History The crazy things we did

Where to start , where to begin ?……..
Well there was that time, nope, and the other , oh god no. There was that time in New York with the midget ……. Can’t tell that one………. And the other time in Niagara Falls with the police chase ……
Ya know what I’m just gonna keep my mouth shut and say “ It’s a DODGE”

 

No, but we'd have probably had a damn good time if we met up at 25....lol.

Edit: the donkey gif is hilarious...

 

210 ,Yes ,only another musician can understand the adventures that can happen leaving the stage and venue !!! Hated when the alcohol came with a set of handcuffs though !!! Unfortunetly most of my driving escapades involved late 60s muscle cars

 

I but a 1954 Ford coupe from a elderly gent when I was in my teens and he had purchased it brand new and he was great at changing the oil and keeping it up but the paint was horrible and he rarely washed the car, if you were to lean on it the oxidation would rub off on your cloths.

My granddad gave me a can of compound and some cotton waste from the cotton mill and told me what to do, it took me about a week to really getting the car to shine, then came the wax, the car still had nice chrome and looked very presentable but the rims were starting to show surface and were caked with dirt.

I scrubbed them to the best of my ability but I lacked any sand paper to do the job incorrectly, the only thing I had was some fine steel wool, so that's what I used.

My granddaddy (Highpockets) was painting the oil drum behind the house with aluminum silver paint and he gave me the left over paint so not having any blue paint I thought this would make the wheels look like chrome rims, that stuff was runny and I got some on the tire using a 3" pint brush that should have been thrown away many years ago.

To be honest it looked like crap but at a distance, in the dark and if you squinted, they still looked like crap, live and learn. HRP

 

- can relate to this observation when on a low, or no, budget

 

I grew up in a poor neighborhood, our idea of those "new" fancy mag wheels was to paint the wheels black and use silver paint to paint a fake spider around the hub and lug nuts. It kinda did look like mags from a half a block away...

 

https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/so-stupid-car-tricks-how-many-did-them.1070979/
https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/dumb-sh-that-almost-killed-us.530292/
https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/stupid-stuff-we-have-done-and-survived.71666/
https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/ah-the-stupid-things-weve-done.741073/
https://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/threads/ot-funny-things-we-did-when-we-where-little.207193/

 

Bleach burnouts and Black jeans don't mix. Looked like a Dalmatian the next day

 

Ummm....I rode a modified harley shovel 4 gear, lots of stories, lots of girls, but only one stood out. It was in a whorehouse in winnemuca, nevada, and it didn't go the way you'd think. To this day, I'm glad I met her, she made an impact. Then there was the time at some bunny ranch where the girl set a timer, and...nothing happened, but money changed hands, smart girl. Yeah, those days.....

 

In 62 I stuck a couple pieces of pipe in the front suspension of a 54 Ford for the gasser look. Took about three houses down the block to see that wasn't going to end well.

 

The craziest thing I did was on an aircraft. Many military planes carry a system that ejects magnesium flares to decoy heat seeking missiles. For obvious reasons, this system isn't used at all flying over populated areas. So periodically we were required to check the system for readiness by putting a tester in the dispensers and watching the squib impulses count down. But a large area north of Las Vegas is perfect for using it. Now normally, armorers are the only ones allowed to touch the live flares. But on night shift we didn't feel like waiting for the arming crew and decided to drop the live canisters ourselves and test one side at a time. So I put the tester up on the right side and we applied electrical power. Fortunately we did use an intercom cord. I said, "OK, ready on the right" to the guy in the cockpit to hit the button. Then he says, "Did you remove the flares on the left side?"

"No, I thought you did"

"SHUT IT OFF!"

 

My nickname is not self-applied, let's just leave it at that... I will mention that I went through multiple GFs that couldn't take what most would call excitement, although that's not what they said.. LOLOL

And no, no funny shirts with real long sleeves were involved.

I have mellowed considerably over the years.

 

This is a little tale of real " HEAVY METAL ".

Back in 1970, when I was a junior in High School, I was having a blast driving this cool old 41 G.M.C. K-18 Army truck. I am from that time period of when it was cool to have something totally weird and out of the ordinary.



