Projects 30 sedan Mishap...Dumbbutt Move of the Month

Only I could wreck my 30 sedan before i even have the chassis under it. So, I have the sedan on a homemade body dollie and i go to move it out of the garage and into the driveway when i trip on something and send the sedan rolling out the garage and down the drive...bounces off the backyard fence made of horizontally 2 x 8's and then in to the gravel section of my yard. There was no damage, but it did almost knock the body off the dollie.

Dumbbutt move, but if ya can't laugh at it then your living to seriously...anyway hope it makes someone laugh and maybe share a stroy that might make me feel better

 

Hahahahaha.................sorry but the visual made me chuckle! Glad all is well.

You should have seen the time when my pal Randy ran the handle of the floorjack into the 2 day old paint on my T........................gotta love single stage, never left a mark! He did have 15 seconds or so of an O SHIT moment.

 

Doh !

 

don't you just love hotrods
and people wonder why building em' is most the fun
no damage thumbs up

 

Just the other day I was tighting the intake bolts on my uncles 318 and we had the valve covers off. I get the last bolt tight and as I move the socket, it falls off the ratchet and down through the head it goes. OH SHIT was the first thing that came to mind. Luckily it fell down in the lifter gallery and I was able to get it out with a magnet. Thank the good Lord for that. All you can do is laugh and go on.

 

Dude - I need pics......of you on your ass, reaching, reaching and yelling, "get your ass back here"....too f*ckin'; funny, dude.

 

do have a story to make you feel better
buddy of mine had a 63 chevy short bed pickup, nearly done and it was a 60-70 grand truck, put the tranny in for him one afternoon so all that was left was the bench seat, well i leave and before i get home i get the call " just wrecked the truck" WHAT!!!!! He could'nt wait another day so he takes it around the shops sitting on a milk crate, fell off the crate, jerked the wheel on the way to the floorboard and hit a $500 S-10!!!!
so the whole driverside front, hood, grill, door etc. etc. trashed
there that make you feel better

 

Ok cracker's story make me think of the top gear episode where Jeremy clarckson decides to make an s-class into a cottage... poured concrete floor and completely unattached furniture... made for a interesting lap of the track if you havejn't seen it make youtube your next stop!

 

My buddy started his 60000 chopped merc the other day from outside the car and it guard railed itself 40 feet awat and boy was there damage!

 

Sounds like a 3 Stooges movie.

 

My Mailman told me he drove his 66 Chevelle through his garage door doing the same thing. Never start em standing outside guys !

 

I used my just out of the package new remote mechanics starter from Napa, pulled the trigger and my recently finished 62 vw rag was in gear with jumped the street gutter and drove straight up the driveway into/thru the garage door, with me standing back in the street holding the starter and wires. It cost me a garage door, but at least it didn't run me over, my landlord was pissed.

s.

 

if it makes you feel any better, we tried to pick my '30 sedan off of the chassis with tie-downs and a forklift. needless to say, it dropped back onto the chassis and busted damn near every tack weld that the body was removed to in order to access in the first place.

 

My first engine swap was a 283 with a cast powerglide into a 49 or so willys station wagon.. J.C. Whitney motor mounts and i wont even mention what the trans crossmember was made from... remember i was 14 or so.. well the guy that owned it asked me to come by and listen to the motor.. it had a mid rpm miss.. sooooooooo.. I stand up on the front bumper (it was up in the air a bit).. he lights it.. sounds ok.. I grab the carb linkage and bring it up to about 2 grand.. it stumbles a bit so i stretch it out a little more.. ya know that whine a powerglide makes when it drops into gear.. that was the first indication i was in trouble.. Being the brain surgeon that i am.. i let go of the throttle and grab the coil wire to kill it.. wire comes out from the distributor end zapping the shit out of me just as the hood slams on me lumping up my head nicely.. i go face first into the engine compartment and that puppy launches backwards.. it still had enough zing in it to send it thru the back wall of the garage.. down an 18 inch drop off.. into the guys yard behind us and into the corner of his house.. all with me still under the hood.. this all took about 4 or 5 seconds.. my pride had more damage than my body.. the willys lost the rear window (it was open) and back bumper..

