Crazy/Insane Shop Accidents

Summer of '66 and I am putting the finishing touches on my stick change-over on my '57 Bel Air hard top.
It about 5:00 PM on a warm Sunday afternoon and I want to run it up the street to see how it runs.
Get one block from the house and all is good.... by about the 4th block the danger signs are on.
I am now hearing a distinct bearing howl in my Muncie box.
I remember now what I didn't do. I forgot to add gear oil to the new gearbox.
Only 3 more short intersections to go and in I pull to the friendly neighborhood Texaco station to grease it up.
Real nice kid in there is all apologies because he just took all the tires, oil cans and other display stuff off the gas island and crammed everything into the lift bay.
Tells me I can't borrow the lift but if it's okay with me he'll let me work on it in his side yard before he does the final lock down for the night.
"Great, let me have your pump-grease gun and some gear oil, an open end wrench your floor jack and I'll do this drill right in your driveway"
Kid says it's fine with him and I'm into this quickie gear oil job in the blink of an eye.
I'd left the engine running all this time by the way, It's August and it's hot out.
Do you see where this is going yet?
In my extreme haste I drop to the ground while the kid is floor jacking the Chevy's front cross member and with my right arm out stretched I grab onto the left front header pipe to pull myself underneath said "hot" Chevy.
I let out a scream that brought everyone nearby running to see what happened.
My right hand turned instant white and puffed up to 3 times it's normal size.
My hand looked like a cartoon Mickey Mouse hand.
Needles to say I couldn't drive my new Muncie stick home with a puffy right hand so my brother came up the street to drive it home for me.
It was quite a while before I could touch that Hurst shifter that summer.

 

Another stupid incident.
My best friend's mother pulls into our shop one afternoon in the middle 70's. It's late December and very cold outside where she parked.
Her '73 Malibu coupe ,she tells me, is not holding a charge.
I ask her to pop the hood release from inside and start the engine so I can see any possible belt slippage or other gremlins.
The problem with this maneuver is my hand has dropped down in the area in front of the alternator as she lights it off in the same instant.
The fan is spinning now and clips my wedding ring finger right on the band and instantly turns my ring into a tight oval shape.
The good part is the Malibu had a clutch fan so it was a gentle strike but still my finger ached a lot and this ring was not coming off easily now.
Fuck it! I figure, I'll straighten it out later with some forceful tools, soap or oil it up and eventually work it of my throbbing finger.
Next I move to the battery. It's very cold outside working on it and the finger is not behaving either. Call me clumsy if you must.
I'm holding one wrench, a screwdriver and a pair of pliers when somehow I drop one of them across the positive top mount terminal, the other tools touch the negative terminal and complete the circuit thru the bent up ring I'm wearing.
Well, now I'm crying like a baby. The hot ring is juicing the wee outta my finger and the finger is turning shades from red to purple to something like rotten eggplant.
Naturally the burning hot ring cant be twisted free from said crushed and now electronically singed finger and no amount of snow I'm throwing on it is helping much either.
She didn't offer to pay me for my work and she never came back again for any kind of service. WTF !

 

Got a couple, but will do just one right now.

Years ago one of the guys who went to my high school decided he was going to learn how to be a mechanic. Pestered me to get him a job at my dad's shop, but I knew that was no dice so he ended up getting hired on at a service station down the street.

He hadn't been working very long when somone came in with a big ol truck flat. He got it off OK under the direction of a more experience man who then fixed the hole in the tube, and got it back together.

Things got busy at the pumps so the experienced man was waiting on a customer when the kid went back and decided to air up the tire.........

No chain around the tire and wheel...... split ring....... he died almost instantly when the damn thing came apart.

I won't ever forget it, and afterwards, my dad said see? .... That's why we don't hire kids. Hell, that other kid was a year or two older than me, but I knew what he meant.

SAFU

 

