History Stupid things I did with my first car

I just read this blog post from Hemmingshttp://blog.hemmings.com/index.php/2014/05/14/stupid-things-i-did-with-my-first-car/?refer=news) and it got me to thinking about the stupid stuff I did with my first car, a 56 Ford.
I think we all did things we should not have in the learning experience of owning a car and modifying it more to our liking.
I can remember mis-tuning the old Holley teapot carb so that it idled with a miss thinking it sounded like it had a hot cam in it. I thought it impressed my high school cl***mates. Of course, it smoked and the fumes would sometimes be overwhelming coming up though the unsealed hole in the floor where I put my old Spark-o-matic floor shifter. The fumes came in there because of my bolt-on cutouts that leaked profusely. Then there was the huge mound of bondo in the hood where I removed the hood ornament leaving a gaping hole in the front. With little talent or tools I found it easier and cheaper to just mix a large amount of bondo and fill it in and smooth it out before painting it with rattle can paint. I sure there were many more things I did to the old girl that I have forgotten that I would not do today.
So, what were some of the stupid things you did with your first car?

 

Hmm...I guess nobody wants to 'fess up. It is painful to think about.

 

16 years old........Used screen door wire and bondo to fill the two spear openings on the hood of my '57 Chevy. Looked good until I slammed the hood a few times. Used the cheese grater that cane with the bondo kit to fill a hole in the right rocker. Bondo'd over it and it lasted until i sold the car.

 

I`ll never forget how I went about putting carpet in my first car @ 16.
55 chev. It was a thin outdoor carpet I guess, and I could`nt get it to mold over the hump. My solution was to cut in sections and hide the seams with some stainless strips I snagged along side railroad tracks at a steel recycle yard.
I drilled holes in the strips and screwed them down through the floorboards.
Looked good, though I`d never do that again

 

You and I both shared that teen aged over zealous-under knowledge gene Don.

My first car, that I got to keep, was a cream puff (remember that used car term?) was actually one owner low mileage car.

2 days after I purchased it from a elderly gentleman my enthusiasm combined with a size 12 shoe resulted in a spun main bearing.

Since I was 16 years old and all I really knew about cars is what I read in Hot Rod magazine and Henry Gregor Felsen books I began pulling the engine and transmission and sought out a local junk yard and purchased a 390 Police Interceptor engine and transmission.

I used a chain fall that my granddad had hanging in a oak tree to remove the old engine and slide in the new engine.

I didn't have access to any welding equipment and wouldn't have known how to use it if had but youth,desire and perseverance came through and I bolted pieces of angle iron together to make the new motor mounts fit the frame.

With some help from a older teenager that lived next door to my granddad the car was running again.

The car ran like a bat out of hell,but the brakes were marginal,,I tried to avoid a lady pulling out in front of me on main street in a '48 Dodge and my split second decision to swerve hard to the right resulted in hitting the curb and driving up a telephone pole guide wire resulting in a Joey Chitwood style barrel roll down main street.

I was told the car rolled 3 times,I do know it ended upside down on the roof and sometime during the thrill show my engine & transmission both decided to extricate itself from their ***igned place under the hood.

Needless to say the car was totaled and besides being black & blue I emerged from with looked like a upside down turtle basically intact and the only real cut that brought blood was reaching back inside the twisted & mangled heap to get my brand new Jimi Hendrix album,,interestingly enough "Are you experienced".

This devastating lesson started me down the path to the obsession I have to this day.

 

Great story HRP. Glad you survived that "learning" experience.

 

Just thought of another stupid thing I did.
I liked chrome wire wheels and I found some Chrysler factory wires in a junk yard for about $4 each.(you know it was long ago).
So I mounted 2 of them on my recaps and bolted them on the front of my ole 56 Ford. Of course the pattern was the same but the back of the wheel did not fit the brake drums right and they would work loose after a few miles. So I proceeded to drive around like that, at one point I went 105 in the old Ford never being smart enough to know how stupid that was with those ill fitting wheels and marginal recaps.
I finally got rid of them since I couldn't keep them tight.

 

These story's are going to get interesting. HRP

 

"I just read this blog post from Hemmings...it got me to thinking about the stupid stuff I did with my first car, a 56 Ford.
I think we all did things we should not have in the learning experience of owning a car and modifying it more to our liking."

