I was taking apart a dash and trying to pry loose a wire harness with a pick tool when it slipped and went right through my ring finger clear to the hilt. My buddy who wasnt so lucky, was working with a pick tool taking a harness off a door panel when he slipped it went through his left eye destroying his eyeball forever.
ok, now I hurt ALL OVER after reading about all these mis-haps!!! Guess I've been doing it all wrong for almost 20 years! Nothing much more than bumps and bruises and a bloody knuckle or two. Ok I did break my arm after slipping in some coolant at work.
Hmmm.... the WORST injury I suffered working on cars was the crush/tear to my right index finger while removing a dually rear axle for a tow vehicle project. I severed the finger at the first knuckle and crushed, but didn't sever the next two fingers. A couple of pins, and dozens of stiches later, my $200 axle turned into a $3600 axle. Plus, I'm right handed sooo I spent a lot of time getting used to left handedness. BTW other than numbness in the index finger, I have recovered its use. The accident was in 1996 and it took several years to get full function back. Now, I ALWAYS watch where my body parts are in relation to heavy objects and I haven't had a repeat experience.
Man, I'm gonna have nightmares tonight about one eyed, toothless, 4 fingered, hunchbacks, Or was that the Road Warriors in MAD MAX?
now you know how they got that way. cant build those kinds of fuel searching vehicals with out injurys
When I first saw the title to this thread I thought, I have a couple of those stories. Compared to what some of you guys have done mine seem lame. 16 year old kid brazing a stolen realot sign in the floor board of my 66 chevelle and forming it with a hammer as i go. Wearing shorts I get a nice long string of molten brass imbedded inside my thigh, man that smells bad. Later on in life doing a tune up on a 60's land rover and the hood falls on the back of my head and lays me out cold in the shop parking lot. I wake up to see one of my buddies laughing his ass off at me. Did I tell you the hoods on those things were made out of 1/4 galvanized? Wear your safety glasses.
While holding on to a blower pulley for support while checking fuel lines at back of engine someone decided to turn the engine over. Fingers between pulley and gilmer belt - that hurt like a bitch.
Oh yeah! Forgot about this one! Pulled the VW engine and treans from my old sand rail. Was carrying the trans out the back garage door (again at my parent's house). Forgot about the step down even though I gre up there... The trans came down on my knee, dislocated my knee. I threw the trans as far as I could before I fell to the ground and passed out. Not ure how long I was laying there but the cool garage floor fealt pretty good (haha). When I woke up I saw my leg all fucked up and tried to move it. It made loud "POP" and fell back in place somehow. Then I passed out again from the pain and just being plain wigged out to see my leg that way (haha). Yeah.. starting to think I should just sell all my tools and take up TV watching as my hobby... ???
did you guys know that transmission fluid is really good at stopping severe bleeding? found that out on my last trans rebuild when one the wrench slipped on one of the valve body bolts and my right middle finger middle knuckle met one of the other bolt heads at very high speed. i saw bone for a min before the blood started... the one where i felt the stupidest was changind my plug wires once on my '84 delta. i was stretched across the gargantuan engine bay when the foot opposite the arm i had stretched out slipped on some gravel and i threw my back out. i collapsed over the hot engine compartment screaming obscenities while crying like a little girl. luckily my girlfriend at the time was there and was able to help me up and inside where i lay for the next few days in absolute agony popping ibuprofen 800's like they were candy. that fucking sucked!
about a month ago i was at the garage using the wire wheel doin something, went out after words to dunkin donuts and so forth and i had a feeling that i had a "blister" on one of my toes so i just ignored it till i got home later that night, so i went to check out this "blister" and it happened to be a wire from the wire wheel inside my toe...only a little was sticking out so i figured the rest broke off...as i pull it out with tweezers the whole thing came out almost an inch of wire in my toe...im surprised it didnt hurt as much as it should've...
for a while the staff at south austin hospital emergency room knew me by my first name. band saw up the end of my index finger, welders burn in my eyes, metal in my eyes, putty knife through my left thumb (14 stitches)trying to pry apart a holley carb that had been gold plated. Lost toenail dropping a 4x10 sheet of 20ga on my foot (edge first). 10 stitches on the back of my hand when the jackman dropped the car before I got the old tire off, much less got the new tire on, pulled a cutting torch across the back of my hand climbing out of a roll cage (amazing how fast blisters form) and that is the stuff I can remember going to the Dr for. Any number of other times I did my best Jesse Ventura impression of "I aint got time to bleed". Nobody ever accused me of being very smart.