 

Holy Crap, I aint even going to try and top that! WINNER!-MIKE

 

Your story made me think about this one, happened tuesday morning(6-30-09), in danish tv, live.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0QIpKLhpTM&feature=related
Lars

 

Gee.. this sounds like a support group!
My name is Joe and I'm a mechanical clutz.

From the age of 14 I was into VW dune buggies.
Once, when I was about 19, I was trying to boost one buggie using a home-built tractor.
Long story shortened... really. Honest. This is the short version.
I reached over to shut the tractor off but before that happened that dang thing's forward trans (the automatic) jumped into reverse gear. The rear trans (standard) was in reverse so the tractor started moving ahead.
Unfortunately my left leg was between the rear wheel (with heavy duty homemade chains with cleats) and big-block chevy block that was half buried in the ground from years of sitting.
Well.. with the wheel (thank the lord) SLOWY churning my leg was not getting any happier.
I couldn't reach the stick to change gears. Couldn't reach the switch to kill it. No one was around.
BUT.. I COULD reach the engine.
I tried choking the thing but no way would it stop.
So I started pulling the plug wires (from the plugs ends, all I could reach).
That darned old Buick 310 finally stopped running after I was appropriately zapped.
Now what? I'm stuck between a large wheel and a heavy block.
Alone.
I was a scrawy 120lb runt.
Somehow I pull the block out of the ground.
I hop in the car (standard trans) and drive 10 minutes away to my apartment to get my wife to go to the hospital with me. DOH! She doesn't drive. I guess if I was going to crash and burn I was taking her with me. In retrospect... hmmmm
Anywho. I still have my leg.
Learned a lot from that.
The least of which is that the Buick 310 was a tough little critter that was hard to kill. Guess I was too.

There. I feel better. Thanks for the support group meeting.

 

Haha, picture of that would be "Priceless", Help I've fallen and I can't ,,Oh shit the car, lookout. hahaha

 

Glad you were ok. That is some funny stuff!

Tony, pace yourself.

Bart

 

I'll share one of many dumbassed oh-shits' Back in the day ol' Wess, my buddy, and i decided to put a straight axle under his mustang. It was a weekend project and we had use of a neighbors garage. The problems started with the fact that we were old enough to buy beer, things went downhill from there. We had a DC welder, cutting torches, hammers and stuff so we stuck this front axle and spring from an econoline up under his mustang, it took a couple cases of beer and some fabrication but we were on a mission. Sunday evening we got her done an ol' Wess hopped in it to back her out of the garage, cut the wheel to the right to clear some stuff in the shop and the car went left and knocked out the side of the garage door. It steered backwards. I don't tell that one often.

 

The best I've got is when I reached into the window of my old '55 Ford to fire it up. I was working replacing all the wiring and I was checking to see if my charging system was wired correctly. It was the first time it had fired up with the new 302, C4 and new wiring. Unfortunately, it was in reverse with no neutral safety switch. It cranked and caught and proceeded to run backward over my right foot and out into the street. (just about ripped my right arm out of its socket, too). It backed straight across the road and stopped dead when the exhaust tips hit the opposite curb. No real damage except a really sore foot, a couple of bent tail pipes and a mildly soiled pair of BVDs. Man, when I saw that sucker launching down the driveway backward, I didn't even think about my foot. I was just praying that there wasn't a car coming down my street at that moment.

Glad there are no real injuries in these stories. Just something to laugh about later. Makes for good bench racing with the guys. Haha.

 

I got nothin' to add here, I couldn't top some of those stories if I had a bag of weed and ten minutes to dream sumpin up. It's true life is stranger than fiction sometimes. Glad ya'll are allright

 

Tony
As big as you are you shouldn't even have a body dolly.

If it makes you feel any better the only time I ever painted my HAWG anything but black I had spent a month smooting out an old dented up hummer tank and painting it Black and Orange. I had it in my closet waiting for final assembly when Small paul came by and I was going to show it to him. I dug it out and carefully unwrapped it. Then managed to drop it on the floor right in front of him.

