Anybody got any stories we could laugh at

Had a 47 Ford coupe with a flattie in 71. Was driving along in front of Sears on Kingsway in Burnaby, BC. It was 3 lanes wide. I went to change lanes and the steering wheel came off in my hand. I nailed the brakes. Got out and got a pair of vise grips in the trunk to clamp on to the steering column. Used them to get off the road. I still don't know where the nut and keyway went that held the wheel in place. Pat.

 

I had a slick '57 Chevy hardtop when I was 17 (early 60's) & one day my mom had to borrow it to take my grandmother somewhere. On the way back, they stopped at a roadside stand to grab some grub & decided to listen to the radio in the car while they ate. The radio was cutting out, so my mom smacked the dash & some rubbers fell out on the floor from underneath the dash. I must admit that they weren't mine (we moved a little slower back then), but I got the third degree because of it. The former owner must have been ahead of the curve.

 

"my mom smacked the dash & some rubbers fell out on the floor from underneath the dash" Reminds me of the time my mom needed a ride to town and she put the sun visor down. What should fall into her lap but a bunch of motel receipts from my girlfriend and I gettin some on the weekends....

 

1962 in central Iowa, my buddy and I are out messing around in his dads shop. We find a set of keys so we go out to the yard and start trying the keys in all of the cars, Lo and behold they fit his brothers 39 Ford tudor.
The Ford has a 53 Olds 303 in it, we jump in fire it up off acrost the yard , the key fits an after market ign. switch, the origional switch in the steering column still works and is locked. Well the next thing we saw was his mothers 59 Pontiac Catalina 4 door, we got both dors on the passeger side at about 30 mph. He hit his face on the steering wheel and I hit the dash. His mom said we got what we deserved and walked away.

 

here's another one. After the 69 Biscayne gave up the ghost, I redid a ten year old 68 Catalina coupe that friends of the family sold us cheap. Rusty from the Northern MI salt, but four gallons of bondo and coat of paint took care of that. Anyway, this was the main mode of trans for our family as well as my hotrod on the weekends. I had installed an underdash 8-track player. One Sunday, we are just heading down the road to church and I didn't realize I had a tape in the deck. It was between tracks. It was Nazareth and the song that came blaring out was Hair of the Dog. "Now you're messing with a..., a Son of Biiiitch". Needless to say, the folks determined that wasn't appropriate mood music for the ride to church.

 

she sounds like she might have learned that one from my wife...what a tease.
i have found a way to pay her back for those but i cant talk about it on here

 

One evening before dark in St.Louis, driving my prepped 1950 Plymouth to get painted that next day, I got pulled over near the J-B bridge.

Car was in primer, no glass, no lights, no chrome, no handles, no bumpers, and a license plate on the floor beside me. I was maybe 23 years old. A rolling disaster!

Officer was very nice, we shot the shit for a while on the side of the road, let me go "before it gets darker out". Thank goodness he was into cars as well!

 

As a kid I used to cobble together motorcycles from junk. Once bought a Yamaha 360 for peanuts but it wouldn't fire. My dad helped me out though. We tied the bike to the bumper of his truck with a rope, maybe ten feet in length. The rope was secured to the neck of the Yamaha. Then he towed me around the block as we attempted to bump-start the bike.

At around 15MPH the bike finally came to life BIG time. That's about the same time that I found out the brakes didn't work. I went around the truck on the driver's side and just barely made it past my dad sitting behind the wheel before hitting the end of the rope at full throttle.

I'm still impressed by the amount of torque those old 360s put out. Not so impressed with my father's handling of his injured son laying on the ground several feet in front of the now-wrecked bike. He just laughed and laughed at me.

Hell, it was HIS idea.

 

Here's my contribution...

My friend Joel was selling a '50 Chevy 5 window P/U and since I've always loved these trucks, I decided to buy her for I believe $350. It ran and was as drivable as you could get, with no brakes. I didn't have a trailer at the time and we decided that the easiest way to get it the 2 miles back to my house would be to drive it home with my '93 S-10 strapped to the back for brakes. So with the strap attached to one of my S-10's tow hooks on the front, and the other end strapped to the bumper of the 5 window, we started out on our little journey.

