dumbest/craziest thing you done with cars

Posted this on in the "stupidest thing you've done in your shop" thread about and indoor burnout gone wrong. I guess it fits here too.

I used to drink a lot more than I do now, sometimes with hilariously tragic results

The funniest part was when the 'ol lady (now ex) got home and found me in the back yard surveying the damage, she looked under the truck and said "is that the brand new air compressor you just bought?!!"

Being my usual smart*** self, I just cracked another beer and replied "yep *buurp*...but it's ok, it's still under warranty!! "

 

have loads
but I bought an Alfa Romeo Guilia Super for parts....get it home, after a 140mph blast and start to strip it...anyway after a couple of days we have it down to a door less shell wint no windows, hood or trunk lid, bumpers gone, no lights etc.......Hva a mate round the garage giving me a hand so we go for a drive...after a bit we go back to the garage....cut the roof off and go for another blast....this time getting really out of hand (remamber I lived in a residential Victorian area!!) by the time we got back to the garage the monocoque had sagged so much the split propshaft was s****ing on the floor of the shell!!!!.....it was agreat laugh thougth

one I regret
going to look at an Alfa Romeo GTC (early 70s convertable based on the Bertone coupe)....and Yeah I like Alfas OK!!.....so anyway pitch up at this house in a posh area of Coventry (earlsdon) to take a look.....go though the house and in to the garden to a collapsed garage being held up by said GTC....the car was a pile of ****, rust and dents being held together with paint...even at £500 I figure it's gona be cheaper and easier to buy a coupe and chop off the roof ...me and my mate decide to leave...on the way out we p*** a guy who just hands the owner the cash and says "where's the car".....we laugh and clear off........about a month later it shows up at auction, as found and sells for £29000....for ****s sake £29000 as it was..complete with bits of wood stuck in the roof and seats........OK so they made less than 30 righthand drive cars.....yes I am a jerk!!...and belive me I didn't learn my lesson....there are at least 2 other cars I really should have bought but p***ed up........Including a all alloy Frogeye sprite for practially free!!
Do have a mate who was asked to have a look at an XKE with the poss of buying it....quick poke round showed no rot.....at all...any where...lots of underseal, minor dents etc.....and a very flat floor!!....he gives me a call (as he knows squat about early Jags).....it was a flat floor alloy prototype value (at the time) at least £250K and he's been offered it at sumat like £10k......Mr ****ing honest tells the owner what it is and he don't even get a thanks!!

 

While Drunk and disorderly at a High School Graduation Party, a bunch of my Friends (oh yes, it took a large bunch of them) threw me in the Lake. I was laughing like Hell. The next thing you know, I got into the ring leaders 1971 Camaro and drove it into the Lake up to the Door Handles. When Mike came out of
the Cottage to give me Hell, I uttered the imortal words
" How do you like me know ? ? "

I still get a good laugh now and again when I think of that story.

It's been 29 years now and I wouldn't change a thing.

My motto : "You're Dead an awful long time".

VR&C.

 

Dumbest thing I've done with a car?....

Sold it (a 1954 Jaguar XK-120 drop head coupe, back in the 1970s)

Sold it (a 1951 two door Mercury sedan, back in the 1970s)

Sold it (the coupe in my avatar, in the 80s)

Lesson: KEEP 'EM !!

 

Much acid, in Wichita, 6 friends in a Pinto, no Reverse, trying to take the shortcut up to the on ramp.

 

1969, four of us in my friend's '56 Ford with a 383 Mopar set back 10 1/2" inches. No cover, just raw engine. Took it out on Ten Mile in Novi, hammered it. Firestone drag slicks on it hooked up good, actually a little too good, we snapped the u-joint straps off the rear end. Pulled off the side of the road. Two of us stayed with the car, we were in the back seat. Oh yeah, Illinois dealer plates on the car. Problem #1

Problem #2, Novi Police pull up behind us. Officer comes to the back window and asks which one is the driver. I tell him neither of us, they went to get a tow truck as one of the group's father has one. (Part owner of a used car lot in Illinios.) The cop looks down and sees the engine sitting between the seats.
Tells th other cop with him to come and see this! The other cop doesn't believe it runs, so with his permission I start it up. The first cop asks why we did this. I smart-***d him with "Well, it was the cheapest way to fix the heater". No sense of humor I determined at this point.

Problem #3,4 and soon to be #5. The other two guys pull the tow truck up as the cops are giving us a rough time about the out of state dealer plates.
On the tow truck, yep, Ilinois dealer plates! Now both of the cops are getting a little teed off by this. Threatening to tow both vehicles and impound the plates.

