into deck, destroyed everything of sheetmetal to the windshield and did a doozy on the deck. There it sat digging holes with the back tires at 3,000 rpm and the fan blade just killing the radiator!

I say thank God it bounced and turned, because other wise it was headed straight for the back stairs which were plenty wide to make a nice ramp for the jeep up into the house!

I guess the upside is, I got a new paint job among other things.

 

[gregg75]

Pulled the oil pan a few times over the years to do various work, main seals, oil pump, rod bearings, etc. You all know the pain of getting the pan back in without knocking the gasket off, even with a lift. Finally had the engine on a stand and did the most beautiful pan gasket job, all torqued pretty and neat, locktited with care, etc. Got the engine back in and bolted and while bolting in the second motor mount, look over to see the oil pump on my truck tailgate. Man talk about realizing you are an idiot. Luckily only took an hour to drop and slide the pump in, and luckily it didnt leak. Still cant believe I did that.

 

[coastie124]

Her name was Dan. :tear: