Done lots of dumbshit in my life but heres one scarey moment that comes to mind .When i was about 15 i was riding a 250 dirt bike through a pasture (that i was not familuar with) .Wanted to see how fast it would go so i pinned it in all the gears up to about 65-70 and was so excited i was not paying attention to how close i was getting to the barbed wire fence that i was running along side of.I felt something snag on my pant leg and looked over and it was the fence at 65-70 mph ,fortunatley i was wearing real thin pants that just tore instead of hung in the fence.I was so scared i nearly pissed myself .After i carefully eased the bike away from the fence and got it stopped ,i was done riding for the day .I can only think what would happened if i had hung the handle bars in the fence at that speed.I wasnt wearing a helment at the time BTW ...
I didn't do it, and nobody came near death, but it is sufficiently dumb. When I was in college, I had a younger friend still in high school who had a real clean '39 Ford Deluxe coach that he wanted to put an Olds Rocket in. For any of you have done this, you know it takes more than an adapter plate and some motor mounts. Well he had the engine in, but had the traditional problems with the starter and oil filter, so he called me. I knew what was going on and I had an Honest Charley catalog, so I had him order a starter switchover plate, a remote oil filter block for the engine, and a remote oil filter kit. About a week later he calls me and tells me that he's just driven his car a couple of miles when it started making "funny noises", and quit. It wouldn't even turn over. I went to rescue him, looked at his car and found the problem. In the interim, he had received the starter switchover and remote filter block, but they back-ordered the remote oil filter. You guessed it; eager to get his car running, he put the stuff on, put 2 pipe plugs in the remote filter adapter, and took off for a test drive. Scratch one newly rebuilt Rocket. It always amazed me that he was smart enough to get all that stuff in and working, but still dumb enough not to realize how a full flow oiling system worked. I'll bet there are a lot better stories out there somewhere, but the participants are no longer with us to share them.
Towing another vehicle on the highway with just a tow strap. 17 years old, towing a Jeep Cherokee with a Jeep CJ5, came to the crest of a hill on Route 17 just about 90 miles west of NYC. Well when I { dumb-ass } slowed down a bit just before heading down the mountain, the tow vehicle's right front wheel rolled over the tow strap. One of those probably lasted 4 seconds seemed like an hour moments. The strap wound up in the wheel locking it, spindle broke, tie rod, drag link, and then the axle!!!!!!!! Almost 5000 pounds of Grand Cherokee took a nose dive down into the road, and then all hell broke loose, literally, and then it drug itself, me and the tow vehicle into the rock cliff. Grand Cherokee- total, tow vehicle salvaged. Thank GOD no one else got hurt. I think my buddy and I shook for about a week.
Outside of arriving back at the lz with tree branches in the skids of the OH13 I was the observer on when I had three weeks left in Nam? The Pilot was the same one I had crashed with six months earlier in an OH 6. In November 1965 I bought a 1954 Buick brush buggy. It was the running chassis of a 54 Buick cut down to where you could reach back and touch the left rear tire from the seat. After getting it running I took off down the then dirt road across from the house to my buddy's place two miles away. A mile down the road I went across the old Rocky Ford creek bridge a little fast and lost control spinning out and knocking down about 100 ft of barb wire fence. I still have the scar under the left side of my chin that took 13 stitches plus the one on my leg that took 12 stitches. Lost the radiator cap to the barb wire and ended up selling the buggy to the doctor who sewed me up. He put a cage on it and took it up to his cabin in the mountains. Those cheap spit tube jack stands don't work worth a damn in dirt floored carports either. That stunt is filed in my stash of really stupid stunts that I lived to tell about.
when i was 4 my aunt and uncle came for a vist, while they were in the house i was outside proping little nails up against the front and rear of all 4 of their tires, about 1/2 hour after they drove away we got a call from the service station 5 miles away, it was them and they had 4 flat tires, my dad put me in the car and we went down, i never let on and they never figured it out, lucky they were not hurt, i told them it was me when i was 18...lol when i was 11 or 12 i used to shove 3 or 4 nails into apples and roll them out onto the street, then hide, some people love to run over apples in the road, same with styrfoam cups, paper bags with who knows what in them, i never run over anything laying in the road.