I had no experience with the three on the tree so I let my buddy drive. I was so excited about my purchase that i just had to ride along, so another friend was in my S-10 as the brake man. This was a pretty rural area so we only had 3 country stop signs and a possible stop at some railroad tracks. We got going and all was well until coming up on the second stop sign, the strap broke from rubbing on the bumper. We got her stopped at the top of the hill and since there was only one more uphill stop sign, we decided to press on. What we didn't think about was the railroad tracks on the bottom of the current hill we were sitting on. As we started to pull out from the stop sign and down the hill, my friend calmly stated, "Oh shit, we forgot about the tracks." I then answered back, "We should be fine as long as there isn't...A TRAIN COMING!!! HOLY SHIT JOEL A TRAIN IS COMING!!!" We weren't going fast at all, but both of us went into a panic and started spouting off ideas of what to do. Should we bail? Should we just shut her off? Should we throw her in reverse? Should we put her in the ditch? I was screaming "Throw her in reverse, throw her in reverse!!!" And he actually came back to me with, "That might wreck something..." I was like..."Just do it!" So he got her in reverse and with me hanging half way out of my already opened passenger door, the poor 5 window came to a chirp, chirp, chirp, engine dying stop...about 150 feet away from disaster. The train went roaring past and we just sat and looked at each other...both of us were just speachless as there was nothing that we could have said about what had just happened. The train passed, we started the truck, and actually managed to get to her new home in one piece without further incident.

To this day when I see my 'ole friend Joel, we always have a good laugh when we think back about that and can't believe how much our lives could have been different if we couldn't have gotten that thing stopped...

Josh

 

Here's one of my favorite stories that took place with my dad...My dad had suffered a stroke when I was in high school in the mid 60's.The family kept the farm going until the early 70's, then it became just to much to handle. Two of my brothers and I bought the farm from my folks so they had something to live on, and we were going to develop it into a subdivision. Before we could, we had to tear down all the barns, corrals, fences and such, after years of collecting clutter and debris that old barnyards seem to attract. Hauling all of the things to the dump, even in those days got so expensive, we burned what we could. We had and old silage pit that we were going to fill in anyway, so we drug my old '47 Plymouth "cutdown" out of the barn and into the silage pit. Some of you may remember "cutdowns". We made them by taking the bodies off the chasis', welding a seat across the frame rails, building a firewall out of plywood, adding a beer keg gas tank behind the seat. We usually slid the rearend up under the tank and cut off the rear of the framerails. Kind of looked like the "Bug" . Were they safe? Not really , but they sure were FUN!!! Anywho, back to the story... We drug this out to the silage pit and pushed it back in as far as possible so it would still have fill dirt over the top of it, plus we had to make room for some dead animals that we were going to bury. My dad had raised a bunch of Shetland ponies, and always kept plenty of them around. His prized old stud, General L, was his last one to go and we were just going to drag him out to the pit and bury him with the cutdown. Dad said: "Lets give ol' General a good send off." We carefully lifted his old carcass up with the backhoe and a chain and placed him the best we could in the front seat of the cutdown. We even got his hooves through the steering wheel! We backfilled around him and made sure we didn't change the way we had placed him. Dad said: "I'd like to see the look on the guy's face that digs this up! What kind of civilization was on this earth before we were?" This place is now a neighborhood full of houses, and every now and then when I drive by a get a big grin on my face, thinking of my dad and General L.

 

Back around 88-89, I had just gotten off duty from a midnight shift. I didn't normally wear my uniform to and from work, especially when I was driving my 40 Chevy coupe. So I'm in a Black Cherry 1940 Chevy, with a definite gasser rake, stopped at a redlight. The local high school Joe Badazz pulls along side in his 84 Mustang, with his girlfriend more or less in his lap. He's trying his darndest to impress me with how bad his Mustang is, and keeps trying to get me to acknowledge his presence.

