I want to see the broken stuff...

OK I'll fess up. I learned first hand why a suicide front end is called that on my first attempt when I was about 15 or so.

Never ever use bed rails (from your old bunk beds) for structural pieces, or anything else other than holdin' your matress up for that matter.

Now that ought to get things started.

BTW I got lots of broke stuff around here you can look at while your pullin lines on my core support ifin ya want.

 

Grim, I'm not too proud to tell ya, you should have been at the HAMB drags Early saturday morning to see me shine up some guardrail.I know I should have had one more carrier bearing in my steering system but you never think you are going to be the dumb*** that overlooks that one critical nut in your half***ed steering design.

 

DUmb*** me, in a hurry to get my f1 goin to its first major run., bolted tubular headers on the motor and then used pep boys muffler clamps to hold the remainder of the exhaust system on the truck..

well 4 hours down the road, the heat from the exhaust musty allowed the exhaust pipe slip off the header and drop the remainder of the exhaust system on the pennsylvania turnpike..
what to do.. rip the entire mess off throw it in the bed.. and continue onward, sans exhaust system on one side of the motor, to ***berland maryland.

clark and the rest of the so what boys said that they heard me coming for 5 miles..

Now EVERY exhaust I build is FULLY welded...

 

O.K., here's a major ****-up for you. I had an '82 Mustang GT back around '89-'90. Terrible wheel-hop with the stock suspension so I decided to build some Traction Bars. Made 'em just like the ones for leaf springs, but since the Mustang had a Coil Spring rear suspension, I made them with a pad on the front that actually hit the control arms.

Worked great until about a week later when I forgot about a rough railroad crossing and down shifted at the last second to help slow the car down. The front of the traction bars went down, of course, and hit the first rail at about 25 mph...

Since that Mustang was of a unibody construction, the sudden stop didn't just tear up the suspension, it ripped the Floorboard of the car on each side where the control arms mount. The tire's also "re-arched" the wheel wells for me.

I think that was one time that I would have been better off buying something than trying to make it myself...

 

A good friend of mine and his wife(!) were both seriously injured when he used one of those tubular steering arms on a non-cross steer roadster - they rode their roadster over a cliff when the factory weld holding the tie rod boss in there vibrated out, after less than 20 miles! He said it looked like a good weld, but had chrome plating over it (hydrogen embrittlement?)...They survived, but whenever he sees one of those now, he mentions it to the car owner, and so far, nobody wants to hear about it. Nobody wants to hear bad news, even if it can prevent worse news...Good topic, Grimlok...BTW, I've never made a fabrication mistake myself. LOL

 

For a wedding present, my dad decided to get the brakes rebuilt on my 51 plymouth. I just wanted to be able to drive it around town before I could really tear into it. He took it to a shop that we've always used for fiero and other difficult repairs. They have never failed before or since.

The plymouth got back 5 days before my wedding. My dad cruised up the driveway at a snails pace. When he hit the brakes, nothing. He paid $700 for a long list of work that apparently never got done. Once we figured in the cost of a new garage door, it became a very expensive wedding gift. The shop did refund the money and they cut him a deal and dropping the third engine into his Windstar. All in all fantastic guys, but apparently the Plymouth baffled them.

 

I think about the most catastrophic failure I ever had a part in was this.

I built a street rod for a guy I know locally,a STRONG 406 chevy with Manual 5 speed.
I mounted the 9" with a set of stainless 4 bars and bracketry that Speedway sold me -it was listed as/ designed for a 32 Ford.

I supposed it was adequate for a street rod it was adequate for my application even if brand differed.
I instaled it with THEIR BRACKETS as lined out in the instructions.

I had used Coil over shocks at the appropriate mounting angle and spring rate [BEHIND the axle].
I finished up the car and as usual I was the test crash dummy who dialed it in and test and tuned the car before I sent the customer out with it...

I was convinced it was bulletproof so it wasnt on my mind to be concerned at all.
within a week he called and asked me to come and pick it up as it had " broke down on him"......
I took Regs Rollback over and located it and when I drove up it was setting weirdly.

I loaded it on the flatbed and then I got a real look at the trouble....
THOSE 4 BARS- were now ALL FOUR -in the shape of U-BOLTS!!!
the pinion was straight up! :

afater I got it in shop and up on stands I realized what the problem was.......
ALL the brackets had stayed welded on the rear end and also on the frame end of the four bars.

PROBLEM WAS- the front brackets were SINGLE CUTs and did not have a double or "sandwich set" of brackets on both sides of the urethane bushed rod ends.

this coupled with a LOT MORE horsepower than a typical 350 and 350 setup usually produces allowed the front brackets to flex enough to allow the 4 bars to deflect inward under tourqe statring the process of TOTAL FAILURE in motion.

the coils overs were all that save the day- they were bent in a 90 degree angle but did not break!
END result the pretty stainles 4 bars were not up to our virtually "RACE CAR" power.

I asked the seller and they said that of course they had-"never been a problem"

they did state that they had redesigned that offering as a DOUBLE CUT set of brackets as a PURELY COSMETIC change.
so the moral of the story is this ....

NEVER ***UME that if a big company sells it for a purpose it is SUITED FOR THAT PURPOSE!!!

re designed it myself and it still works 3 yrs later so it probaly is corrected now.