Once upon a time, a dumb teenager did a tranny swap(me). I pulled the car into the garage and drove the front of the car up on to ramps(drive gear was good,reverse was shot). Then I jacked up the rear and used jack stands under the axle. The tranny came out with no problem. So now it was time to install the replacement. It started to rain so I closed the garage door to stay dry(key fact). I slid the tranny under the car and got it into position. For some reason I couldn't get the tranny to line up with the engine properly, so I went under the car and decided to push it into place. I grabbed onto the rear axle with my hands and used my feet to push the tranny into position, good idea right Well... when I pushed the tranny I didn't realize that it mated on the first try. On the second push I rocked the car forward and then the car rocked back. The front tires rolled over the safety lip on the ramps and down the car came with me under it Remember the key fact...it was raining so I close the garage door? Well as the car came down it hit the garage door and got wedged between the ramps and the door. I had just enough room to slide out from underneath. This story ain't over yet. That garage door was the only way out and I was in the garage alone and trapped. It took me a hour and a half to unwedge the car and get out! Final damage tally = Broken garage door, floor jack, destroyed oil pan, rear bumper scratched, trunk and quarter panels dented.. My dumb ass, not a scratch <!-- google_ad_section_end -->
i had a ct70 mini bike when i was 11 it was running rough so i rebuilt the carb. It got it all put backtogether but put the throttle cable in wrong. So it would be at WOT all the time. Instead of fixing it i would push start it and kick it in gear and just make hot passes and shut off the key. while one time when i was shutting the key off i must have leaned to fa because it hit a tree and fell off with the bike at WOT...........good times
I heard that! I used to drink....a lot. There's more than a few "hold my beer and watch this shit" moments in my past lol.
I had this friend who used to whip his car's steering wheel back and forth while saying, "I'm in complete control." Funny thing though every time he would say that we would wind up flying into a ditch somewhere. He finally quit doing it after going into the ditch 4 times. Later my same friend decided to whip some donuts in the parking lot at work. Truck was going round and round then it hit some pavement and up and over it went. He was always doing stupid shit and wrecking cars. Amazingly he never got a moving violation and now works as a truck driver. He drives much better now.
I was clearing brush with my Dad one winter and we were using his Ford 8N to haul logs up from the woods. There was a little melted snow on the ground making things (like my boots) slick. I was hooked to a big log and it wouldn't budge. Put 'er in first gear and dumped the clutch on the tractor, it lurched forward then started climbing straight up to the sky since the log wasn't moving. I was hanging on for my life, and couldn't seem to get my foot on the clutch...boots were wet, couldn't find it and I was about to ditch the tractor or get killed. Finally when I was at about maybe 50 degrees I slammed the clutch and the tractor fell back to earth. Dad and I agreed not to tell Mom about that one.
Holy shit...as I read these stories, I realize I've done an awful lota stupid shit myself. I shouldn't be here to tell about it. I've run out of the ruts in the snow sitting with 3 other kids in a upside-down 47 Stude hood. Hood jumps the ruts, flys over a barbed wire fence and crashes into a big ol lava rock, spilling all 4 of us out laughing. Put the stands too close to the frame's front kickup under my 51 vicky...was under it takin a break with my arms above my head when the stands kicked forward...when I opened my eyes the tranny was 1/4 inch from my nose..Had to roll off the creeper to get out. Driving down the Columbia river gorge in northern Oregon one hot afternoon with all the windows open [hardtoppin it] in my 55 chevy hardtop...kept seeing smoke come from under the dash...pulled over on I-84 and smoke stopped...got going again...same deal, smoke from under dash..pull over a 2nd time...crawl under dash..everything's fine...get moving again and this time there's LOTSA smoke! Pull over a 3rd time to find smoke coming from rear floor carpet....[little floor-mat pieces of shag] grabbed it and as I threw it into the river, it exploded in flame..my home-made exhaust sagged in the middle and blew hot exhaust up on the floor...wind fanned the smoke forward under the front seat . I can't write down all the times I've had a close call..
Oh lord that reminds me I've got a handfull of mini-bike incidents. Once me and my next door neighbor were taking turns riding my mini bike around my house. He came back whining about how the throttle was sticking. So instead of taking it in the shop to see what the problem was I was just going to ride the sob to show him there wasn't nothin wrong. Well I cranked it up and wound it up and took off.....throttle cable broke off inside the handle and hung at WOT.....and I couldn't seem to get my senses together good enough to hit the kill switch. So I went screaming across the yard right into this little ditch. My front wheel dug in and I went flying like superman over the handlebars onto the ditchbank on the other side. Then we fixed the throttle cable and bent the fork back where it was supposed to be. A year later same shit happened except my little cousin was on board for the flight. He crashed into some rail road ties in the neighbors yard. Good thing cuz he probably would have hung on indefinitely...I forgot to tell him about the kill switch.... The mini bike stopped being fun because I wanted something faster so I upgraded to a Honda Trail 70. I could now do wheelies....it would do the best wheelies when I had a pal on the back. Did one once so big that my neighbors back was on the ground so he let go and stayed laying on the ground. LOL Busted the tail light another time doing a wheelie. But the incident that takes the cake was the time I had it out on the farm and decided to use this hill at the end of the turn row as a jump. Did it a few times without incident....until one time when I was going over it and was getting a run at it....lost control and went right into a tree stump. Again I went sailing over it like superman. Busted the headlight. Had horrible bruising on my legs were they hit the handlebars. I stepped up to an XL100 after that but miraculusly never had a crash on it.
