Jeff Grossman wrote:Bill Spohn wrote:Got lots of idiot car stories (fortunately I was rarely the idiot).
Fine, I see the wriggling little fish.
Pick two to tell us.
OK (though waaay off topic of course).
One guy was too cheap to fix his parking brake on a Triumph TR3, so came up with the (not) brilliant idea of drilling a hole in his transmission tunnel over the driveshaft, and continuing the hole through the driveshaft itself (IIRC he did two holes at 90 deg. to each other), Parking procedure became coming to a stop, then dropping a long carriage bolt into the hole in the tunnel, and slooowly rolling a little until it lined up with the hole in the driveshaft and dropped through. It actually worked pretty well until he came out of a pub one night carrying a surfeit of lager on board, jumped into the car and fired it up, and instead of pulling out the 'parking pin' just drove away. It nearly bisected the remains of the tunnel and barely missed removing some bits of his anatomy that most of us would consider to be vital to life quality. Left bruises both physical and mental and gave us ammunition for derision for months.
Another one was when I walked into a friend's shop (he ran a garage specializing in British cars. He was on the other side of a six cylinder engine block on an engine stand, reassembling the bottom end, but was scratching his head and complaining that the engine had locked up and he couldn't turn it after installing the last piston and rod assembly. I broke out laughing as I was standing on the other side with the top of the block and could see the piston sticking all the way out of the block with one of the rings locking it in place. He was working on a Triumph GT6 engine and the shop had sent him a TR6 crank, from a basically identical engine but with longer stroke, so the piston popped out the top and stuck.
I'll give you a third one where the joke was on me. I was driving a 1958 MG and the battery was going out on it, so being a typically impecunious university student, I simply took to parking on hills (which was OK only as long as some git didn't park right behind you on the downhill side). The car was well tuned and would bump start with a couple of turns of the engine and saved me the money for a new starter for some weeks. Until I was out with my girlfriend and decided that the battery was probably charged enough for one start so pulled into the local drive in for a burger. Of course it wouldn't start, and the embarrassment of having to get out of the car in front of the other people, most of whom were driving American muscle cars, and getting the starter handle from the boot and cranking the engine to life to their jeers and clapping was a humiliation I was only able to conceal by eventually marrying the girlfriend to ensure her silence on the subject.
Guess we could make that last one technically on topic for this thread is we viewed the rarely used implement as my common sense.
