Did something similar to this in my 68 lemans back in 2003. Had a nicely built 455. I went thru 3 Holley electric fuel pumps so in the trunk I kept a gas can and 10 ft of fuel line with one of those fuel priming bulbs u find on out board boats. yea fuel pump went out 30 miles from home. Made my passenger be my fuel pump at freeway speeds ran out of gas twice on the way home and he gave up a couple times complaining his hand were tired.....panzy
In 1964 I was 13 and my father's long track race car which we ran once a year was in the driveway while our weekly race car (the one in my avatar) was in the garage. It is summer, schools out and I have time on my hands with no one home... bad combination. I see wasps flying out of the car and looking in I see a wasp nest which I felt needed to be taken care of. Putting on my "thinking cap" the decision was made to burn the suckers out so I go to the garage, drain a little fuel from the mini bike into a small can and pour it on the nest. Then leisurely I go in the house & find some matches and proceed to the car, light a match and drop it on or about the nest. The inside of the race car becomes, as firefighters say, "fully involved". I am drop jawed but in desperation grab the nearby garden hose and within a few seconds the fire is out, luckily I used so little fuel that it was not as bad as it could have been. It did melt some of the roll bar padding a bit and when I fessed up about this incident (well into my 20's I might add) my father recalled the melted padding and thought it peculiar but could not think of a logical reason for this to happen; that is because there was absolutely no logic involved. I forever learned the meaning of the word volatile- evaporate rapidly or easily at ordinary temperatures.
I dropped a 460 in a f100, I wanted to see how well it did so I took it out for a spin before doing any real close inspections. I backed it out into an alleyway and let her rip. She promptly started boiling the tires and wouldn't stop. The throttle linkage had gotten stuck wide open. Since I had hot wired it I couldn't turn off the key and the brakes were no help at all. At the end off the alley was an abrupt drop off of about 6 feet! I slammed it up into park thoroughly ruining both the engine and the transmission. The truck stopped by dropping one front tire off the edge of the wall. The adrenaline dump hurt for 20 minutes.
Set up a SBC to start on the shed floor. Starts, runs, all happy. Until I see a tiny wisp of juice from the carby inlet trickle towards...yep, the disributor. The top of the engine goes up in flames, so Einstein here grabs...the garden hose and squirts the flames...and the gas...onto the wall, still aflame. Luckily they went out quickly (corrugated sheet wall, nothing to burn). After all that, I look and see TWO CO2 extinguishers within reach. They had been there so long, I had forgotten about them. total damage was just a blackened carby and some scorched paint on the inlet manifold, but I thanked my lucky stars the whole workshop didn't go up in flames. Now before start-up, I put the extinguisher next to me, with the pin pulled just in case!
Actually the water will cool the flame from melting /burning stuff. I had the whole engine compartment engulfed in flames and all I had was a garden hose and water. It finally went out and not even the paint on the hood was touched. My wife was drivine my car that I race for the first time and the engine/wiring caught fire. 9damned previous owners wiring job). She used the fire extinguisher and all the aluminum, nickel plating and anything else that was polished was toasted by the chemicals in the fire extinguisher. She did good but if I had my choice, I'd rather just keep flushing the flame with water.
same friend tried to burn some brush in a storm cellar ,couldnt get it to light so we kept adding gas,,,when it got enough air to ignite it looked like the space shuttle taking off...[/QUOTE] Wooooo Hoooooo....that's a helluva idea. Wish I was 30 yrs younger cuz I'd try that one !!
In High School a buddy and I needed to fix his OT daily driver in the middle of winter here in Minnesota. Not having a heated garage to work in, we decided to fire up the propane grill to heat up the closed up garage, as well as to warm up the tools we were using. Well, about an hour later, His mom came out, found the gas grill going, and the two of us very light headed from the fumes. Needless to say, she wasn't happy....