This involves my '53 Lincoln convertible and my head.
First day of summer vacation 2 years ago and my wife wants to go to the Indian casino for a couple of days and nights of gambling but before we leave I want to work on the wheel studs of my Lincoln.
She's not happy but I promise I'll be done with it by noon and off we'll go to feed the tribe.
The wheel studs have too big a shoulder to properly hold my MacLean wire wheels on the hub so I've got to knock them all out to switch over to the right studs.
No big deal, can finish it by noon (maybe?).
Both fronts get driven out fairly easy with my mighty sledge hammer, some double nuts and whatever black magic I can conjure up.
The rears really suck, they involve a bigger hammer, lots of swinging, and too much cursing.
It's now HIGH NOON and one wheel left to pound on.
I'm down on the left rear, I'm getting real tired and very frustrated.
I grab my rolling stool with the spiffy JEG's logo on it and rest my ass on that while I pour all my might into the meanest sledge hammer I got to pop the last 5 studs out.
The key words here are....... ROLLING STOOL.
On the very last stud,(now I'm really tired) I give it a mighty swing and the freaking stool shoots out from under my ass.
With nothing to support my rear I tumble forward, loosing all balance, and fall head first into the rear wheel well.
I give my jaw a little thump against the brake drum but no biggie , hardly felt it.
I'm a little stunned though as I pull myself out and drop down in a heap on the garage floor.
I survey the situation and see the stud is out.
As I start to insert the new one I look up at the top of the wheel opening where lies to big pointy vertical studs in the quarter panel that align and hold my fender skirts.
Those stinkin' studs are holding a big chunk of my scalp now.
The blood is now pooling on my new epoxy floor at an alarming rate.
Easy stuff to wipe off the new painted floor though. Still no biggie.
I head into the house to survey my damage and maybe grab a bandage if needed .
The wife is waiting at the door, suitcase packed ready to leave. She takes one look at me SCREAMS you cant travel looking like that, and dials 911.
The rest of the afternoon was spent in the emergency room where they bombed my head with tons of staples and injected massive quantities of drugs into me to kill the pain.
We did get to the casino very late that night. She drove all the way, grouchy. I slept in a medically induced stupor.
I gambled thru the early morning hours high as a lab rat on my HMO-Blue provided meds wearing six pounds of bandages on my head, and getting free sympathy drinks from the cocktail waitress.
Took about 3 days for the headache to go away, had a lot of fun,
and the Lincoln's wheels held securely.

 

Ever been hit in the face with a wrench?
To remove the tires off my bagged sled you have to unbolt the rearend! Shocks, panhard bar, bags etc.! So I'm under there last weekend doing the deed. I have a 3/4" boxend wrench on the shock bolt nut and I need to get a little more leverage. I pull on it to slide into a better position when it it slips off and goes full force into my face! I pull my stupid ass from underneath the car sit up in a daze when my wife walks out and just shakes her head and asks "again?". I'll just tell everyone I was in bar fight. Hahahah -stick

 

I was laying upside down in the seat of an IMCA modified, mig-welding a broken brake pedal assembly at Canyon Raceway in AZ...Crawled in there pretty easy, didn't even think about having to get out...both my feet were sticking out the window, head turned, welding helmet sorta on, gun was sizzling away when I all of a sudden an extremely large BB of molten steel shoots up in the air, and DIRECTLY INTO MY RIGHT EAR-HOLE-A hole in ONE! I heard it sizzle when it hit my eardrum, burnin' wax, I dropped the stinger and started hollering for help, trying to get upright-two VERY BIG ol'e Missouri boys from Dirtworks Racecars that were touring with us heard me yelling, knew from my tone it was serious, and one grabbed each leg and lifted me outa the car in about 2 seconds. (I'm 6ft, 265lbs at the time...) My ear was hurting fierce, so I grabbed a bottle out of the icechest and dumped as much as I could into my ear-hole. It stopped the burning...awful sound, hearing your flesh sizzle up close like that...
8 weeks later, I'm at the doctor and mention this incident, wondering what damage was done-he looks in my ear and says, "hummmmmm" Gets a squeeze bulb of warm water and metal pan, puts it up to my ear and squeezes the water in. About 1/10 of a second later, we hear a "ping" as a metal BB about the size of a real BB hits the tin pan-we look at each other and start laughing. He said it left a red mark on the eardrum, but apparently no major damage...OK, so you woulda had to have been there...

EW

 

I was laying under my truck trying to loosen up some old exhaust bolts. So I am pulling towards me like a genius when the socket slips off and I hit myself with everything I have right in the teeth with a 1/2 inch drive ratchet. It knocked two of my teeth perfectly back like they were recliners and swole my lip up so bad I could see it out of the corner of my eyes a few minutes later. That was about the worst for me, I did however have a brush with death trying to get some drag springs in my mustang. There is still a hole in the floor from the spindle on that one, but I was extremely lucky and the spring went back up into the wheel well

 

In 1969 after high school I worked in a Toyota dealership in Lakewood, NJ (grease
rack, new car prep, used car lot repairs, etc.) One rainy day a late model Cadillac
pulls up just outside the bay door with a real bad miss. This nice looking older lady
(now I'm 18, she maybe 30s) gets out and comes up to me and asks if I can look at
her car. Before I could answer her one of the older mechanics comes over and says
he'll take care of it. He opens the hood and a plug wire is dangling. She asks him
if he wants her to turn the car off, he says no and proceeds to grab the wire. Well
after he banged his head a few times, I shut the car off and installed the plug wire.

