What's the stupidest thing you're ever done in your shop?

when you get old, you put stuff down and then cant find it till you bought a new part!

 

Hell, I'm still young and I do that.

 

been there, done that, same grease, but nothing is worse then chevron duralith, I cut a bolt off of something I can't remember, well dummy left his hat on the ground, then slapped it back on his head, guess where the extremely hot cut off bolt was? I had a red mark on my forehead for weeks

 

Welding in flip flops and shorts.

 

My friend was pulling apart a poncho 40o engine. Got frustrated because the intake wasnt coming off. So he spun it upside down to see if that would help. Lets just say he found out how much the intake weighed with his big toe.

 

Guilty!

 

My current project

 

Shoulda used a Master Lock

 

I've seen some one weld a ratchet to a fender pulling out a battery once. We gave her crap for the rest of highschool for that.

 

We are not worthy!!!!!!!! LOLL smooth move

 

Cutting up a donor cars frame with a torch, gas tank was out and it had been sitting for months so I figured any fuel in the lines had long since evaporated. Turns out there is a lot of fuel in those lines. Got pretty exciting and warm.

 

No safety glasses while grinding under the car laying on my back.

After several hours of the most uncomfortable, irritating pain of my life, the eye doctor pulled a sliver of metal out of my eye.

It took a week for my eye to function normally.

 

HAAAAHAAHAAHAAHAAaa! I was crying after reading these two!!

EWWW, worst nightmare for me, metal in eye...

 

It's not a shop story, but it's a car story.....

Had a good friend in high school who had a worn out Ford truck that wouldn't operate in drive until he warmed up the transmission by driving it in reverse for a while.

This dude never did anything slowly or carefully and would run the truck in reverse down the country road that we both lived on, WAAAYYY too fast and by the time he'd gone the length of the road, he could usually shift into drive and go from there.

One morning, it's dark as usual....doofus is screaming down the road as usual....I can hear his glass packs roaring, as usual....and suddenly all freakin hell breaks loose and there's this terrible crashing noise.

Turns out that the old man who lived down the road left his truck parked out on the road overnight and doofus ran into it going about 30 mph in reverse.

He was pissed when he walked up to my house to get a ride to school....and I almost couldn't drive us there because I was crying from laughing so hard.

 

That reminds me. I need to buy pants & shoes.

 

Tossed out a duel oil filter set up! Didn't know the problem was shitty Fram filters!

 

I set my ass on fire by standing to close to the construction heater in my shop. Pleas don't wear frayed jeans anywhere near a serious heat source. Six months of agony and a skin graft later, I'm doing fine.

 

This thread has some of the funniest stuff anywhere on the entire HAMB...

 

Stabing a engine to the transmission from underneath, while my wife operates the jack on the cherry picker!!.....God damn that hurt!...LOL

 

I used to lend a hand at a buddy's repair shop when he needed it.

On one such occasion, he was short a few people, so I'm there. I'm busy working on a job, and the goddamned phone won't stop ringing. I get annoyed, kick back my rolling stool, and go answer the bloody thing. I spend a few minutes on the phone. When I'm done, I turn around, and the whole shop floor is flooded with oil. What the hell? (When I kicked the stool back, it knocked open the 2'' ball valve on a 250 gallon bulk oil tank. Drained it dry).

I take my first step away from the phone, and promptly wipe out on Castrol's version of a skating rink. One shoe goes north, the other goes south, I perform an arm-flailing pirouette, knock over a trash can, split my pants, and take an unscheduled dip in a shallow pool of 10W-30.

Covered me from asshole to breakfast in fresh lube, earned a nice goose-egg on the back of my head, and openly displayed my wife's idea of fashionable men's underwear.

The girl in the office, (who should have answered the damn phone) observed my performance through her window. She gave me a score of 9, and ordered a pallet of floor dry.

The guys called me Greg (Louganis) for at least a month.


.......

