Hot Rods Sometimes a person shouldn’t work on an engine

Face it,there are people WITH mechanical aptitude & those without , for those without they generally make things worse , no amount of coaching or teaching will help ! For those folks without ,they're better off leaving it alone !!

 

It usually goes like this......
..... You want how much an hour to do this job for me???.....
..... That's ridiculous. I will do it myself and save some money.....
..... Geezus, it's shit itself. Can't have been anything I did.....
..... You want how much to fix up the mess???.....

 

Back 40 something years ago one of my brothers bought a great looking black on black Chevy 3/4 ton 4x4 that allegedly had a 400 in it. First thing that happens is the trans goes out and he has a buddy with a transmission shop rebuild it and replace the flexplate while he was at it. He shows up at my place with a pretty nasty new vibration. Up on the hoist at the school shop and a couple of my students and I started looking it over from the bottom. Looking at a few things we noticed it didn't have the tell tale things that Id a 400 from below including not having a counterbalanced dampener. A quick check of the suffix number and block casting number (thank god for skinny little high school kids who can climb over engines in 4x4 trucks an it came out as a 350 out of an older truck. Hammer and chisel to knock the weight off the flexplate and it ran smooth as silk.
A few weeks later he is back with our younger brother towing him into the shop. engine was locked up. We (students and I) pulled the pan and the pickup screen was packed full of red silicone. When we got it out and on the stand and torn down it looked like someone had used two tubes of red silicone on it. That one got the crank turned, block align honed, rods resized and put back together right.