 

I pulled a nail out of a customer's tire and proceeded to dress the puncture with a tire plug reamer. Went to push the reamer through the puncture, slipped, and put the reamer right through my left hand. Ouchie.

 

I've seen plenty of close calls in the past, from being in a rush or not respecting the work to be done.

I attached pictures of a couple of guys that I thought were seriously going to hurt themselves in a shop I was in. Nobody paid any attention to them really, because they were a little loony.

They had a perfectly good lift right next to them, but they insisted on using a cherry picker & using a 2x4 piece of wood to brace this car they were working on.

I always figured they would hurt themselves or somebody else, but it didn't happen.

 

16yo, fresh out of HS & apprentice mech at the local Jaguar dealer...

Boss was a cheap bastard.

I'm out back detailing a customers car & the boss tells me to syphon a couple of gallons of gas out of it & put in his car....

Not wanting to get a mouthful of gas I use the hose on the vacuum cleaner to get the flow going....


Yeah, it sucked straight gasoline into the electric motor with fairly predictable (& very spectacular) results.

There was a BOOOOOM & I'm stood there holding the hose which is now only connected to the end plate of the vacuum cleaner, the rest is nowhere to be seen....

Before the boss arrives I shut the gascap & get around to the other side of the car. He asks WTF happened as he saw pieces of plastic landing on the other side of the street out front.. after clearing a 2 storey building... I tell him "dunno, was just vacuuming the carpet & the fucking cleaner exploded"

He picked up as many pieces as he could find & took the cleaner back to the shop for a refund...

I got away with that one

 

I was going to drain the water out of the bottom of my big air compressor so I first let all the psi out through a sprinkler type valve on the side. Opened it up all and the pressure went out...our so I thought.
This thing had been sitting outside since like the Korean war and junk had solidified inside the tank around the area of the valve and stopped the air from being able to escape .
I got down on the ground, opened up the drain plug and WHAMMM! Shit exploded all over my face. Good thing I wear glasses, otherwise I might have been blinded. It really freaked the neighbors out, they said I looked like a coal miner.

 

Wasn't a car one for me. Just my house coming back to get me.

Changing the main shutoff for the house in the basement, up in the joists.

2 pipe wrenches. One slips and hits me right between the eyes. See stars, head upstairs to check out the damage. Grab the butterflys (don't we all have them in the cabinet?!), look in the mirror, and say, nope, those won't work.

Home alone, drove myself to the hospital. 20 miles away. Hit it so hard it started bleeding about 3-4 miles from there. Didn't just split it, but actually hit it so hard it put a Y split in it.

-Mark

 

I just had one a month ago. not working on a car but building an office in my shop. got it all framed in and have the drywall on the ceiling inside, I'm up top of the office on a sheet of plywood stuffing the bays with insulation. I'm on the last one, kneeling down and pushing the insulation down so I can slide the last sheet of plywood over and nail it down.

for reasons I have yet to figure out the next thing you know I am falling 8 feet head first through the space between two 2x6's nailed 16" between centers. how I fit through there without getting stuck is yet another mystery.

so I landed head first on my shoulder and back. broke 6 ribs and messed up my shoulder on the right side. it could have been a shitload worse. a slight twist one way or the other and I could have broken my neck.

that was March 3 and I'm still hurting.

up until then I'd say I had a pretty good shop safety record.

 

I've learned from the follies of others.

One summer I had a job at my cousin's tire shop, replacing the goomba who worked there previously. Apparently he was inflating a truck tire without benefit of the cage, or chains. He flew through the air with the greatest of ease, without benefit or net or trapeze......

The other was a friend of mine who fired up his 57 Chevy in gear with a jury rigged remote starter while he was working under the hood. car was in gear and took off in reverse out the shop, went in a lazy half circle around the yard before knocking the chicken coop off its' foundation. Just like the movies - dust, feathers, and pissed off chickens. If I'd have had a video camera, AFHV would have been sending me the cheque.......

 

A friend of mine a few years back was clearancing a crankcase for a stroker crank, problem was it was a VW magnesium block.
As he was grinding the mag dust was settling on his overalls at a very 'delicate' area.
He clipped a steel stud with the grinder and there was a large flash as the powder ignited!

Don't know what did more damage...the flash, or him trying to beat the thing out!
I just about pissed myself laughing.........

 

Good lord 2many, sounds like you might be getting close to out of spares. You might want to ease up from here on out. Good stories though.