 

You guys slay me! I'm glad I started this thread. Someone resurrects it every few months and there are still some great stories told each time!!

 

I was about 20 or 21.

Put my old K5 Jimmy in the garage for a SBC to BBC swap and to add a tilt column out of a car. Didn't have the right connector for the neutral safety switch so bypassed it until I could get one.

Put a new cam in the big block so the lifters needed adjusted. Hooked up a remote starter switch. Well, some idiot left the key on, and in a forward gear.

First bump on the starter, it fired up. Truck ran into the workbench on the back wall of the garage. Mashed a couple drawers, broke the countertop and knocked about 6 feet of the garage wall off the foundation.

I was standing on top of the 40" mudder front tire. Got thrown to the ground and thought I was going to get run over. Lucky the hood was off or I'd gone for a ride tangled up in the engine fan.

Bruised pride, a knot on my gourd and a good lesson.
~Mark

 

We converted an old coal burning furnace to wood. I went to fire it up and couldn't get a fire to catch, so I poured three quarts of used oil in, and then stuck a propane torch under it. Turns out my brother had poured gasoline into the used oil bucket. For a second the other guys in the shop couldn't see me through the flames shooting from the open furnace door. I walked away pretty close to hairless.

Second story is from a friend of mine. We spent years trying to convince him to cut his pony tail. He was laying under a truck welding a bracket and the sparks took care of that pony tail for us. Took a day to get the burn hair smell aired out of the shop. ;-)

 

Caught my ponytail in a creeper wheel, whichever way I moved just wound it tighter. Had to wiggle off the creeper and crawl out dragging it behind me. walked to the front of the shop with the creeper hanging down my back and got my utility knife from the toolbox and cut the ponytail off while everyone else in the shop was busting a gut.

 

Back in 2004, I attempted to weld shut a couple of pin holes in a gas tank which came off of a car that hadn't moved since 1982. It still had gasoline in it but I thought it would be crap by now (or then: 2004) I successfully put out 2 fires that ignited in it by tilting it and snuffing it with the fuel but the 3rd caused a small explosion which left the 65 impala fuel tank looking like a warped and weird bubble. My pops gave me the "i told you so" and drove me to the junkyard to get another tank. I will never do that again. Had there been more fuel in it, it may have taken my head off.

 

so far the three time I have set my clothes on fire are pretty high on my list. but dropping the four speed on my little finger and making it look like a stepped on grape ,kind of beat them. Still I think the best was when I was in the shop late, by myself, with the doors closed, putting a Hemi in the back of my truck. When in one graceful move I broke my left knee and ankle. No way to get help. No way to leave. Just wait for morning. Great.

 

Stupidest thing I did was running an internet cable out there. Now I don't get anything done.

 

My friend and I starting his rear engine top fuel dragster inside his shop while it was raining. It only takes about 10 seconds to fill a small shop with nitro fumes. Let the brake off and out into the rain we went!

 

Well, it's not the stupidest thing that I have done but I was a first-hand witness to someone elses' if it counts. In High School Machine Shop, there were about 8-10 of us students (couple of Tomboy gals too!) gathered around one of the large square work benches just talking & waiting for the bell to ring at the end of class. This one fella was feelin' pretty antzy and kept jumping up on one of the corners while spreading his legs and straddling the corner of the work bench. He does this about 3, maybe 4 times when on approximately the 5th time, he jumps back up, straddles that corner and we all hear R R R I I I P P P! The loud sound just kinda ended everyones' conversations and just automatically drew your eyes down to the sight of his hairy testiculars hanging out the side of his underwear! To this day, that was probably he funniest thing I have ever seen in my life! One second that uppity fella is waitin' for the bell to ring . . . . the next second his family jewels are just exposed to the world to see!

 

Here is a You Tube video of our team firing our nostalgia funny car in the shop. We are from Illinois and we needed to prep the car for a race in Florida in January, if I remember right it was snowing outside so we started it inside. Enjoy the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=cmWD1mms9-Q