It only toook me a week to clean up and paint my old sporty tank. I think Paul still has my freshly painted and dented Hummer tank on his shelf. He said that I was the only guy he ever knew that could crash and burn and never leave the house.

 

I had just finished spraying this custom square body truck the day before. It was all shaved and cut up, I probably had a thousand hours in the metal work. The paint came out perfect, and didn't need much buffing. A friend of mine jumps in with me, and we head off to the store in it, to put some gas in it. About the time we hit 40, the hood just lifts off, and shoots straight up in the air, probably fifty feet high. We stopped and watched it drift back to earth, in what seemed like slow motion. Right before it hits the ground, it flips over, shiny side down. Nobody had bothered to tell me that it was just sitting on the truck and not bolted down. It cost me a new cowl hood, and some paint time, nothing else on the truck even got touched when it made it's exit. I still laugh about that one...

 

A friend of mine had just unloaded the '36 Ford coupe that he had bought and delivered from Cali. He was walking around it ,planning the rebuild when his John Deere tractor (small mower type) jumped out of gear,rolled down a small hill and ran right into the pristine grille on the car.
The grille was one of the big reasons he bought the car in the first place.It took us 5 years to find one as nice to replace it.

Now he laughs when he tells the story ,but not back then.

 

These stories are great, each one makes me feel a little better about every lesson I've learned. Several years ago I had just finished up a paint job on my 65 Falcon. I wanted to sweep the garage but didn't feel like starting the car. The window was down so I reached in and put 'er in neutral and pushed it onto the driveway reached back in the window and threw it in park and walked into the garage. Then I heard the sound of tires s-l-o-w-l-y rolling on cement. Sure enough, the car was headed accorss the drive, accross the yard toward the neighbor's house!. (had to take a 90 degree turn out of the garage to enter the street so I dodged that bullet) A pine tree stepped in to protect the neighbors house but it sure did a number on the bumper and pass fender. Never fixed it- drove it that way for about 15 years...
Marginally Smarter now

 

Sitting at a traffic light in Tipp City Ohio, in the left turn lane. Got a high stance pick up in the far lane, (one of those that you almost need a ladder to get in), and a Tuner next to me. Joe Cool in the Tuner starts making the fart can try to sound bad and putzing with the guy in the truck. The guy in the truck takes the bait, puts the truck in neutral and revs back.

There was no one behind me, so I sit through the left turn arrow, 'cause I see a total screwup in the making. The light turns green and the guy in the truck is at about 3 grand, and drops it into gear and holeshots the Tuner really badly. It should have been the high point of his day. Unfortunately, in the testosterone rush he was having, he had forgotten about the complete big block ford motor sitting next to the cab in the bed of the truck. The force of the launch, coupled with the new plastic bed liner and the wooden engine stand, allowed the motor to slide with enough force to take the tailgate out and deposit the motor on the ground at the light.

 

This is like Darwin Awards for gearheads!

 

I bought an OK '32 truck cab at a swap meet, and planned to haul it home in the back of my brother's '80 El Camino. It was pretty heavy (complete cab, some glass still in it), so we figured it wasn't going anywhere. Kinda tight fit in the Elky, so we didn't tie it down.

Made the trek home about an hour or so and a few miles from home we rounded a corner and into a clearing. The wind in the clearing musta thought the cab was lighter than we did, and picked it up over the side of the bed. Just caught sight of it tumbling like a die in the rearview mirror.

Luckily there was nobody close behind us, and the cab tumbled into the ditch. We backed up and ran to the ditch to find the once-square cab is now a parallel-O-gram. The doors were ripped off, glass busted, and every seam on the body is now cracked and torn. We loaded it back into the Elky and drove the rest of the way very slowly.

Moral = always tie down your loads. Even the heavy ones.

 

I had just finished installing the motor/tranny combo (second combo) and was going for my first trip. I called the wife out to hop in, and fired it up. Put it into drive, stepped on the gas and nothing happens. Tried again. Put it into reverse, gave it some gas and it took off like a rocket into a workbench and some boxes. No real damage. I had built a boxed frame around the gas tank and that saved it. Found out I had a bad tranny, Swaped out to a 200r4. All better.