I was driving around in Atwater California, by Ralston park, where all of the cool people would hang out, about a block from the park, I was stopped at a stop sign, waiting for traffic to go by. I felt the truck react to a strange little nudge from behind. I then heard cussing from in back of the truck, I got out to see that a guy and his girl friend, in his MGBGT, had driven the car right up under the meaty can opener, military bumpers to his firewall ! Seems his foot slipped off of the clutch and BANG, there you have it !

Me being the eternal smart ass, I said, " Look at what you have done to my bumpers, you have scratched the hell out of them ". The driver was not amused, but he did realize that it was his fault. So he said, now what do we do ? It was clear to see that the bumpers had cut about a 2 inch ditch groove in the " bonnet " of his car, and in doing so, raised up the rear of the truck just enough that the bumpers got a really good bite on the hood, which was now junk. I told the guy, its simple, either you put your foot on the brakes of your car, and I will pull away slowly, or I can hold my brakes and you can back away slowly, either way, it will rip the hood off your car. He took my suggestion and he held his foot down on his brakes, and I put my rig in granny, and inched ahead as the hood peeled away in one fell swoop !

He said now what ? I said, well that hood is junk now, go throw it in a dumpster. He said, no I want to keep it, to repair it ! Trust me, it was toast after the bumpers of my truck had their way with it.

So I suggested this, I said, I have an old blanket in my truck that you can put on the top of your car, you can place the damaged hood on top, with the curved nose of it facing down, so as to not catch the air. I said, your girlfriend can use her right hand to hold one edge and she can shift the gears for you with her left hand, and with your left hand you can hold the other edge, while you steer with your right hand !

I even offered to throw the junk hood into my truck and I could take it to my dads wrecking yard and just toss it in the scrap metal pile. The guy was so pissed at his mistake, that he really could not think straight, so I gave him the blanket and I put the hood on top of his car and told them to go easy, to where ever you are going to take this hood to. I said, you might want to go to the local " Western Auto " store and get some twine or some clothes line cord, to tie it, to the top of the car.

I watched them drive away slowly, with the junk hood on top of the car, I have no idea of where they went, my destination was to go hang out in the park with the rest of my long haired hippy friends !

 

At least you were holding up the politically correct finger for the occasion

 

When I was in high school, my pal's dad had a friend who owned a used car lot. The guy was pretty cool and we hung out with him at the lot. There was this AD Chevy with an Olds engine and hydro that looked pretty cool. One weekend we decided to go to the lot and mess around. The lot was closed and it seemed like a good idea to hot wire the Chevy and take it for a spin. We're bombing down the Harbor freeway at about 65 when suddenly traffic is stopped. My pal panics and clamps on the binders and next thing we know we are sitting sideways in the lane. Somehow we managed to miss every car in the area. We quickly returned the truck and headed home pronto.

 

"Seemed like a good idea at the time".

This is a recurring problem ha ha

 

Smokin' dope and talkin' $h@t about da gubbmint! lol

 

You're asking for us to confess right here in writing, good luck with that.

 

Like someone else said, just check the statute of limitations first.

 

I don't know... I've got my well established sketchy reputation to think about.

 

Back in the day if you combed the thrift stores you could find boxes filled with all the accessories for an Electrolux vacuum cleaner among them would be a spray gun! Yes sir if you were handy about the house you could vacuum your rug, paint your car and about 20 other nifty things with it...I've heard brush painting can turn out quite nice...as I recall the electrolux produced a lot of runs (house paint) and using a roller was too textured (latex house paint)...I'll try the brush next time

 

Yeah, a quality brush left a much better finish than an alternative I have seen, a broom

 

Not to be proud of it but I have outlived the statute of limitations on pretty much everything from my youth.

As for '57 and '58 Fords I actually like '58s because they do look like a large mouth bass.

My sophmore year in high school I decided to change the gear in a '55 Victoria that I owned. Who knew that 2 bumper jacks was not optimal to hold one off the ground. Mr Dorman rescued me (I lived across the street from Dorman's Speed Shop). He also gave me my first pair of jack stands.

