"Mechanical Genius" comments you've heard?

There's a guy that comes to the local car show with a blown hemi coupe. He's an automotive instructor by trade. However, everyone calls him "Bandini" because he's so full of s**t! He claims his coupe runs 10's but when he is challenged, he claims he has a bantam that runs 9's. He does have a bantam, but it's in pieces and hasn't run in years.

 

Hot Snot,now thats just funny as hell! you ought to sell that one to Larry the cable guy.

 

I built the whole thing myself in my garage...........................

 

when i was a kid flipping burgers, i worked with a guy who one day buys some early 60s mopar with a later 318 in it. i ask if he is going to do anything to it. he tells me that he wants to put chrome headers on it. i ask why and that i doubt it even has headers on to begin with. he takes me out to show me the engine. turns out chrome headers actually meant chrome valve covers.
then in high school there was a kid that swore up and down that he had an 89 mustang with a tri power set up. we asked to see it and of course it was to fast for the street. so someone asked how hard it was to set up, and he replied very easy. you just run lines from the nitrous bottle up to the manifold

 

I know you all have heard this, but you still here at the shows. A guy bragging about his 650 carb and how he changed the jets and now it is a 850! The never cease to amaze.

 

Don't know if anybody posted this but what about any dipshit that call's a traditional Hot Rod a "r@# R%d!!!!!

 

"There is no way that truck makes 450 HP, you can't make that much power with a carburator...."

 

There's some I see that are borderline.....

 

I used to be the head of the "woodworking department" in a cabintet shop in Colorado. We had this woman that worked for us whose "lights were on but no one was home". She provided some serious laughs and some serious scares but one I just can seem to stop laughing about:

"Sara" is tasked with sanding some doors fresh out of the wide belt. She's got the orbital and is going back and forth, back and forth and she keeps getting real close to the door and looking at it. Back and forth with the sander some more and she starts mouthing words and shaking her head. So back and forth with the sander, harder and faster this time. She's getting really aggrivated by this point, about 5 minutes into sanding. My other employee and I are standing there watching, finding it pretty entertaining. I say, "watch this..." and walk towards her. She's pissed, I mean she is really fuming that the sander isn't working right. I take the sander from her hand, and slap a paper disk on the pad and give it back to her. "Here, that should help." My other worker and I had to go outside and laugh our asses off after that one. She didn't last long in my shop...



These stories remind me of my baseball days in High School. We'd harass the freshmen by telling them to go "grab the box of curveballs" or "go get the key to the batter's box". I know that's nothing new, but it was funny as hell to watch them look for the stuff.

 

I was doing tire changes at a local tire shop and I pulled in the costumers car started to jack it up by the spring pirch and the customer yelled at me saying I was going to break his axle if i jack it up that way so just to satify the costumer I move the floor jack to the pumpkin started to jack it up and he said what the hell are you doing you are going to break both my axles. you need to use the lift so the axls dont break.

 

I would have him to go elsewhere and that I didn't need his bs....

 

less than a year ago i was sitting in the break room at the "automotive technician training school" having dinner, when a student I'd been in Auto Trans' with, but who was now in the High Performance Engine Design class, (two weeks from graduation from the program, mind you) popped in on a break.
I asked him how he liked the class, and asked him how his '48 Hudson resto project was going. He said something about not knowing where to get a replacement throttle body for it.
I said "Uhhhhhh..... Hudsons don't have a "throttle body" "

he spins on his heel, goes dashing out and returns minutes later, thrusting a crusty blob at me and defiantly says "Then what's THIS??!!"

me-- "that's a carburetor" "it bolts to the intake manifold, and controls the fuel air mixture WITHOUT electronics like a modern injection"

him-- "well, my engine doesn't have an intake manifold"

OH SHIT!!!! This guy might be working at a dealership near you!!!!

 

I had a guy tell me once he had a "3/4 race cam" in his 327 Impala. I asked him how he figured that out and he said that he had the pan off once and he took a tape measure to the cam and it was only about 3/4's as long as the crankshaft! OMG!

