So I am a moron...motor build idiocy....

My "shop" truck is a 91 Suburban 3/4 ton. Nothing fancy, just a bare bones truck. The truck has about 190,000 miles on it, and ran like a top. It had a bit of a coolant leak that I was aware of and as long as I filled her up every so often, she ran fine.....

Well, I left for "hurricane duty" in Florida last August, and left the truck at home with my wife. The truck runs out of coolant, and blows *both* head gaskets between the center cylinders. Not her fault, I should have told her about the leak and how to fill the truck up....

Anyhow, the last couple of Saturdays I have spent installing new top end gaskets. No upgrades, or hop up parts, just gaskets. I get the motor buttoned up last night, valves adjusted, and go to drop in the distributor. It hits something. I think "Thats strange"...and have my buddy take a look. He does the same thing the distributor hits something.... We shine a flashlight down the hole and notice that in my infinate wisdom, I had left two rags under the intake... Not only that, but the rags also covered the lifters, and were underneath the pushrods!

This was at 10:00 last night, and I promised the wife I would be done at 10:30....I finally made it home at 1:00, and the wife was pissed!

Yeah, I am a moron. So, the moral of the story is "make sure you remove all the rags you use before you button the motor up"....

Any of you have any stories of your motor building stupidity you would like to share so I don't feel like the only "tool" on the planet?

 

I'm sure we have all done something stupid....
I once spent 2 days trying to get a Ford 351W to start, before I realized the distributer spins counter clockwise so my plug wires were all off. Amazingly it almost ran on 4 cylinders that way.

 

we buttoned up the motor in my dads stock car. I looked everywhere for the 7/16 wrench I had been using. Half way through the first hot lap....we found it.

 

haha me too! Figured it out after only ONE day though haha

 

I have never been able to complete a brake/fuel line plumbing job with out doing this: I flare the tube without putting the nut on, so I have to cut it off and do it over!

 

my dad and i were taking the engine and tranny out of my fairlane and after getting it out and disconnecting the two we put the engine on the trailer so i could haul to my schools autoshop so i could modify it. Anyways, my dad thought it was a good idea to get the trailer out of the way and started to roll it himself up little gravel road he made for storing his trailer. Now there is a slight incline, and an engine is not light by any means so when the trailer comes to the gravel incline it stops abrubtly and the engine rolled off and rolled down the hill a half a turn. think it landed on its side and rolled over the intake and onto its other side. i think my dad was pissed because i got tranny fluid all over the driveway and he wanted the trailer out of the way...this is because we didn't have the chains on the engine right, basically we hauled the engine/trans out vertically. only damage to the engine was a bent up valve cover. nothing internally was bent and no cracks in the engine. the oil pan didn't even get bent up, still not quite sure how that happened. i know that wasn't a build, but it was the start of it, and putting them back in was a lot smoother.

 

You're a moron Keth.

 

Hey Keith
Don't feel to bad ,I am sure alot of us have done similair things when buliding something.

One time I had a buddy helping me install a 396 big block chev into a 70 nova. We could not find one tranny bolt we were missing. I find a replacement bolt and we finish up the install. I fire the car up and head down the road, I get about 1/2 mile and the motor just dies. I towed it back the shop and discover that the dizzy is not turning, turns out that the missing tranny bolt fell into the lifter valley when the distributor was out and wound up breaking the cam in half.

 

At least nothing was broken....Are you at work?

I stopped by Sam's, and got that vaccuum bullshit figured out this morning, filled her with antifreeze/water, and go to starth the fucker, battery is dead.... nice.

 

F- you Nads, I've seen you do some stupid shit....Did you see the logo I made you on the "logo" thread by SamIyam????

 

See, now that one hurts!

 

A couple years ago one of the kids who had a summer job here got a later El Camino from his uncle. It needed an engine so he had a "friend" build him a 327. Supposed to be a medium street engine, the guy charged him a "Good buddy" price of $1900. Ran like crap and had a decided knock. Used a lot of oil for a new engine. Finally, after a couple weeks, a much better builder tore it doun and found the guy had used .030 pistons on a .040 bore. Kid got most of his money back when they looked at the rest of the internals.

 

I timed the Vertex mag in the dragster using the "cellophane in the points" method. Pushed that car all over Union Grove trying to get it to fire.....no luck. At the end of the day I found a tiny piece of cellophane in the points.