Now, Gordie's mother pulls up on the other side of the road. Gordie's dad was the dealer. She stops and gets out of her one year old Buick Electra with what kind of license plates on it? You guessing Ilinios? NOPE, this time ALABAMA dealer plates. Seems Gordie's dad bought this car from another dealer friend of his and left the plates on it.

These cops are now going *******, threatening to tow all three and take us all in. About this time, Gordie's sister starts crying in the Buick, the cops tell us to hook up the Ford, get the truck and the Buick home and off th road until they all get Michigan plates.

Great times, great memories when you are seventeen.

 

I flat towed an S-10 with a rope and it had no brakes. Pulled it 15 miles home. My buddy was driving the tow vehicle and I was in the S-10 using the clutch like a brake. Another time I pushed a 60 Studebaker Lark 18 miles to my house using a Geo Metro. The Lark was a rotted out pile of **** with no brakes. Luckily no one was hurt in that incident. A few years later I picked up a 51 GMC with no brakes. I put on a lot of no brake miles on the back roads. The fuel pump didn't work so I rigged up a motorcycle gas tank on the roof. I got a lot of weird looks.

 

Early 70s my bud took the seat out of his 54 Ford truck to get it upholstered, we aint gonna waste no cruising time so we put a couple of those aluminum green and white web chairs in it and took off, going around a curve on a gravel road he grabs second gear and g***es it, his chair collapses and he falls against me, my door opens and we both fall out and roll into the ditch just as his truck wraps itself around a telephone pole, we werent hurt but his truck was totaled. Spike

 

Built a car for 88 bucks .I bought a 1980 Pontiac 2 door Something sort of like a Parriseane .I took a quadrajet and grinded it flat and bolted it to the hood.I made a flat black area and ran a fake fuel line to it .Triangle mesh aircleaner .I also built a plywood wing which was made of alot of filler ,Also had cragars with black centers ,I use to get so many compliments about it being different ,People thought the carb was real , I built it for ****s and giggles.......Drove that around for a year without insurance....Young and dumb

 

I was hauling trash for the shop I used to work for back in high school, they had a trash trailer made out of an old truck bed and I was hauling it off in the shop truck.

Well I think the speed limit on that old dirt road leading to the dump was 10MPH but I was doing about 40, everything is going great until BOOM! I hit a big bump in the road (couldn't see very well with all the dust blowing) I look back and the trailer popped off , I stop the truck and right as I'm about to open the door the trailer goes whizzing by.

That trailer rolled about 100ft, thankfully it didn't tip or I woulda been in deep. I just hooked it back up dropped off the trash and never went speeding (down that road ) again.

 

I'm not old enough to have the cool 50's or 60's story but I do have a few from the 80's. We used to party out in this part of town that they started to develop and then quit. My friends and I had a really stupid game that pretty much got us laid every time. I had a pretty decent car that drove like a go cart. We would load the car full of girls and then take off down a hill on a street that was finished but still blocked off
by a metal barrier. I would get going about a 100mph and then act like I was going kill us all by hitting the barrier. I'd slide through a little space between the barrier & the curb before we would hit. This was called "the ride" It kinda got me famous in high school, but looking back I think that there was some good luck happening there too. Karma gave me a really cute daughter as a payback...go figure?

 

My 35 Ford pickup. It had a smooth vinyl seat and one day a came around the corner fast to go up the drive way. As I went around the corner I slide up against the p***enger door. The driveway was not straight and I had to steering the truck from the p***enger side up between the house, garage, barn a some shed. I manage not to hit any thing. I think I was doing about 60 when I went by the house. The garage was straight ahead and had to turn left to miss that then turn right to miss the barn. My dad was in the barn and seen the hole thing go down.

Had and old Ford panel truck that the bottom of the gas tank rutted out. Strapped a 5 gal. gas can behind the seat and ran a hose up through the floor. ran it that way for two years.

My 68 Mustang Drag car I forgot to put the hood pins in. About half track the hood came up and for about 1/2 second all I seen was blue then the hood rip loose and all I seen was the motor.

When it comes to bikes I have a hole list of crazy thing I did.

