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February 23, 2009

What's Your Worst "Oh Crap" Car Restoration Moment?

By Sam Barer

Sound Classics

If you work on cars, you’re bound to have one of those proverbial “oh crap” moments. You know the type: while trying to “fix” or “restore” a part of the car, it all goes terribly wrong.

I was in the process of rebuilding the four Weber carburetors on the Sound Classics project Ferrari 308 GT4 utilizing the tried-and-true Polish Blueprintmethod of reassembly: taking a part off the second carburetor, while putting the new, yet identical part back on the freshly cleaned first carb. Things seemed to be going great.

The second carb’s fuel bowl float retaining pin didn’t want to come loose. I placed the top of the carb housing in the bench vice and tapped a small punch pointed in the hole with a hammer, causing the pin to slide just enough to get pliers on the other end. Still tight, I tapped the pliers with the hammer and the pin started sliding. One last light hit…

Continue reading after the jump!

A little piece of aluminum flashed past the corner of my eye. Somehow, half of the section that holds the pin on one side broke under the stress…and it seemingly disappeared into thin air.

Luckily it was around lunchtime at Madrona Autoworks, so the guys helped me look for the part. Madrona’s owner, Bret, is a former airplane mechanic, so he keeps an ultra-clean shop. Unfortunately, the one area that is impossible to keep clean throughout the day is the place where all the grinding, welding and cutting takes place.

To make matters worse, after thirty minutes of searching to no avail with flashlights around the bench, on the floor, behind welding tanks, and in spider-crawling corners, the team all agreed that there was a definite possibility the two-inch piece flew into the nearly full garbage bin.

So much for that private school education and impressive corporate resume… it was time for me to do the nasty. Diving into the barrel head-first, I picked up each greasy, oil-dry (read kitty litter) crusted disgusting bit, inspected it and threw it into another can.

Finally I found it – the bottom, that is. No little irreplaceable part essential to getting this Ferrari running. Just some final dirt-soaked fish crackers, cigarette butts and used box cutter blades.

After washing my hands and arms with every type of soap, I decided to take one last look around the bench. I stuck my head under the table and ran my hand next to the base. There, under the bench cross-member… behind the jug of anti-freeze next to the battery holder was my piece – ready and waiting to be tig welded back on. I had looked there before, but figured the gods of “Carma” wanted me to go through a test of garbage sorting before earning the piece back.

So what’s your worst “oh crap” moment…and what was the nastiest thing you had to do to find a lost part?

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Posted at 9:45 am in 308, Ferrari, GT4, Sam Barer, Sound Classics

Comments

dcatkin
May 24, 2010 at 3:53 pm

I was working at a Jaguar restoration shop in Portland Oregon, it was just me, the owner, a manager, and one other guy. This guy was a newbie at car restoration, the manager told him to mix some epoxy primer, and spry it on a car that we had just masked.

The kid preceded to mix the primer, then he poured in in to the spray gun, he masked, and them sprayed the car, but much to our dismay we cam in the next morning, and found the primer to still be fully wet, as if it had just been sprayed.

It comes to find out that he had grabbed the wring reducer for the primer, he had reduced it with acetone rather then epoxy reducer, we learned very quickly that it doesn’t dry when that happens.

The manager made the kid scrape the primer off with a razor blade, lesson in all of this, look at the can before you pour it in.

satty12
Mar 3, 2009 at 11:36 am

My best o crap moment was when i drove for 138 miles with my oil cap off causeing all 4 quarts from my little 91 saturn to soak the engine bay luckily for me those engines can take a beating new oil and filter and i was ready to go the car never even skipped a beat and i know people who have blown engines with only 2 quarts of oil in the engine and i had none haha lucky me.

E
Feb 25, 2009 at 3:19 am

I’m Restoring a 89′ Mustang 5.0 I picked up the vehicle a couple of months ago and I thought it was pretty solid even though it needed work. The first order of business was a complete tune up as it didn’t pass smog and I didn’t know the maintenance history. I also decided to sea foam it to get the 20 years of carbon deposits somewhat free and clean out emissions stuff throttle body, egr, maf, etc. So when it’s all clean I start the car and notice oh crap, the white smoke followed by a steady stream of coolant. Antifreeze in the oil meaning I probably blew the head gasket.

I’m working on that right now but I figure since the engine is basically apart I might upgrade some of the pieces. This is also an oh crap moment as it seems for every part that I order I have to buy another part that works with it.

Katakuna
Feb 23, 2009 at 6:11 pm

I was trying to do a brake job on a ’95 Cavalier, I did the front brakes fine, but when I got to the back drums (I fucking hate drum brakes), I remembered how badly I suck at doing these. I decide to go ahead and do it anyway. All goes fine taking them apart, but I put them back together half-assed. I go to test them, I hear 3 springs bounce off the inside of the left rear drum. Then the bitch wouldn’t stop at all! I couldn’t get it to stop until I caught it on a Buick Park Avenue. Good thing both were donated shop cars for my Auto Tech class, otherwise I’d have been in deep poo.