The missus and me owned a 58 merc. We loved that big old pig our first car.
One weekend I decided that it would look cool with the ass end jacked up. Well we had a pair of front springs from a '64 Chevy so I jacked the car up and wedged it in on top of the punkin. It was tight and I figured it would stay. The car had "the look" just sitting there. We took off and made it about a block then hit a bump. The spring came spoingin' out the back with a vengeance. We heard it hit something but we kept going and pretended we didn't know who's spring it was.

 

how on earth did you roach a 9 inch!?!

 

I had a buddy in HS who had a '64 Rambler coupe. He wanted a convertible real bad, so one weekend he came over to my house and we made him one. It was cool for a couple of weeks until the unibody couldn't support it any more and the doors wouldn't shut. He drove it for a few more months with the doors always closed but got tired of having to climb over them all the time. So off it went to the salvage yard.
He then got his uncles old '64 Chevy 4 door. Instead of cutting the whole roof off, we removed just the roof skin leaving the supports over the doors. After a couple of years it too went to the junk yard.

 

My brother traded a rifle scope for a roached out rusted/primered 6 cylinder Mustang. It hardly ran and it was a complete POS. He said he paid $48 for it since that's what the scope cost. I have no idea why, but he turned it into his daily driver. Just an absolute junker of a car back then. Today it'd be worth thousands, but back then it was junk that ran. He got the bright idea of "flat tracking" it in a dirt lot.
It still makes me laugh but we took that thing out there and threw it sideways at redline (what 4800???) dry silty dirt flying everywhere. Even with the windows up the car was so full of holes and rotted you could only dirt track it a short while before you couldn't see out of it. I never laughed so hard in my life. I was sure it was going to be dead after that but it soldiered on.
He worked at a sporting goods store and the owner was an intense little man who rarely liked anything. But if he did, he pronounced that it was keen. OK. So Bob took a Mark-a-lot to the roach coach and put 8" letters down the side of it reading THE KEEN MACHINE and put a Nascar style driver's name above the door "Captain Keen". He proceeded to take the owner's parking spot right in front of the store. So in the man's spot instead of his new Jaguar, stood an absolute POS with THE KEEN MACHINE emblazoned down the side.
When the owner would come in, he'd get on the loudspeaker and tell whoever was parked in his spot to move their car. Not crazy, but funny as a mofo.

 

That's a good question. I've broken a lot of rear ends in my day, but not too many 9 inchers. The 292 didn't have enough horsepower to be much of a threat to it. I think it had been abused before I got it. If memory serves me it broke the pinion pin or a spider gear. I was as surprised as anyone when I realized it was broken.

 

Like I said in the beginning of the Whatever project thread, "But I knew better..."

Which reminds me of the time with my CJ5, a French transfer student and a pair of ski goggles, but I'm much better now!

 

It was New Years eve and we wanted to cruise. There were plenty of DUI checkpoints expected and none of us guys had legal cars. We were already in the hole when it came to get out of jail cards Jeanie had an old beater Chevy more-door but it was legal. She hadn't been drinking and volunteered to drive.

Here we were behaving for a change when some clown starts tailgating us and flashing his lights. We thought maybe it was someone we knew but discounted that because we didn't know anyone with a car sporting the newer square headlights.

Then we thought that maybe the clown had an emergency and was in a big hurry, so Jeanie pulled over on the shoulder but the clown wouldn't pass.

Jeanie patiently out-waited him until he passed only to find him a few minutes down the road waiting for us.

The guy started brake checking us but Jeanie wouldn't play and stayed back. He eventually came to several complete stops and blocked the road. Each time Jeanie tried to pass he swerved violently left to block her.

He was glaring at her in his side view mirror waiting for her to try and go around again when I bailed out the right rear door and unbeknownst to the clown, slashed his rear tire really good.

His tire went flat instantly.

I told Jeanie to floor her car and pass quickly. When she did, the guy floored his car to block but his rim jut spun in the slashed tire and we went on down the road laughing all the way. We never did figure out what the guy's attitude was about. Maybe a case of mistaken identity.