 

back in about 1979 i was in highschool and 2 freinds and i bought a relativly solid just a little ratty 67 malibu with a gutted interior and non running 283 4bbl and at. for $300.00 and flat towed it about 5 mi to one partners farm using a pickup and a chain with old tires surrounding the chain (as a bumper) with the farm friend driving the truck and me steering and braking the malibu. fortunatly the brakes still worked but the steering wheel was gone so we reasoned that 2 opposing vise grips would work just fine, and they did seeing that im still here to tell the tale.did I mention that I was sitting on a plastic milk crate ,you know the kind 4 gal. of milk are delivered to the store in (yes-young and dumb!!!!) we proceded to get the 283 running then torched out the rear wheel openings to fit huge 4x4 tires and slapped in 2 old VW buckets and of course no seat belts (WE DONT NEED NO STINKING SEAT BELTS!) and made a field bomb out of her. we had a great time with that car till we stuck it in the creek and blew the trans rocking it from forward to reverse trying to get it out. oh ya!- this was with the throttle STUCK wide open . we towed it back to the farm with a tractor ,unstuck the throttle and that old bulletproof 283 fired right up! after that we yanked the motor and sold it to get our money back and the car sat outside the barn untill the friends dad got pissed about it being in the way and crushed it with the tractor loader then hauled it off to the s**** yard. that car wasnt that bad and it makes me sad now that i had a part in destroying it! but i do have good memories of blasting through the fields with my best friends.

 

Raced figure 8s on a dirt track!

 

.......Trying to out run the cops in a corn field.....was fifteen at the time.in 1962

 

Me: Bought a 66 Ply Fury for $40. 318 Poly, 3 on tree. Beat to ****...well, the left side had one teensy little dent. The right side looked like it had been left on the street and hit by a snowplow ...REPEATEDLY! It was rusty, and had a broken front torsion bar. Got the thing running "good enough" where it sat, which was WAY up a hillside driveway. Even got the brakes working. Jacked it up and threw a block between the control arm and frame, and set off for home. As I got to the bottom of the hill there was no traffic coming so I figured I'd hustle left it onto the road...FORGETTING that the RF spring was really a chunk of 4X4... So the thing bounces around the turn, the block comes out and wipes the RF brake hose. Single M/C on that unit...but I was young, stupid, and going uphill so I rode it out on the bumpstop at about 40 ...until I got to the 90deg right hand corner at the top of the hill and figured out that the brakes were somewhere in my past. I had just enough on the ball to floor it and yank the lever back into 1st then dump the clutch. Locked the rears and I KNOW that old 318 had never seen that kind of rpm before...and I made it. So I decided to work with what I had. A buddy was following me in his pickup, and we drove 5 miles on back roads and made it across US101 to my ranch. The car only left there one other time, when my daily was broken and I had to go back almost the same route to get to work (with brakes this time).

All time craziest: I used to set tanks for a propane company in the Central Valley. There was a road called the "Raisin City Freeway" out there that ran dead straight for 4 miles with no stop signs. I'm in the crane truck one afternoon when I'm blinded by a glare about a mile ahead. It keeps getting closer and I'm thinking alien abduction when the Trigueruo Bros Hyder supermodified flies by me at about 180 (really)! The glare was coming from the aluminum wing on top. The wind blast was so bad it kickied up a mini tornado INSIDE the truck. About 10 sec later, their crew cab goes by at around 100 with 5 guys riding in back. They were doing a little testing, I guess.

 

20 years ago I s****ped a wrecked and parted Z28. All that was left was from the firewall back with no roof. How to tow??? I rachet strapped a bumper jack to it, horizontally, connected the jack to my driver with another strap, "trailered" it to the s**** yard 5 or 6 miles away... wtf

 

When i was about thirteen my dad my brother in law Dan and I were at my brother in laws house helping him clean up a little. My brother Ed had a 38 international that he was storing at Dan's house. Dan wanted to take it to My grandparents place 40 miles away but the truck had no brakes. They jacked the truck in the air and backed my dad's 62 cornbinder 'ol red' under it so that the front bumper of the 38 sat on the back bumper of ol red. They chained the bumpers together and held it in place with two big spud bars. It worked great until we tried to get on the freeway and realized that it didn't want to turn. We were on the far right sidewalk and started our left turn. We ended up having to go through a gas station that was by the onramp but we managed to get it on the freeway. We got about halfway there when my dad noticed a highway patrolman behind us. He pulled along side and looked at us in our dirty clothes and straw hats and just shook his head and drove off.

 

this is one of my old mans stories but in 1966 he had a 48 or 49 chev he sees a group of girls and thinks im gonna throw this ***** in reverse rev it up and dump the clutch...well he had it in second.... three on the tree.. car jumped forward and rearended his buddys falcon.thats how he met mom lol

 

As a senior in high school we needed a senior prank.........
We took my "garage car" a 1957 Belair and cut it in half between the doors.
We trailered the two parts to the school and chained them to either side of the
chain link fence just behind the school......kick....kick...kick (!) At first glance it looked like it had rolled down from the parking lot and ran through the fence, LOL.
I did learn a LOT from that car, thanks Dad !R.I.P.