 

My neighbor came outside to find me under my pickup cursing at an o2 sensor. She notices I have yellow wheel chocks on my truck and exclaims how glad she is... I made the mistake of asking why:
Her son was a mechanic. In his driveway he was doing something simple and was under the car. He reached for something to help pull him under the car more and he must've hit the transmission linkage or something, because the car started rolling down the driveway and took him with it before he even knew what was going on. A neighbor tried to get to him but it was too late. I'll spare the graphic details, but I ALWAYS chock my wheels now, because we always think, " Eh, i'll never grab something under there like that." Never say never. After I heard that story, I put my wrenches down for a few hours to get that image out of my head.

 

Another machine shop gem from the archives. I was working in a R&D shop for a large company and the machine shop was spotless even though we had some big pieces of equipment in there.

We had engineering and tech types in and out of it all day, dropping off or picking up work. One day, we had a big piece of stainless steel being turned on a huge LeBlond gap lathe. The chip coming off was simply treacherous and as bad as razor wire.

One summer intern was going by and the chip was coming off the back of the lathe and went over the chip guard. It was on a slow speed due to the size of the piece of material and the alloy. The intern grabs ahold of the chip, realizes it was as sharp as hell and pulls his hand back.

The chip by now had encircled his index finger. All I heard was a yelp and saw people running over. The chip had cut a barber-pole groove on his finger down to the bone. We had a nurse at the facility, she patches him up and he goes to the ER. I forget how many stitches he got, but it was a nasty wound to say the least.

Later that same year, we were forced to tame down our Xmas tree in the shop. We were in the habit of hanging rejected parts and interesting chip curls off of it. Again, some passerby happened to get ensnarled while admiring the decorations.

Bob

 

For some reason I was expecting a sheetmetal-in-the-drill-press story like my junior highschool shop teacher used to tell.

That was even worse than the multitude of horror stories my chemistry teacher used as warnings.

-Dave

 

no way! really? hahahaha if thats not a sign you shouldnt own that car, i dont know what is?

 

hhahahahahahaha! only you!

 

My middle school shop teacher had 5 fingers total, both hands. He was a good shop teacher and very safety conscious. I never heard how he lost them. NO JOKE.

 

I saw a few in my HS days, hair caught in the drill press, the spinning piece of sheet metal in the drill press trick. Luckily no one got badly hurt even though we were well supervised.

Bob

 

I had worked in car shops where some guys survived some horrific accidents.

The worst was an "old timer" (he was 54 when I knew him, but he could pass for 84) who had a tire blow up in his face on a tire machine. It broke almost every tooth in his head, split his nose right up the middle as well.

He was taken to a dentist (this was in 1964 or so) who advised him to go to the local bar and drink as much as possible then come back. He did so and the dentist extracted all the broken teeth. Not 100% sure if I believe that one, but a scary-assed story!

Bob

 

Shit, I managed most of the first page, and this last one, and that's enough for me. I lost a finger when I was 12 and anything involving blood and/or digits makes my stomach churn.


Although yesterday I was telling one of the blokes at work a "hair caught in the drill press" story - the victim lost a big patch of hair at the front of his pate.

 

1985, I'm a 'tech' at a chevy dealer, 2 guys beside me named Smurf and Neck. Smurf is under a cutlass hood torching something on the frame, catches fire. Fire extinguishers are dead, Neck picks up a gallon jug, sniffs, shrugs and slowly walks over to help out. He pours the MINERAL SPIRITS on the fire and....................! The rest of us are laughing our asses off but Smurf somehow saves the cutlass. Sadly, in 01, Neck lets a set of portable drive-on ramps send him to the hereafter. DO NOT USE CONCRETE BLOCKS EITHER! peace

 

Underneath my coupe with a air chisel trying to bust the last rivet loose on a running board bracket, turned out to be the only thing holding the drivers side of the frame together. Good thing model A's dont weigh too much.

 

At the workplace, there was a big rig trailer that was having problems with the hydraulic system for the gear on the front of the trailer used for parking after disconnect from the tractor. The system was pressurized and a end cap was loosened to relieve the pressure but nothing happened, so the cap was removed. Again, nothing happened so the mechanic looked in the hole when this stuck plug decided to let go. He lost an eye and had to have the plug removed from his head. Luckily it ended up between the skull and the outer skin - he could have easily been killed.

 

I worked for a used car dealer that sold mainly over the net. Ebay autotrader so on.. The shop we worked out of had a lift in it previously but was removed when they moved out.. I said I wanted one so the owner ordered a cheap one and paid some guys to come in put it together and so on while I was out at a auction. Well shortly after I needed to put a Harley f-150 on a lift to fix the damaged airdam so it could ship out.. It made it about 2-3 feet in the air when the concrete rumbled and the 2 posts pulled out of the concrete and slamed inward on f150's cab slaming back down to the ground.. It wasnt totaled jus needed a set of doors.. As for the lift it was tweaked. I refused to use it ever again.