A little o/t , Back in the early 70's I managed to buy a 1941 Harley WLR(factory racing bike) Basket case. put it back together but could not get it running right. Knew of an old time Harley mechanic in a town about 20 miles away, so my buddy and i decide to tow(no other way to get it there) it over to see if he could help. The only thing we could find for a tow rope was an old acetylene hose so we tie one end to my buddies corvair and the other end to the front springer on the bike. Going down the highway about 35/40 with me driving and my buddy riding the bike the chain broke, lodged in the rear sprocket locking the tire. Felt the Ass end of the corvair swaying, looked in the mirror to see Lloyd playing dirt track racer back and forth across the road. As the hose streched, it would sling shot Lloyd to one side of the road in what looked like a classic dirt track power slide and then rebound with another power slide to the other side of the road. Lloyd never was the same after that.
I had just turned 16 and got my first driver, a 72 chevy halfton. Well being stupid at that age, me and my cousin and his two best friends decided,after a bottle of jack daniels, to go shine for racoons. Everything went great until my cousins friend shot a hole through the hood and the radiator. We had to leave the truck in a farmers field, were we where illegally and walk to the farmers house to call someone to come and get us.......needless to say alcohol and firearms don't mix...I had a lot of explaining to do to the police then my parents.....
I used to stick em in a vice in the cellar and hit em with a hammer. most of the time I thought to put a block of wood in front.....
this one knocked an old memory loose from my brain. riding a bike around off this yard feature sort of a berm which we used as a jump. I decide to try and shove my shoe in between the front fork and top of the wheel to stop the wheel while in air. I didnt realise that my reaction time was too slow to pull my foot out in time. endo onto my face, luckily it was in grass. here is my first experience with the speed death wobble. Just moved into the new house and riding my new bike up to the store to buy some candy or something. an older girl goes wizzing by me the other direction hauling ass, after coming off this large down hill with a nice section of s-turns. well I decide to do the same thing on my way back coming down the hill as fast as gravity got me, the handle bars start oscillating and it throws me from the bike in a blink. another time, older now, decide to do some stoppies in my gravel driveway with my dirtbike, no gear or anything on. well gravel just slides so my handle bars turn sideways and dumps me into the ground. picking gravel out of my skin for a week or two. another time we are driving the ez go (ultility style golf cart) drunk late at night. I am steering while my buddy has his hands under the tipped up dump bed so he can pull the throttle by hand (it bypassed the governor spring for extra speed. ) we are going full speed when he goes "TURN HERE" and grabs the steering wheel and yanks it right real hard. well the thing rolls and he gets thrown off. I ended up under the ez go upside down, the only reason I think I survived was because the dump bed was up and it kept the thing from steam rolling me. needless to say I was pissed at him for that. the stupid shit I do now generally has me getting out of a bobcat under the fully lifted bucket to fix some rigging gone wrong or generally dumb ass shit. this though scares the hell out of me and I only get out of the bobcat with the bucket up if I absolutely cannot drop the arm or anything. usually when I am stuck in the snow from trying to plow the driveway and I have the chain wrapped around the nearest tree to try and walk it out of the ditch. this fall I am getting snow chains for the beast. surely there are more that my mind has blocked out to keep me from crippling anxiety.
In Buffalo we caled it pogging, lets go "poggy" , it was fun until someone got hurt, then we laughed our asses off.......
A couple years ago I was pulling a 4x4 pressure treated fence post out of the ground with my F-150. The post was 12 feet long, about 3 of it in the ground ,the rest above. I didn't realize that the rope I was using had a lot of nylon in it. I couldn't see the rope as I took up the slack. What I didn't realize was the the slack was gone and the rope was stretching , storing lots of energy. Before I realized this the post snapped off at ground level. I was looking out the rear window and saw the 9 feet of 4 x4 hurtling at me. Thank God I had time to fall over in the seat. The end of the 4 x4 bounced off of the bed rail and came right through the rear slider glass right where my head had been a second before. It blew out the glass and drove the aluminum frame inside the cab. If it had hit my head , if it didn't kill me it surely would have caused some serious damage. Lesson learned , never usenylon rope , always use a chain that can not store energy by stretching.