Christmas Tree Fire. The tree is on fire I get the family out of the house. Then the dumb part. I call call 911 from a wire-less phone. Guess what wire-less phones don't work when the power goes out. Got out of the house and spent one very long time in ICU and a total loss of our home. All is well now and we have a new home at the same address and our Christmas tree come out of a box each year. I have done some TV stuff about burning Christmas Tree or as I call it the "Burning Bush Thing" Don't do this at home. Get out of the house first then call 911.
A few months ago i saw a guy driving a Dodge Dakota on I-294 while pulling a very large Winnebago motorhome with a rope doing 80mph+.
Okay...time for the newbie to chime in...you all emboldened me to make my contribution to the thread... In 1967, I had a '67 327 Camaro...power nuthin...327/300 4-speed...quick little car...lotsa fun...my very first "new" car. Well, the turn signal stalk broke off one weekend...dunno how, but it did. I called a local Chevy dealer...John Ellis, I still remember them...and got a price for the turn signal unit. You had to buy the whole unit...not just the part that was broken, of course. Well, they were open only half-a-day Saturday...so, Sat morning I pulled the steering wheel off the shaft using a steering wheel puller kit I bought from Sears (...still got that kit, by the way...) then removed the bezel, collars, etc, to get down to the nylon turn signal switch unit. I removed the switch unit, but then needed to drive the car over to John Ellis Chevrolet to pick up the part...and of course, I didn't want to completely reassemble the steering column and re-install the steering wheel. "After all," I reasoned..."I'll just need to disassemble it all again to reinstall the new turn signal switch, then put it all back together again, right..?" So, what the hell...I'll just screw this big fuckin' nut back in the end of the steering column shaft and give it an extra pull'r-two to tighten it down against the shoulder the steering wheel butted against. In place of the steering wheel I stuck a plumbers wrench - a monkey wrench - on the nut and drove off, using the wrench as a steering tiller. Well...all was well for a while. I had to make three right turns to get to the dealers place. Of course, not thinking about it then...all those right turns only served to tighten the nut...no problems, huh? Hell, this is workin' fine...kind of fun, too...using this big ol' monkey wrench as a tiller. All worked just dandy until I came to the intersection in front of the Chevy dealers place. I had to make a left turn into the dealers lot. I stopped...had my hand on my makeshift steering tiller...saw the opening in traffic...give her some gas...slipped out the clutch...pulled on the tiller to make the left turn in front of all those cars coming at me... ....and the damned nut unscrewed causing the wrench to come off in my freekin' hand...! There I was...in the face of oncoming traffic...in the middle of the intersection on a six lane road...with no way to steer the damned car!!! Luckily, I had just enough turn on the steering before the nut came loose...I eased out the clutch and slowly pulled through the intersection with all that approaching traffic now leaning on their brakes and horns...all their horns blaring...tires loudly complaining...and one poor driver letting me know I was #1 in his book...you name it...my dumbass was hung out to frickin' dry. Then all the adrelain dumped...hot and cold flashes...got the shakes...sweating my balls off...everything that could possibly tell me how close to becoming yet another highway statistic was now going off. I managed to put the wrench back on the nut and re-tighten it before pulling in to the dealers lot. Luckily, I had left the steering wheel in the passenger side floor board....and it was loosely installed for the uneventful drive home. I often wonder how I lived to be 61... There's another story about this Camaro, too...stand by...
Tom and Eric decide they want me to come help them get Eric's new 53 ford pickup running on a cold day...in the shop to see how good the mopar 440/4 speed will run..hasn't run for years. The fuel pump didn't work..had to hold a bottle of gas above the carb to run it. Tom says "lets take it outside to see if the tranny will work! I volunteer to hold the gas bottle but they both say it doesn't hold enough...we need a bucket of gas. I'm sitting on the cowl with a foot on each fender top..no hood.I say to Tom..."don't drive too fast and don't go out of the parking lot into traffic"..Tom agrees. I'm holding an open bucket of gas when we take a few careful laps around the lot and out on the street we go! Tom cranks the 440 on and we fly through all 4 gears!....slow down slowly and return to the shop, through town with me screaming at him...we get back, shut down the engine and I tell Tom he's gonna die now,,,,he says "I just wanted to see if all 4 gears worked ok".