Once I removed it it ran like Jack the Bear !!!

 

I helped rebuild a 351 with a buddy and he couldn't get it to even turn over once it was buttoned up and installed. Now, I wasn't there when he connected it to the tranny, but it ended up that he hadn't seated the torque converter all the way when he installed it. He sold the truck for $1200 after getting real frustrated and his buddy was driving it the next day. Of course, this is the same guy who spent $200 throwing parts at his 60s Bronco that wouldn't get any fuel in the carb only to have me come over, dump some gas in a bucket, and proceed to test it discovering that the switch between the two tanks had gone bad and his new fuel pump/new lines/rebuild on the carb was all for naught. Come to think of it, this is the same guy who ghost rode his harley up his driveway, scraping along his freshly painted bronco, and through the back garage wall into his basement after it got stuck on the broken curb pulling into his driveway - I guess pulling in the clutch had never occured to him. He now owns a fuel-injected fatboy and is in the middle of securing a $200k business loan to open his 'chopper shop'. The cool thing is, he told me I'm allowed to work on my hotrods and bikes in his shop, so there is that. Hopefully, he's a better businessman than mechanic...

 

I remember my Uncle Ray had changed the intake gaskets on his old Ford LTD.... the one that is 30 foot long. It ran like crap after he was done. He brought it over to my Dad's house for him to check out. After yanking off the intake, Dad found it... two screwdrivers and a pair of gloves! Ran like a champ afterwards.

I was working under the hood of the Hellcamino, putting in the tin fenderwells which go together with allen bolts. Halfway through, I can't find the stupid allen wrench.

About 50 miles into the maiden voyage to the Street Machine Nationals, the left front tire blows... the culprit... that stupid allen wrench which fell between the plastic inner fender and the sheetmetal with pointy-side down.

On the plus side, I got a magazine photoshoot! (thanks OGNC)

 

I had bought a 31 A pickup with flattie a few years ago-and after assembling it from the boxes and bags of parts ,I was ready to start the engine.

I had some buddies come over for the start up "show"..........
Long story short- I fiddled with the dual point distributor and "timing it" about an eight hour day and wore out their patience till all of them left.
I went back after supper and it finally occoured to me what was wrong.
The small coil of wire on the BACK SIDE of the Porcelin ballast resistor was burnt in two......NO FIRE...sheer genius at work there.

 

Me and my buddy David Speer(now deceased)and Ed Grubbs and a few others were gettin' properly soused one night as we assembled a motor for our roundy round endeavors of the time.

Got the thing assembled on the stand and ready to install,called it a night and went home.Got to the shop bright and early to clean up and get ready for the next day and one of my Snap Along screwdrivers was missin'.

Didn't think a whole lot about it I figured I'd find it during the day in my travels around the shop,it just got left layin' around some where.Now keep in mind in the early 70's we built the motors loose as hell .012+ piston to wall and had to put fresh rings in every 4 weeks or so when you felt the car gettin' weak off the turns.

Anyway to make a long story short,the time came to freshen up the the motor and during the tear down we found my missing screw driver layin' in the lifter valley with the handle perfectly formed to the area of the block over the top of the cam .

The moral of the story,even if you're tanked to the gills find the missing tool. LOL

It didn't hurt anything and we had a few good weeks of racin' but it theoretically could have been ugly .

T.OUT Next story please!!LOL

 

Shiiiit...Your a novice when it comes to fucking stuff up....

In the last year and a half I have....Toasted TWO oil pumps...THREE camshafts, ONE torque converter..ONE tranny pump...and cracked a VERY expensive block...

Come back when you can challenge ME...


I won't even tell you what happened here...... -Abone.

 

I was getting my Chevy ready to go to James Dean a couple years ago and was drinkin a few beers putting on my WWW tires and hubcaps. Left the next night and was cutting across country over some hilly roads. Had to radio ahead and tell my dad to slow down a bit the ol girl was a little "squirly" in all the curves at speed. Of course I just hadn't driven the car that much, and certainly not at high speeds on narrow roads. We pull into Lafayette and one of the guys that was following pulls up and tells me my left tire is wobbling. So I stopped and guess what....2 missing lug nuts and the others were backed off pretty good. Moral of the story....don't drink a lot when putting on tires

 

A bunch of years ago I had to replace the intake manifod gaskets on a 540ci ford motor in a bluebird bus, found a well lubricated 1/2" drive impact gun in the valley from the last guy...SCORE!