 

I was out at the strip with Jangleguy the morning Fe2 shined up the guardrail with his 35 chevy coupe. An unfortunate set of cir***stances put the car in the rail about 50 feet off the line but he forgot to tell the rest of the story....
The strip's asphalt ends about a foot before you hit the guardrail on the one side.. Ol' Fe's left front tire went down in the hole next to the guardrail and his oil pan made contact with the edge of the asphalt while he was grinding to a halt.. The pan fell right on the drain plug while the car was in motion, automatically unscrewing his drain plug and losing all his oil!
It was wild. We loaned tools to the poor guy to repair his steering shaft but the track's tech guys didn't like it.. said to put it on the trailer, or in Fe's case, put it on the "hook" and take it back to maryland..
I once added a few leaves to the tired rear springs of my 55 chevy hardtop. I celebrated by driving it from Portland to Medford Oregon. Jangleguy, living in Medford at the time, was about 14 years old then and I took him back to Portland with me. We decided to drive the scenic coast-hiway back up north and the 235 in the 55 was running like a watch. Came around a corner and "snap!"...the right rear corner of the car dropped down and the tire, mounted on a wide chrome reverse wheel began grinding and smoking. I pulled it over and took a look...busted the rear part of the main leaf! The appreviated spring was resting against the trunk floor.
If I'd only ground a bevel in the new leaf I'd installed, it may not have ground it's sharp edge into the main leaf and weakened it.
As luck would have it, there was a little rural fire station a few steps away and I saw 2 nice 4X4's against the side of it...about 12 inches long.
I jacked up the car with the bumper jack and slid the blocks between the floor and the busted spring.. continued on...........
Got to the portland city limits about 3 in the morning when the overdrive sprag unit did the chicken. No more forward gears...I had to back about 15 miles home! The next day, my neck was siezed up!

 

Not a hot rod story but a good story about trusting a welder...my cousin from Minnesota was a certified bridge welder and applied for work at the Kerr-McGee nuke plant in OK City. This was about thirty years ago.
One of those jobs where they had about twenty guys lined up with radiation counters on their suits- you'd go in and weld until the tag turned color, then the next guy would go in.
To get the job you needed to weld a "card", a good weld, on a certain type of steel that would be tested by the company's inspector.
Stayed at a motel that first night and wander over to the local bar...guy said, "Come on out to the parkin lot". In the trunk of his car he had a box of "cards". "Twenty bucks man and they'll p*** ya. Just carry it in under your coat and slip it on the table"
He was doin a land office business
My cousin said no thanks but it makes ya wonder

 

Too bad you guys couldn't have been there to see Rocky whipping that '55 through the streets of Portland in reverse! It was night time, so anyone going our way had headlights pointed at them, and oncoming traffic saw tailights in the "wrong" lane. We made it clear across town without incident...Now I always radius and bevel all leafs - afraid of a charliehorse in my neck if I don't...

 

The first rod I built was my 35 Dodge. It was a truck box case, as in all the parts fit into my pickup box. After a few years of working on it off and on, the last 6 months were a mad thrash. The car went from a rolling ch***is/body shell wothout floors to a driver in 6 months with me, my wife and our 10 year old son the only ones working on it. We got it running about 2 days before the 95 Back to the 50s in Minnisota, a 500 mile one way trip. We managed to put about 40 miles on it before we left. It was a memorable trip.

There was not a hood on the car, the only gl*** was the front and rear gl***. About 10 miles from home, it started spitting power steering fluid out and it went right to the windshield. Good thing the wife had some kleanexs so we could wipe the PS fluid off the windshield so we could see to get to a gas station. Couldn't find any reason for the PS exit, so we refilled it, cleaned the gl***, got a fresh supply of kleanex and were back on the road. We got about another 40 miles before the windshield was covered with fluid again, only this time it was motor oil (and the PS was low again). The oil was coming from the valve cover breather. Refilled the oil, (about 1/2 qu low) and topped off the PS, cleaned off the windshield and were on the road again. We soon hit the interstate and discovered that the speedo was way off. Acording to it, the trafic was running just under 100 mph. I determined the motor would push out the motor oil more if we went over 90 mph, so we slowed down to 90. The first gas stop was at Madison. there we found out that you had to fill the tank REAL slow. The car actually drove pretty nice. I was beat, the wife volenteered to drive as long as we were on the interstate, so she climbed behind the wheel. The instructions were pretty simple. Keep the speed around 90, if anything doesn't seem right, pull over and wake me up. I p***ed out for at least 1 1/2 or 2 hours. When I woke up, I almost couldn't see through the oil on the windshield. We were p***ing everytrhing on the road, pretty fast. I looked at the speedo, over 115 from the p***enger side (Autometer 160 mph unit)! We stopped at the next exit, added a qt of oil, cleaned the windshield, got gas and food, changed drivers, and were on the road again.

It rained almost all weekend. We bought some clear garbage bags to put over the tops of the doors to use as windows. We had a ball all weekend.

After we got home I was checking things out under the car and saw the u bolts that held the rear end to the springs were loose, not just not tight loose, gap between the axle and the leaf spring loose! Wonder if I ever tightened them? We put 66,000 miles on that old Dodge in 7 years. Might not have been pretty, did a few really screwed up things on it. It was a learning experance. It was a good car and we had fun with it. Gene