Was helping a buddy once to get his Nova running after a intake manifold change. When I came along he had been trying to start it for awhile and obviously had the distributor off as it was backfiring. He told me to jump in and try it after he pulled the dist and moved it, I didnt realize I had the key on and he didnt unhook the wire so when he dropped it into the hole it must have sparked and ignited all the raw gas in the crankcase, which promptly caused one of his nice M/T aluminum valve covers to come shooting right off the head and barely missing his face. We found the valve cover in his moms garden later, chrome wingnuts and the broken edges of the valvecover were still on the head....
Well the first one that comes to mind was while we were in college. Went to school for high performance engineering. A good buddy of mine had an S-10 pickup with a 4cyl. Slow as hell, so he decided to make it handle real well. He lowered it and we did a bunch of tuning to it on the G-circle. Thing handled amazingly. Well one night, we decided to see how fast we could go around the ONLY turn in western ohio, lol. That got boring real quick, so my other friend brandon and I decided to stand in the bed of the truck and see how fast we could still stand while going around said turn. Now people always wrecked and some of them rolled around this turn because of how it was made up (and because everything was straight out there, I don't think people knew how to navigate turns). Well scoot decided he was going to scare the shit out of us and nailed it heading up to the turn. Brandon (very intelligently) chickened out and layed on the bed up against the outside bedside. I, on the other hand, figured I could handle it. Brandon grabbed onto my ankle and just as we started the turn I realized I was going to be evacuated from the bed very rapidly at about 60mph. I let go of all my leg trying to get down as fast as possible. Somehow my elbow found the straightest highest velocity route to brandon's "cash and prizes", haha. He was screaming in pain and moaning for a while and me and scoot couldn't stop laughing. He never let me forget that he saved my life and I killed his nuts, lol. He got me back a few months after that with a cell phone full-pitch into my nuts, lol.
Same '67 Camaro...after I came home from beautiful South East Asia, where I met and earned to kill the yellow man. Turns out there was a natiowide problem with Chevy Camaro engine mounts sometime in 1969. Seems almost every 327 Camaro had broken the left (drivers) side motor mount...causing the left side of the engine to raise up when the powertrain was subjected to a lot of torque...as in all the tire smokin', full throttle 3500 RPM launches from almost every traffic light I ever stopped at. Well, this pulled on the upper radiator hose and eventually caused the radiator to leak around the neck for the return hose. So...the way most of us found out about our broken motor mount was our radiators started leaking...go figure... Anyway, over the course of the Summer, I had gotten quite adept at pulling the radiator, laying it on the workbench in my father's garage, and using a propane torch, sweat soldering the neck to reseal the radiator. Hell, I had to get good at it, because I fixed it almost every weekend all summer long!!! Well...it was a typical Memphis Summer afternoon...hotter'n billy hell with not a breath of air moving...humidity at about 106%, air temperature around 102...with a heat index of about 600...it was Summer in the Delta....HOT....! And I had to resolder the frickin' radiator neck on that damned Camaro again. So, I pulled the radiator - by then I could do it in about 20 minutes flat - and layed the radiator on the workbench. It was hot, like I said, so I had on my typical Summer uniform of the day...a pair of gymshorts...a t-shirt...and was barefooted...maybe I had on some flip-flops...don't remember exactly. I lit the torch and allowed it to warm up a bit while I steel-brushed off the paint from the radiator neck. When it was all cleaned off, I picked up the torch and started to play the flame around the neck as I had done many times before. I brushed on some soldering paste and picked up the roll of solder. As I pushed the solder against the neck and applied the flame again, the solder started to flow around the hot brass neck really nicely. Perfect...looked like this was going to be a perfect seal. Just then some of the solder ran out from around the neck, down the side of the radiator...right onto the top of my big toe on my right foot. Damn liquid hot solder caught in the hairs on top of my toe....burning the Holy Hell out of my toe. Well, here I go....hopping around the garage on my left foot while trying to kick the solder off my right big toe...holding a lit propane torch in one hand, a roll of solder in my other hand...and cussing like a Marine Corps drill sergeant on a hot day at Camp LeJuene!!!! Must 've been loud, too...because all the commotion brought my mother to the door to see what was going on. Moral of the story...don't work around cars barefooted. Too soon old...too late smart.