rippin a boneyard rearend out of a ex-cop car (twas a burn out with 80K on the clock and the back half was pristine) it was your typical boneyard dirt, nice and clean intermingled with shards of glass and stray shards of "dull" tin and slag, I was of course working bymyself and got the lower trailing arms off no prob, had my hand on the bottom of the pumpkin movin the rear around to persuade the upper trailing arm bolts out and the thing came thunderin out of the car pushing my hand into the dirt....I got my hand out and saw I had a peice of metal sticking out of it....no prob I think it cant be that deep, grab my needle nose and rip it out of my hand, right as I noticed a dimple protruding on the opposite side of where the metal went in....yep it went almost all the way through,, when I ripped the metal out I started puking blood all over the place, undaunted, I grabbed what I had, a greasy shop rag and a roll of electrical tape, at that point I figured there is no way I'm leaving this rearend sitting here for someone else to take, I finished the rip job, loaded up and went home, walked in the door and told my wife I needed to go get some stiches....it was a navy hospital and I had to actually suture myself as the fuckin corpman was 2 days on the job and was three shades ligher in the face than I was (former paramedic, I know sutures), luckly he also gave me the ladocane needle so I was able to numb myself up but good....took about 45min to get all the junk out of my hand 5 internal sutures and 7 external sutures later I was able to return to the squadron and commence 4 weeks of med down....yep flyin a desk....the next good one I'm kinda ashamed to repeat....I was welding up some pipes under my truck, it was a rush job and I didnt have the truck up as high as I should have and was layin on the concrete doing it, I welded the top of the tube and went to get a closer look to make sure I got the whole thing, I got a little too good of a look and burned the living shit out of my forehead, as you may know your first instinct is to jerk away, I unfortunatly followed my instincts and bounced my head off the non-yeilding surface directly behind me, I then followed the same instinct and jerked my head off the concrete burning myself yet again on hte still red hot pipe directly infront of me, after 4 or 5 cycles of this infernal instinct I finally quit beating the shit out of myself...I went into the house, forehead all burned to hell ad a huge goose egg on the back of my head, it looked as though I tangled with the local bouncer at the pub....luckly I had a meeting the next day with a 3 star admiral talking about our great safety program.....no shit, I kid you not....my response to the brass "I rather not tell you how I got this sir"
In high school auto shop I dropped a drive shaft on my right big toe. The day before I had an ingrown toe nail removed on my right big toe. I wasnt supposed to be wearing shoes let alone work boots. When I worked in equipment rental I smashed my thumb into the trailer jack in front of a customer. I continued to jack the trailer down onto his truck and when my manager showed up I went inside to hide while I whimpered in agony, I broke it but never went to a doctor. While changing a battery for a customer at the parts store where I worked, I heard customer say "What's this?" he had just put a new radiator in and the upper hose was hanging on by the very edge. When he touched it the pressure in the hose blew it off. Boiling coolant hit me in the face. Luckily no burns and anti freeze tastes awful. Last month I decided to take the hood off my F-100 by myself. I had it up and against my chest, when it started to slip. I couldnt let it hit the ground so I tighted my grip on it. It slipped anyway slicing through my left index finger and ring finger. The cut in my index finger went to the bone. No doctor, I wrapped it with what I had, my daughter's green Dr. Seuss band aids, and electrical tape.
Isn't this kinda of like asking, "Did you ever look at Playboy?" Getting hurt and all things automotive go hand-in-hand. I cut my wrist to the bone on the rad. of a Alfa Romeo Spider that I was doing a head swap on. God damn did that hurt. Of course I didn't stop. I just cleaned out the grease and thanked the Lord that I had a first aid kit in the garage. Banjo...out.
My brother works on UPS trucks out of his shop. Last weekend he was under the hood when the prop came out, drove his forehead into the radiator, had to drive hisself to the hospital where he ended up with 5 staples in the back of his head and 26 stitches in his forehead, then drove hisself home to clean up the blood.
Mig slag in the ear is the best,, ya can't do anything bout it and I can hear it rolling around in there,,,, finally it stops and I hear a sound like putting a candle out with spit on your finger. It ends up in my mouth later in the day.. Happened more than once.
been there... need to get mama fiddy to make me a shroud to go over the back of my Miller big window for that kinda stuff... thats some scary shit hearing your own flesh quenching some spatter, i shit you not
well me and some friend went and got some parts from a fella we know. and we were unloading the parts out of the back of this big pile of a u haul van. one of my old buddies accidentall nudges the back of the van with the bobcat and pow. a cowl with every edge rusty and tetnus'd up hits me in the head. i go down. my friends think im dead. well i was fine minus a headache. shoulda seen their faces.