Driving tow truck brings some good stories also, gotta love the guy who's car died for no reason & he says it has to have been caused by the last mechanic that worked on it, so I ask him the symptoms & it sounds like it ran out of fuel, I look @ the gas guage & its on empty, I say sir do you know if your gas guage is acurate? He says yes, well its on empty, put a couple gallons of gas in it & all is well.

Went on a lockout call once where on of the rear windows was completely rolled down............................

 

When assembling one of my prize 389 Pontiacs, I had some cool grade 8 allen head 3/8ths bolts just perfect for mounting my new oil pump. I used 'em and slapped the engine in a 56 Pontiac hardtop. The engine ran great and I was buttoning up all the details when we got a springtime cold snap.
Fired up the engine that morning to find zero oil pressure!
I yanked the distributor out to check for a busted oil pump driveshaft and when I peer down the hole? There's no oil pump shaft at all!
I pulled the pan to find the super-dooper grade 8 bolts were brittle enough to snap off when the oil pump attempted to pump the cold, thick oil. The pan and pickup were lying in the bottom of the pan. Put the stock pump bolts in place and never had another problem with it

 

Many years ago, my friends wanted me to help them rebuild a 390. One guy worked for Dow Chemical and got some good parts cleaner. We were working in a closed garage because it was winter and we were being very careful to do everything right. We even torqued the oil pan bolts to spec. After the oil pan bolts we got to giggling sooo much that we realized the Dow Chemical parts cleaner was making us high so we quit for the nite. The next morning one guy remembered that even tho we had carefully torqued the oil pan, we hadnt torqued the rod bolts............

 

Ditto. Except with a 390. And mine didn't run at all.

 

My Dad and I were up until the wee hours buttoning up a motor for the next days race. After a couple of hours of sleep, I backed the truck and trailer up to the garage to load the racecar. We hadn't had a chance to fire the motor for fear of pissing off the neighbors so I let it warm up a bit. Sounded great. Stick it into gear, let out the clutch, nothing. It didn't move. After a bit of head scratching, I found the clutch disk laying the workbench. Doh!


Chris

 

Dont ask me how I know that a SBC makes a hell of a racket without the oil pump drive shaft fitted under the dizzy. Just dont ask me...
dadseh

 

With the help of our old friend BudWeiser several of us put together a high compression small block on Saturday night for Sunday's races. Installed the pistons turned around. Didn't figure it out until we installed the heads and tried to turn it over. Happend almost 40 years ago and I still think of it everytime I install pistons.

 

One night I was dropping my girl off at after a date and my battery suddenly would not turn the motor over. I called AAA and they gave me a jump. After the driver left I somehow locked the driver's door while the car was running and myself outside. I called AAA again and they sent the same guy who was just a few blocks away. As he is slim-jiming the door I look up and see that the passenger door is unlocked. I didn't say anything and he had the door unlocked in about 30 seconds.

 

My dad, his friend and myself were tearing down the engine in my moms 91 MB 350SD (turbodiesel, for those that don't know). We thought it had a cracked head or head gasket since it was overheating quite regularly. of course we did this as a last resort. anyways, while getting it put back together we forget to torque the camshaft bolt enough, but it was enough to hold it while running the car for a few minutes. I start it up, sounds good, dad goes over to rev it a little. We all hear a loud POP and the sound of crunching metal. My dad calls the MB dealership and says...well, we need one more part. the guy on the other end says...what do ya need? my dad replies, an engine! 10,000 bucks later and it uses a quart every 900...although MB says this is normal. i say that is bullshit.

Sorry...i know that this didn't pertain to trad rods and customs, but i thought it went with the thread.

 

Once, I forgot to screw the oil pressure sending unit back into the block.

....lucky for me, I had decided to spin the prime the system by using a drill motor. I was looking at the pushrods waiting for signs of oil and did not notice 3-4 quarts of oil getting sprayed on the firewall

 

Don't feel bad about not having your wife briefed on water procedures. Ask Kustombuilder how much incinvenience a water leak that needs constant attention can cause when it's your daily driver.


Frank