LOL...I was fortunate enuff to live thru all the "stupid things" I did with my cars...so much so that I wrote three books about it...the first two are on Amazon's Kindle - "Bangin' Gears & Bustin' Heads" and "Fast Cars, Four-speed and Fist-fights."

My first car was a Studebaker Starlight coupe bullet nose (My dad said I couldn't get killed in it - little did he know...!!!) My second car was a three year-old '57 Chevy 150 two door sedan...you can prolly guess the rest...but if you can't, car chaos in the '60's was alive and well.

R-

 

Yep, this will be interesting. Hot rodder confessions.

"Forgive me Ryan for I have sinned..."

 

First car, Hmmmmn well I can think of two stupid things I did with it. One is that I was 14 and drove it and two is that after I overhauled it I gave it to my mom's boyfriend so that he could take a ****in' hike and not need to come back.

Didn't really miss the car i still had my norton and i captured a Buick within a month or so.

 

I used to get on a semi steep road and let my 63 Valiant roll backwards in drive, then I would floor it. After doing this a few times I informed my mom that we needed new tires, she couldn't understand why since dad had put new tires on before going to Vietnam. Also while dad was gone, I cleaned the engine (first time for me). Of course it wouldn't start afterwards. Mom was pretty upset. We only had one car. Another time while trying to wind up back window while driving, I hit the curb with front wheel. A few days later I told mom that we needed a new front wheel because one of us must have it a curb. Mom said "I didn't hit any curbs." Never could get anything past my mom.

 

There are way too many to list here.

 

Stupidest thing I did was sold it. '62 Belair bubbletop.
15 yrs old, no DL yet, made big $ profit of $150.

 

I remembered another one. This was with my other first car. A 1962 Austin Mini. I sold it to buy my girlfriend an engagement ring. But then again, I guess that really wasn't that stupid. 45 years later and I still have the girlfriend (wife) and she has let me buy more minis and almost any other cars that I wanted.

 

Attempting to build a '40 Pontiac and installing a 303" Rocket into it on a gr*** mowing 14 year old punk kid budget.
Motor mounts were sawed off logs with heavy chains securing the engine. Shift linkage was s**** tubing bolted together, bell housing was modified in shop cl*** on a big iron drill press and my tools were eight 12 pt. sockets and ratchet my dad gave me for Christmas and a pair of "Vice Grips" I still own to this day.
My biggest expense was clear red plug wires and white Krylon to spray the garnish moldings.
It ran, but only this side of the curb.
Stupidest thing was selling it when I got over my head into it.
If I still owned today with what I know now, I'd be in tall cotton!

 

I have many... but my earliest ones involve a box of spare parts in the trunk when I did replace almost anything.

My first was on my '64 Olds 88. Bought it and it needed a valve job, had one cylinder way low on compression and it had a bad miss. Did the valve job at age 18, first time deep into my own engine. It went back together well, still had the miss. Replaced the wires, still had a miss... wound up being a cracked distributor cap. I could have probably gotten by for a while with one weak cylinder in it.

Bob

 

The stupidest thing I did with my first car was buying it.

 

Conversely, the stupidest thing I ever did with my first car was sell it.

 

Uhhhh, traded my '67 Vette straight up for a then brand spanking new '68 El Camino...the dealer is still laughing his *** off. Oooops, that wasn't my first car, but it's definitely the dumbest thing I've done with a car...

 

As a lad , (1972ish) I joined the local hot rod club with my mint '39 chev.

I had borrowed the money to buy the car , subsequently blew the engine , borrowed some more money , fitted a hot '52 engine , found the rod club , followed their rules , "do something to your car every week , report on progress at every meeting"

So , in an effort to be "doing something to the car" , I started taking the car apart ..................

Never got back together again did it

What a waste.

I don't do stupid rules now

 

Probably a confession I will soon regret....

Before I headed to the US I used to drive a 70 Mustang (Grande, NOT the fastback!) back in the UK at the tender age of 17-18. Not quite my first car but pretty close. That was more novel than it sounded, US cars were a rarity back then.

Somehow I thought it would look way cooler if I painted Starsky and Hutch stripes down the sides and up onto the roof. If looked cool to the 18 year old me but I shudder at the thought now. I am sure I have a photo of it somewhere.