Thankfully, I've still got all the IMPORTANT body parts. I've taken knuckles down to the pretty white. Broken multiple fingers at once, dropped heads on the top of my foot and smacked my face with more shit then I can count........including self propelled ujoints. I think my favorite was stepping down from a 4x4 water truck, being short and over extending my reach, just to end up on my ass and shoulder. Don't ask me how, I'm not in the mood to recreate it, but I can tell ya know the arthritis that comes from this stuff is enough to remind ya to be careful in the future.
A few years ago I was having problems with my brakes in my 1951 Pontiac and I was constantly under my car trying to find the problem. I was wearing safety glasses, but I was under the car and my mastercylinder puked back all the brake fluid right into my eyes. Safety glass didn't help much against liquid. I drag my self out as fast as I can and realize I CANNOT see. I panic and follow the wall to the hose bib and turn on the water, I follow the hose and spend the next 20 minutes running water full blast into my eyes. After a while I just lay on the sidewalk and wait. 10 minutes after that the images begin to come back into focus slowly and I crawl inside and try and sleep. Next day it looks like I was up for 7 days straight on a wild drug binge, but I can see. T
Wellll...I used to be part-owner of salvage yard in San Antonio and never really got hurt, does the roadmap of scars all over my hands and arms count?..we used to prop cars up on tires out in the field with a big loader so we could get underneath them..I was under a big old Chrysler once getting the BB K frame out from under it and I saw it shifting and rolled out from under it just as it grazed my shoulder on the way down..Whew!.. same scenario, as I was laying there a rattlesnake the size of a baseball bat crawled over both my legs! again, Whew!...one of the mechanic helpers was twisting wrenches and slipped and put his hand into the fan. After me rendering First Aid and getting quite bloody he decides to tell me hes HIV positive!.....ever had a battery explode on ya?..you get the picture....Rick
sucked my thumb into a bench grinder sharpening a drill bit. broke the shaft in the grinder, my thumb and the drill bit. the worst thing was I was stuck in the grinder for like 10 minutes while I took it apart to get my thumb out. I almost bled out tryin to reach for a crescent wrench to get it apart. I could see the newspaper. Idiot dies from blood loss while trying to save a buck by sharpening an old drill bit. Man I am DUMB!!!!
cutting the floor out of my 31 and i must have got one in the eye. i thought it weld flash burn until the next day when the eye was way worse. had to go get the rusty piece of metal DRILLED out of my eye. that sucked super bad. the doctor did have a really cool little drill though.
23 years in the army, three wars.............little to no bad injuries. 1 year of re-creating my old hot rod..........fucking scars eveywhere
I'm left handed and Polish. I get hurt everytime I work in the garage. That's about 360 injuries a year.
I've had a few & a few good ones, but reading this stuff is almost sickening.... Two days ago - cleaning up an old stromberg, I got a good slug of brake cleaner into my right eye - that got my attention. The flushing may have hurt worse, but needed to be done, I'm a pilot, so need the eyes - you'd think I'd be more careful! In a hurry pullying a floorjack out from underneath an old truck - with the weight of the jack propelling my hand into the rusty jagged edge of the running board - ripped my hand open above my thumb. Wrapped with a shop rag & finished the job before heading to the ER. Declined the lidocane as they thought they'd only do about three stitches - fortunately, all numb on the "in" side of the needle, so only pain when they popped it out the other side & pulled it tight... Or the time me & a friend decided it would be a good time to wire up my air compressor - after a night of hard drinking, in the rain. Well, I didn't electrocute myself, but managed to fall & break my tailbone (did you know it's called a coccyx - pronounced "cock-six") - that was real agony for a long time.... Otherwise mostly standard bumps, cuts, burns, weld spatter in all the aforementioned places for all the aforementioned reasons, metal in my eye (wearing safety glasses too!!), back-and-forth head bump under hot exhaust & concrete, etc.... Read my signature line....it's the truth!
Was prying some trim off a '57, the screwdriver sliped and I jabbed the inside of my nose. Bled like hell. I'm lucky I didn't knock my eyeball out.
I had a breaker bar slip off and whack me in the head real hard, shook it off and look down and there's blood dripping down my nose so I go inside my buddies house and look in the mirror, Yep gonna need a few stitches, next thing I know I wake up on the floor soaking wet and water spraying everywhere, I passed out and fell against the toilet and busted the toilet tank right off it. My Dad had a really bad one, he was cutting some metal with a torch and he looked down and his shopcoat caught fire, nothing big, so he takes his hand and tries patting it out, well that shop coat was made of some kind of synthetic material and stuck to his hand like napalm and gave him a really nasty burn, took off a ton of skin too.
I think most cars are not happy untill they draw blood. I have very happy cars, I bleed or smash digits every time I'm in the shop. My favorite thought is hot slag in the shoes or flaming clothes from grinder sparks. Whats burning? Me!
The Jalopy Journal