NobiZero
Feb 23, 2009 at 4:24 pm

My worst “oh crap” moment came at my last job at a Chevrolet dealership. I had my 1995 Chevy Monte Carlo Z34 with the Twin Dual Cam 3.4 V6 in it. It had over 120k on it at this point, so I figured doing a top engine clean wouldn’t hurt, seeing as I was about to change the spark plugs and the oil anyway. I’ve done this tons of times before using the brake booster vacuum hose and never had a problem. During my lunch break, can of top engine cleaner in hand, I went out to my car, disconnected the booster vacuum hose, vise gripped it closed, and put the end of the hose into the top engine clean can. Now, my hands were still greasy from work. I figured why wash my hands if I’m just going to get dirty again? So I fire up my car, and go to release the vise grips when they slip and fly wide open. I scramble to clamp off the hose again, but it was too late, the engine had already stalled. Believing that I had just bent valves, blew a piston, seized the engine, or fowled my spark plugs, I figured trying to turn it over with the plugs out of their bores wouldn’t hurt, since I was probably looking at around $700 for a new engine, and lots of time lost. This was my only car, and even if it ran like crap, I needed it to run. I took the front 3 plugs out, cranked it over a few times, and shot a huge spray of cleaner all over the side of the building (sorry, Walter Earl). Since it actually turned over, I wire-wheeled my spark plugs, reinstalled them and to my amazement, the car fired up and ran perfectly fine. No skips, no misfires, not even a hiccup in RPM. That car ran perfectly until the day the car died.

Paul Huizenga
Feb 23, 2009 at 4:10 pm

Keith’s bit about snapped bolts reminds me that I have yet to take the stock intake manifold off a 5.0 Ford without ending up with at least one that needed to be drilled/extracted/helicoiled. And I’ve done a few…

JoshuaS
Feb 23, 2009 at 3:44 pm

The only “oh crap” I’ve had that involves a lost part (keeping in mind I have had a lot of “oh craps”) was when I took the fuel pump off my bug and accidently dropped the nut into the crankcase. Thank goodness for extending magnets.

Keith
Feb 23, 2009 at 2:33 pm

First one that comes to mind is trying to dry paint on an ashtray with a torpedo heater. The cover that the paint was on was plastic and I didn’t realize it, so now I have a melted ashtray in my car. Or it could be one of the many times I snapped the head of a bolt off, probably the one in the head, it just happened to be the one closest to the firewall to make it a pain in the ass to drill it out and retap it, and on top of it all, the tap ended up breaking off in the hole too. Had to punch that out, and the hole was now to big for the same size bolt, a little bit of jb weld fixed that though.

fortyfordsedan
Feb 23, 2009 at 2:30 pm

My worst was involving Window Frames for my 40 Ford. I was about to start Painting the rear quarter window frames and I couldn’t find the set for the Passengers side. To get the Window Frames I had looked on ebay, the internet and all over town for a month or so an I had finally found an abundance of them at a local wrecker and talked him into selling them to me (on cars that old he usually doesn’t part them out, he sells the whole car. I searched the garage top to bottom, the house, our yard, called my grandpa to make sure I hadn’t left them at his place, I even looked in the dumpster on the off chance it might be there. I was so angry and worried that I had left them somewhere someone walking by our house could see them and they had been stolen. After a couple hours of looking and retracing my steps, I looked in the sand blaster and there it was.

cknarf
Feb 23, 2009 at 2:03 pm

Tried to put the tierods on with the threads facing down, they were supposed to go up….. We were pounding the f*** outof ‘em, and dremeling the hole, only to realize that they were backwards….

kori
Feb 23, 2009 at 11:19 am

a couple of us were helping a friend install coilovers on his accord. We had the car propped up on four jacks, hood was open and we were working front and back at the same time (there was 5 of us…). One guy is standing at the engine bay surveying the process of reinstalling the front strut, the other is doing the actual work. another friend is underneath the wheel well, watching to make sure the strut doesnt move. im at the rear end, in the process of undoing the shock set up on the rear left side. all of a sudden a loud “CLUNK” followed by the dipping of the car, and two guys yelling.

The guy doing the reinstall up front actually torqued the strut mount so hard that he snapped one of the three mounting bolts clean off. At the same time, the jack had somehow loosened and fell, causing the propped hood to hit one friend in the head, and nearly give the guy under the wheel well a heart attack.

great first impression of suspension work

but to this day its still my favorite kind of work

Ken
Feb 23, 2009 at 11:15 am

Losing the OE snap ring on my Cutlass that holds the guts inside the steering column. I was changing the turn signal cams inside the column and thought I could get away with using regular pliers instead of snap ring pliers. Similar to Paul’s experience I heard the little “ting” as the ring flew off into space somewhere. Normally this wouldn’t have been a problem, but I was working with the doors open and the T-Tops off, so the ring flew somewhere outside the car into the grass. Long story short, I ended up using a generic one from the parts store that fit OK, but not as good as the original.

Jack
Feb 23, 2009 at 10:51 am

when i told my friend to drain the engine oil on the shop teachers f350. He opened up the tranny bolt and drained the tranny fluid,added engine oil to the engine and then started it.

Paul Huizenga
Feb 23, 2009 at 10:31 am

On my hands and knees in the street, looking for a lost retaining clip while performing a shift kit installation on my ’92 T-Bird. The instructions even say something like “Remove this clip while covering with a shop towel, since it will go flying. Don’t bother to call us for replacements when you lose it, since we don’t have any.”

Fortunately, a careful sweep of the asphalt turned it up after just a few minutes, but I’ll never forget the tiny “ting!” noise of that clip shooting off into the unknown…