Ok, while we are here, I have to tell one on my best friend from high school, God rest his soul. He's the same nut that bought the cameo truck in my earlier post but that was a few years later when we were in college. Anyway, it was spring break and there was a massive kegger going on at one of our friend's house whose parents were out of town. He had this old Galaxie, I think it was a 65 or 66. We were at the party and he needed to go pick up his girlfriend and it wouldn't start, so I just tossed him the keys to mine and told him to go get her. It was my first car, 1968 Rambler American 2dr sedan, straight 6 and 3 on the tree. So he picks her up and he's on the way back. The shifter on that old Rambler had a way of hanging up like those old colum shifts would do when they get some wear on them. I kept a big screwdriver under the front seat to pry it loose when it did. So he makes the last corner heading for the party and it hangs up coming out of the turn. He stops it and shuts it off, grabs the screwdriver and pops the hood. He was a little short guy so he had to climb up and sit on the fender to reach it. The old parking brake on that car was weak to non existent so when he got it loose and into neutral the car started to roll. Instinctively he just grabbed a shift rod to pop it in gear and stop it, but what he didn't know was his girlfriend had turned the key on so she could listen to the radio and she didn't turn it to acc, she had turned it on. So when he pops it into gear, it starts up and takes off down the hill with the hood up, him stiitng on the fender and his girlfriend in the passenger seat. He hollers at her to jump behind the wheel and hit the brake, she panics and hits the gas instead, ( she hadn't taken drivers ed yet). So all the time they are picking up speed down this hill,and at the bottom of the hill is the house where the party is, at the end of the road. So, what we see is my Rambler careening down the hill toward us with Eddie sitting in the fender hollering "THE BRAKE, THE BRAKE GODDAMIT THE BRAKE!!! Off the road and down the driveway they come, teenagers are scattering all over the place to get out of the way. Right as the were getting up to the garage, she figures it out and slams on the brakes. He goes flying off the car, lands on his ass and skids to a stop right in front of the kegs. He sat there for a minute kinda dazed, then he shrugged his shoulders, stood up, dusted himself off, grabbed a plastic cup and tapped himself a beer. Then he looked at me and said "well,we made it, let's party!" Before we knew it the whole place was rolling on the ground laughing. D: Luckily noone was hurt. When I think about all the stunts we pulled that could have gotten us killed...and it turned out that it was cancer that took him out at a young age.I still miss that crazy bastard ...
I had a Z-28 302 in my 56 Chevy in the early 70's. Mallory Rev-Pol dual point distributor...... I was jumping in and out of the car to 'bump' the engine over to get the points at that high spot on the lobes to adjust them with feeler gauges. I got one side adjusted, then I went to bump it again to adjust the other set of points......and left the ignition switch 'on'. I never did find those feeler gauges..........
I moved to Ft Lauderdale when I was 13 and we were at our friends house..The parents were gone and we were unrolling firecrackers and dumping the powder in an ashtray and lighting it..Watched the smoke go up and someone got the idea - let's put food color in it and see what it does... So we did and it was cool. Then another one of us Rocket Scientists suggests filling up a coke bottle with powder and food color and lighting it off. So we did..Took the bottle to the back yard with our home made fuse and set it on a cinder block outdoor grill...One of us lit it and the others stood back..Just as the guy who lit it turns away, he realizes what was gonna happen.. So he turns back to the bottle and then all hell broke loose.. The thing went off and it tore up the grill, took the bark off all the trees are it, split the wood fence, rained down glass crystals all over everyone and the biggest piece left was stuck in the guys throat who tried to stop it.. He is running around like a chicken with a stream of blood pouring out of his throat and the rest of us are looking at our clothes that are literally shredded to pieces...Car alarms are going off, people are coming out of their houses thinking God Knows What.... Our sisters are screaming bloody murder.. So we grab the bleeder and all us guys pile into the Pick up that is there (No one has a license) and we lit out for the Hospital.. Got there and they take the guy and we sit there.. meanwhile the parents come home and her comes my dad and our friends dad.. To say they were pissed is like saying Liberace loved women.. We find out that the piece of glass was only 1/8 in from the airway in the guys throat.. So we end up getting bitched out and on probation by the parents.. So being super smart and all we asked to go to a baseball game down the street and ended up in some friends new convertible Mustang headed to Naples on the opposite side of Florida.. Some of us I guess had to actually grow up to learn how to think right....
Thank you everyone for sharing. Its good to know that I wasn't the only one who felt like I was lucky to be here.
I know a fellow who's father owned a sawmill, he used to saw the buts off of the railroad ties and put them in paper bags and put them on the road and watch.
The Jalopy Journal