 

Bought a '56 chevy Belair for $125 that smoked so bad you had to cut it off at stoplights to stay in it due to the holes in the floorboard and the mufflers with no pipes that stopped right under the drivers seat. Carbon monoxide won't kill 15 year olds I guess. Drove it hard a couple of days until it developed a nasty shimmy. Checked it out to find out it only had two lug nuts on each back wheel.....and the nuts were next to each other.

 

My first car was also a '56 Chevy, but a 210 4-door sedan. It had a lot of wear in the engine, and used lots of oil. In auto shop, I pulled the engine out, and honed the cylinders, then installed the old pistons with a set of new rings. I guess I figured it wasn't necessary to check the end gap on the rings, or mike the cylinder bores, because after re***embly, it smoked just as bad as it did before. After the teacher laughed at my expense, he offered to pitch in for another set of rings, as long as the correct measuring procedures had been done.

---John

 

Plumbed the rear brakes with hardline from the ch***is to the rear, no flexible line. My brother discovered it when he was running the car at Englishtown, maybe Island Dragway and tried to stop. Of course the line broke to the rear brakes. Must have been dual Master cylinder. I'm surprised they didn't catch it at tech.

 

Friend of my folks' mom died, he got her 67 Olds 98 four door (455?) and promptly gave it to me. I was 15. What the hell was he thinkin'??
Folks out of town, took the tags off one of their cars, drove the Olds over to a gas station where a buddy worked. We did an oil change, filters, tune up. I'm driving it home on a four lane, checking out the p***ing gear, car ran just fine for a 13,000 pounder. Not watching the opposing 2 lanes on the other side of the median, doing 70+ in a 45 MPH zone. Looked in the rear view and sure as ****, there's Montgomery County's finest flipping a u-turn about a 1/4 mile behind me. Talk about adrenal gland dump. First instinct was to hit the brakes. Too late, I knew it. If I got caught, no license for me, maybe ever. I floored it. Got to a tee in the road in about 1/2 mile and ran the stop sign, cutting off a bunch of traffic, floored it again and was doing 85 in a flash. I had a friend who's house was about 2 miles away and his folks were at work. I flew up the highway, turned left onto his road on two wheels and ran right through his front yard and around the back of his house. Pulled the Olds up tight to his house, pulled off the tag (what did I think THAT was gonna do?) and ran inside through the back door. We watched through the curtains at the cops cruising up and down that road for the next hour while I did my best to breathe again and get my heart rate under 200. THAT was the stupidest thing I ever did and it was in my first car. I sold it for $150 about 2 days later and went back to bicycle for awhile.

 

56 Chevy station wagon- mint nose, excellent eng/trans. Had a lot of rot in the
floor boards as it was an ex-navy car. Sold it for $25, broke even.

 

Tried to make my henry J look like the Revell Kit when I was 18, cut of the firewall with a die grinder. Didn't have the skills to make it right. had a guy weld it back on. still not quite right. I then sold my perfect steel front end for a few bucks cause I found a screwed up gl*** nose. Then I traded a rusty Henry J I bought to a guy to install a straight axle off a Chevy Truck under it. Which he did , about 3/4 of an inch of true, and butchered the firewall again to fit the engine. Second mistake was letting myself get sidetracked with other projects, the funds which would have payed for the car 10 times over. I still have the car, 30 years later, and I even bought the rusty one back for parts at an auction. I have never driven it, but am closer. I payed a reputable shop to redo the axle, firewall and rear suspension, Correctly, which he did. I may not have done the welding on the frame but I don't have to worry about it falling apart when I drive it anymore either.

 

Like Don56 my first car was a mordoor 56 Ford. I did a lot of dumb things with that car but the one I remember the most was the rust hole in the r rear wheel well. I'd brake torque it and all the tire smoke would come up through that rusted hole in the wheel well. People riding in the car would get pissed at first but we all ended up having a good laugh later. Also when it rained it all came in the back floorboard and the job of anyone riding in the back was to open the door when I made a left turn to get rid of the water.

 

Unprotected *** in the back seat of my 1953 Ford- Devil made me do it the first time- second time I did it on my own!