 

Had a guy tell me he was going to build a 318 'short block' for 'less power, more milage'. He said he couldn't deal with all the power those damn long blocks have and he couldn't afford to buy anything but a running short block. He was also thinking about buying a '74, so..

But most of the stupid things I've heard were coming out of my mouth.

 

Isn't there some truth to getting [brand new] drums turned so they are trued?

 

Just a couple of things that people say that are dumb....some guys are calling driveshafts, drivelines. "Driveline" could be used interchangeably to talk about your drivetrain (engine trans and rearend)...but a driveshaft is a driveshaft, or a propeller shaft.

Also...when did bumpers become bumbers? I guess a bumber is a really good thing to have on your car when you bumb into someone.....god help us all.

 

When I was in high school (years ago now) a guy told me that Cadillac built a V9 engine. He was a friggin expert on everything this dude!

My wife had a 79 Chebby Monza 2+2 Spyder. I took it to a guy to get some work done. First thing he said when I drove in was NICE MAZDA.

Louie

 

I used to love hearing the guys tell me that they had bigger "power bands" installed in thier old Yami's

 

I had someone try convincing me that a 318LA engine was a hemi once and no matter how much I tried to correct them I was wrong and didn't know what I was talking about aparently. Well I don't know alot but I know it wasn't a hemi.

 

This time it was me... I worked for a couple years as the fabricator at an old small town speed shop. A lot of you Central Valley guys probably know the place..."the collection".

One day this guy comes in driving a SWB Chevy 4X4 with 40s and chrome everything. Shorty mufflers and one of those Pete Jackson "whiner" gear drives. He'd been in before and was a real "sexual intellectual", as another poster put it, so I decided to pull his chain. He parachutes down out of this thing and I say "Wow, sounds like you need to put some power steering fluid in that!". He says "It's not low on fluid. That's a fuckin GEAR DRIVE, buddy... You work at a speed shop, don't you know anything?"

I just said " You better hope so." I'd just finished building a driveshaft for him...

 

Had an ex girlfriend ask me the same question. I was pulled nose in to a parking spot. I simply explained that it was upside down so that I could back out of the spot easier. Her response? "Oh, ok, that makes sense".

 

My brother related to me this story years ago when he worked in a local feed mill back in the 60's. He and one of his fellow workers were trying to connect up some 240V appliance with the aid of an extension cord.
Appliance is switched, on everything connected , no go. Fellow worker and mechanical genius, or in this case electrical genius, spots that the cord has a knot in it. "The power won't get through like that" he remarks and sets about undoing the knot.
No doubt this electrical genius learned his skills on garden hoses. My brother is standing there shaking his head.

 

damn right!
esp. with the fucking cheap chinameese shit....

 

so. I work at a car dealer. one day I overhear a phone coversation between our female service writer and a female customer who had brought in her car earlier that day because it would barely run.

Cust: have you found out whats wrong with my car?
s/w: we havent got a chance to diagnose it fully, all we know now is that your engine is missing.
cust: WHAT?!!!!! &(&*^*&#%& click. customer hung up.
s/w: what was that lady's problem?
Me: that didn't sound good.

s/w trys to call customer back but the line is busy.

1/2 hour later the cops show up to investigate who stole this lady's engine.
cop: she's almost certain the engine was in her car when she drove it down here

 

Engine was missing... priceless.

Tell me, officer, your eyes look glazed; have you been eating donuts?

I will keep this in mind if I ever look at R&C.

actually true

And here I was thinking bore finish had to do with ring seal and holding a small amount of oil to lubricate pistons and rings. Silly me!

Actually, I've wondered if it would truly make a difference, since they DO bounce around. But, it takes so little effort, and certainly can't hurt...

Uh, okay; guess we've all been schooled.

Didn't ya' look up a few posts earlier; the guy already fuckin' told us! Pontiac, Chrysler, Ford, Chev, Mopar, Olds... they're all 400s!

QFT!

I've seen muffler bearings listed; they're those gaskets in Honda car exhaust systems, where the joint can swivel. No joke.

Now, I still haven't been able to find an original can of prop wash.

Well Lost, can't completely agree with ya...