Lets see....#25 -pussy #34 part of a friends hand, I had just walked out of the room.. #39 RC plane - split the webbing on my right hand #40 did this across the Pocono Mnts. sleet All of the others to some degree........many, many stories.... latex gloves are great at keeping your finger tips in place after you cut one off while adjusting the blades on a chipper. when melting army men don't let the plastic drip on the back of your hand. When rotating the tires on a 225 Buick I hit the Stainless steel mud flap with the back of my knuckle, cut it to the BONE, it took about two months to heal. O/T Chevelle, slicks, coming back from the strip, NO clouds until I rounded a curve, short burst of rain, (3) 360's, ended up facing the right way and drove off. Had to clean two pair of shorts and the front seats. Towing stoires...You name it I have done it.....How fast can you put a valve stem in a tire on the expressway???? 12 minutes....no joke.....I should write a book...LOL...Oh I am, but not about this stuff....
One night when i was 17, my buddy and me loaded up into my O/T Mustang GT (only had it ~a month) and went out on the town. We ended up chasing a car load of girls out of town and they kept flashing us out the back window and stuff. So i asked my buddy how badass he wanted to be, he replied...Im game. So as were doing 65 down the high way, i rip the e-brake and throw the wheel in an attempt to do a 180 and head back to town. Turns out the guy who i bought the car from didnt see the need for an e-brake (even though i wasnt using it for its intended purpose either). Unfortunately the high way we were on was elevated about 20 feet above the surrounding fields, so when my back end didnt whip around, i went straight off the shoulder. My car was 20 feet off the ground and flying. We landed out in the middle of a pasture... HARD. but i managed to take the car off roading to the next field entrance and go back onto the highway. This was the same high way that about 10 miles down the road i had rolled a 2000 ford explorer 8 times after having a blow out and hitting a concrete culvert. I dont take that road too much any more haha
I found a 39 Chevrolet tudor in a barn while I was in the Air Force in North Dakota and convinced the old farmer to sell it to me for $300. I convinced my buddy Al to help me tow it back to the base with his Ford pickup. We installed some cheap tires and towed it out of the barn and I immediately discovered that it had no brakes and that the emergency brake worked only slightly....but enough to hold the car. I tell Al (who's never done anything mechanically, has never towed a car before...and is not into cars at all) to take it slow and keep watching me and the car in the mirror. We get out on the little farm-to-market road that goes about 5 miles to a big intersection and Al just starts driving like he's not towing anything. He's going about 50 mph and the old Chevy is a complete handful and I'm screaming at his ass as loud as I can..."slow down, you dumbass!!!"....but he's oblivious and is just barreling down the road. I pull the parking brake to maybe slow him down, but all that does is remove what little life the park brake had in it and make it useless.....Al is still driving at the posted speed limit. We get to the intersection (a four way stop) and he goes right up to the stop sign and stops. I pull as hard as I can on the brake....nothing.....and I slam into the back of his pickup going fast. This propels him into the intersection until he gets to the end of the tow cable, which then pulls the 39 Chevy back into motion and I slam into the back of his truck one more time. The Chevy is wrecked....the pickup's tailgate and rear fenders are buckled and I've been slammed into the steering wheel and can't hardly breathe. I crawl out of the Chevy cussing Al up one side and down the other and I see this dude who was at the other stop sign walking towards us laughing so hard he can't talk. That old Chevy was perfectly straight until we towed it home.
Spent a few years in Italy in the 70's. Fire works over there are not your average fire works. More like small A-bombs. They had one that went off like a m-16 and at the end a nice report! This created a huge racket. Well if one was loud....what about 4! I tied the four together and screwed the pooch by turning one in the opposite direction. Making the report ignite on one first. Almost blew my fingers off...My ears rang for a week. Shattered the back glass window of the house.
jumping a 68 Cutlass over rail road berms on a dirt road..that sucker would fly, aint that right Everette?, you crazy bastard
When I was young (pre-21) all I wanted to do was get a 350 into my '64 truck. I had one of the old timers tell me at the shop where I hung out.. "I'd be more worried about making it stop, before I made it go" I thought, yeah right.. whatever. One day on my way home, while approaching a stop light with cars, I hit the brakes, and they hit the floor. I was in a immediate panic and grabbed for the e-brake, which barely worked itself! As the drums were grinding and doing their best to stop the truck I was about to piss my pants. I came within inches of the car in front of me, and then knew what the hell he was talking about.. One day I jumped in my '82 Chevy truck that I had been tinkering with the day before, to meet my wife for lunch. We were on Kelly AFB, in San Antonio, and that is what saved my truck. Because I hadn't fully tightened the rear fuel supply on my Holley double pumper, and as I approached a stop sign in base housing, I saw the smoke pouring out of the grill. I popped the hood, and the top of the engine was in full blaze. I did what any body would have done, and grabbed the chrome air cleaner, burning the hell out of my hands in panic. Lucky for me, a kid saw my truck on fire, and went inside his house and grabbed the fire extinguisher. Needless to say, after the adrenaline wore off, my hands, and part of his front yard, where I tossed the air cleaner, were burned to hell.. And it didn't help trying to beat the fire out with an oily rag either..