He hollers out, "You wanna run that thing?" I've had about enough and holler back "What you got to run, besides your mouth?"

That fired him up big time, he makes the girlfriend get back in her seat, he's in neutral reving for all he's worth. I push in the clutch, and let all three deuces on the small block open up for a second, then bring the revs back to about 3 grand, and wait for the light.

The light turns green, he slams it into drive and lights up one tire for about ten feet and screams on down the road. I put on my turn signal, turned right and went around the block.

You see, I knew that one of the guys had plannned to set up about 3 blocks down the road and run radar. Needless to say, when I went past, Joe Badazz was a great deal less than happy.

 

Here's one I was told yesterday at church! My friend used to work at a shop in his younger days and his boss came over to him one day when a sales rep had stopped by. He was handed a tube of clear silicone, a spring loaded center punch and told to also grab the O/A torch on his way to the rep's car. His BOSS instructed him on what to do and he followed instructions to the letter. Using the spring-loaded center punch on the headlights, he put a BB sized hole in each headlight, pumped in some O/A from the torch and covered the holes with the silicone. It was late enough in the afternoon that when the rep left, he got down the block from the shop and pulled on his lights! He said you could hear the explosion for blocks! the rep came around the block and right back to the shop. Not only did it blow his headlights to smithereens, it disintegrated his grill and curled the front edge of his hood. The boss took care of it all , but I know I would have needed a new pair of Froot-of-the-Looms myself!

 

High school autoshop, and a buddy of mine was taking a trans out of the shop car for a rebuild. He had the C6 auto sitting on the fully raised transmission jack, but for some reason, decided to tip the bellhousing side down. The converter slid down the input shaft and punched him square in the face, ouch. He ran to the restroom covering his mouth. Another friend asked to see, and said "DAMN - your teeth are screwed up!" First buddy looks in the mirror and said, "Nope, they've always been like that." Kinda sad but true, hey welcome to Texas.


Another friend had a '65 Comet 2dr HT in high school, incredibly fast with 2bbl 289 and C4 auto! He used to love showing off all the time, running it through first, then column-shifted up to second, winding it up and finally to third. Except the one day the two of us were taking home a carload of cute girls, he hit the 1-2 shift a little hard and the little column shifter busted right off in his hand. Man you should have heard all those girls laughing hysterically...

 

This isn't car related, but my girlfriend's parents have a treadmill that she used to use all of the time and when she moved out they wouldn't let her take it with her "because her brother uses it." He's a bigger guy... not about to use a treadmill...

So we're at dinner the other day, and he eats a huge pile of food, and I jokingly mention the treadmill. "I going to use it when I get home," he says, "I'm going to take a nap and turn it on and let the hum put me to sleep."

 

I guess the answer is yes.

 

This is not a funny story but it amazes me.
Yesterday I was 300 miles from home, driving my 1939 Ford pickup when a 1939 Ford panel truck crossed the intersection in front of me.
I've never seen a 39 Ford panel before and this one was driving!
It took about 15 miles for me to catch up and when I did, I saw that his license plate was from my state.
What are the odds that two 1939 Ford trucks will meet 300 miles from home?
we pulled over and talked a little.
He lives in a very small town 78 miles from my home and I have never been to his town
but as we talked I realized that I met him 10 years ago when he was driving a 1939 Ford schoolbus at a car show in another town.

 

I pulled up to a toll booth in Albany NY the woman in the booth said stay right here my boss wants to talk to you. The boss comes out to the fence and asks what kind of a car is that we are taking bets back in the office as to the make. Some say it's a Packard and i think it's a Ford. I told him it's a 37 Ford with a Caddy engine. Buy then there's 10 people at the fence. They cheered as I got on it as I pulled out.

 

my cousin & I did the same thing cept we put it in a vice and was trying to punch out the primer with a ten penny nail, my hand holding the nail shook for a day or two and my ears rang for a week