... honing stones remove metal; they just don't cut anywhere near as fast as a boring bar. If they didn't remove metal, you wouldn't stop the bore short of the finished size before switching to your final hone stones. And a good many blocks have been "bored" oversize with diamond stones on a CK-10...

If you've ever seen one in action, I think you'll agree that they rely on the hone to follow the center of the existing bore (of course, if the existing bore isn't in the right place, you're SOL). The honing head is turned by a shaft that is basically similar to a scaled down driveshaft; wobbly joints at both ends. This allows the hone to be spun and stroked up & down, without any significant side load being able to be applied to it by the machine.

But, although it's possible that while a guy could theoretically use one of those little 3 stone spring-loaded hones in a drill to take a block .030" over, I'm not so sure I'm sold on it being a good idea. I would expect that one of those hones would be VERY dependent on user skill to actually come up with a bore that was straight and round. As well as being pretty miserable, by the time you finally finished that first hole, and sat there looking at the other seven you still had to go!

One time I went to buy parts for my '70 Road Runner... "Road Runner, is that a Pontiac?"

Some of the best came from Bay's shop in Ballard, when I worked at High Road... one day a guy brings a car in for loss of power diagnosis. It's an Accord that he'd had a trans put in at Bay's... seems that they put in a later unit that has these electrical solenoids on it - in a car without provisions for 'em. So, the poor fucker was in high gear all the time, or something like that.

Oh, and I almost forgot, the guy pointed at a thing that he'd seen glowing red; it was the exhaust manifold. That's how hard the poor little engine had to work!

Another time, a mechanic from Bays comes down (which they did frequently until this episode); this time he wants to buy a part (usually just wanted free advice/diagnosis). So, I punch up the part, and quote him retail (he is from a competing shop, and has done nothing for us but undercut our prices, and pester us for help, mind you).

Now, I'm busy, with a bunch of customers standing in line waiting to pick up their cars. And this asshole gets all huffy about the price, and asks where my 'professional courtesy' is. I told him I consider my selling a part to someone who competes with our shop a pretty damn big professional courtesy, and to either dig his cash out or step aside to let someone pick up their car. Sometimes it's the attitude that's the true genius.

The guy at the suspension shop next to where I worked always had great stories about genius customers. One was some lady who came down with her car, and then gave him some attitude. When he tried to get her straightened out, she got huffy, and told him that she was going to send her husband down to deal with him. His reply was priceless... something along the lines of "if he's as stupid as you, he'll show up."

God, I miss that old guy.

-Bill

 

this remindes me of a few years ago. my buddy had a 90s mustang that was low on power steering fluid and whined like crazy. one night we went to firebird to watch the friday night drags. when we were leaving my buddy snuck into the road course area to do a few laps. some redneck know it alls were hanging around. all you could hear was the whine of the p/s pump. so one of the rednecks ask me if that car is fast. i say its ok for what it is. he says it must be fast. i ask why. he says "cause it gots a pete jackson in it". i tell him it does not, that it is a bone stock car with a leaking p/s pump. he tells me if i keep coming out here that i need to learn a thing or two about cars because that is deffinatly the whine of a pete jackson. he knows what it sounds like cause his brothers car makes the same sound. i say sure it does and walk away.

 

i had a guy come over wanting me to help repair a broken valve cover hold down bolt on a sbc. i asked how he broke it, he said he wanted the valve covers real tight so he wouldn't loose compression

 

a guy called an advance aoto parts store and asked if they had any 6 volt batteries. The young man that answered the phone says," dude, cars run on 12 volts" and hangs up the phone

 

I had a guy keep bugging me about one of my O/T cars, and the topic of camshafts came up. I mentioned a company that sells their own spec'd cams ground by comp that I was thinking about running. When I mentioned that cam from that company, he said to me "yeah...the only thing about _______ cams is they take too long to turn over."

 

Not really mechanical genius, more of a basic engineering thing...but I was recently helping my old rugby club raise some goalposts on their new fields. While I was welding the posts together they were digging holes and preparing to raise them. I asked if they had a long level. "What for?" said one guy. "To plumb it," I said.

"Plumb it? It's not gonna have any water in it."

I nearly pissed myself.