Don't have to be young - last year I was forced to close my shop last load was moved home and it was time to park the harbor freight trailer with the optional third wheel on the tung - on a 4" tube with nifty crank - Pushing up hill by the old redwood tree in tennis shoes so I slip And at full speed I land chest first on the top of post - knock out wind . Call wife inside house and say only "help at redwood tree" As she heads out I start to spit to see if I punctured lung with broken ribs - go to er and they do seven XRays and and EKG in case I popped my pericardial heart sac and whew no open heart surgery required That was July and I'm 46 - and I am an ass that is lucky to be alive Poverty leaves an impression
When I was in high school in '64, a friend of mine had a '55 Ford that we had put a 312 T-Bird engine in. We wanted to see how this baby ran, so we and another buddy took off to Santa Rosa to go cruzin. We left the hood off to show the cool chrome valve covers. Half way there, the car started stumbling and missing. We pulled over and it died. After messing with it for a while, we found we could keep her running by hand choking the carb. My buddy Kurt climbed onto the cowl, put his feet on those chrome valve covers, and hand choked the car 10 miles back to Sonoma on Hwy.12
I couldn't find the source of a noise in my 64 chev, it made a grinding noise only for the first few seconds after take-off. Stumped, I thought "I have to be in the engine bay when it happens", so I get a mate to plant it while I'm hanging over the fender with my feet up and head in the engine bay. We had to do it a few times up and down the street while everyone was waiting for the poor sap (me) to either fall in or off. Luckily I didn't, but I found the source of the noise- fan hitting the shroud because of a stuffed engine mount.
I went around an S curve in heavy traffic in my 39 Ford and hit a small pothole full of water. Looked like a puddle. I got a loud pop and the sound of something dragging. I couldnt stop there so I drove a 1/4 of a mile up hill then turned right into a parking lot, then turned right again into a parking spot. Looked under the truck and found that a tie-rod end had stripped all the threads and pulled out of the tie rod, and it was dragging on the road. The drivers side front wheel had nothing to influence where it went yet drove straight up a hill and turned 180 degrees into a place to stop! A stranger pulled in and asked what I needed to fix it, I told him two 1/2 inch wrenches and he went home and got them. I put it back together and drove home----Slowly!
Made the spring perch for a suicide front end on a Bucket T out of bed rails, took us almost a block to find out why it was called a suicide front end. Used a finish nail for a cotter pin on the mechanical break for my Harley. I was in a hurry to leave for San Francisco from around here. Left at around midnight, found out on the way down the other side of Love Pass why you don't use a nail instead of a cotter pin. Used cheap carriage bolts and 1/8 hot rolled steel strap to hold the rear spring on my buddys '34 roadster. We both layed in the floor just before we went under the top strand of barbed wired into the field. The barbed wired didn't break but it did slick his windshield off just like it was done with a band saw. I could probably think of a couple more but you get the point right? You can't fix stupid.
I was hanging a ceiling fan in the garage once. I just wanted to drape the cord across the ceiling, and plug it in over by the work bench, when I wanted the fan on. So I decided to just use an old orange extension cord. But while hanging the fan, I needed to use my drill to screw in the mount. So I had to use the cord. After I got the fan hung, and got ready to do the wiring, I grabbed my wire cutters, the end of the extension cord, and proceeded to cut the end off of it. It was still plugged in.. After the loud bang, my mom came running out of the house into the garage, where I was standing there, still in amazement from the flash of light, right in front of my face, with a ruined pair of wire cutters, and 3-4 black fingers. I was lucky that I hadn't killed myself. She chewed my ass out pretty good..
The Jalopy Journal
