History Stories relating to towing incidents (What was i thinking)

Stories relating to past towing/trailering episodes.

 

Ah the things we did back when we "knew it all"

Back in my late teens I once bought a 1942 American LaFrance fire truck located on the other side of the state. Well, me and a buddy loaded up the tow bar, and ice chest full of beer and hit the road to go get it. The fire truck was a behemoth with a big old V12 engine and a huge water tank built on the rear.
We paid the cash for the truck and chained up the tow bar and hit the road. We were using a 1/2 ton 2wd Ford truck as the tow vehicle which looked very small out in front of the fire truck. The fire truck tracked well enough and pulled fairly good at moderate speeds (30-40MPH). The big thrill came when we started down hill. All of a sudden we had that massive fire truck trying to push us out of the way. The thing would start walking back and forth trying to come around us.
It didn't help that by this time we had dipped into our ice chest a few too many times and were feeling a little fuzzy. The plan was to take state roads and avoid the interstate. Not a bad plan, except there wasn't any direct routes or frontage roads and we had to get on the interstate. So, there we went, half blasted, no lights what-so-ever, and only able to run along about 45-50 MPH and much slower going down hill so the thing wouldn't overtake us right down I-40 across New Mexico.
By the time we got to Albuquerque we were more than half blasted. We drove that contraption down Central Ave. That danged fire truck pushed me through more than one red light. Surprisingly enough, we made it home unscathed. How we avoided Johnny Law I'll never know.


I'm sure glad I know better now
Bobby

 

I broke the transmission in my '67 Pontiac Lemans race car so the next weekend I decided to take it to a car show while the trans was being repaired. All was good, I pushed on and off the trailer at the show and had a good time. On the way home about a mile from the house I had to slow down and make a curve on to a side street. Coming around the corner I heard something that didn't sound right. I rolled down the window and heard a chain dragging. All I could think about was the stop sign coming up and what the car was going to do if I had to stop. Sure enough, there was traffic, so as careful as I could I started slowing down, then it hit. The rear chain came loose, no park brake, and free wheel car on moving trailer! It bounced over the trailer jack taking out the core support and radiator and landed dead square into the tail gate of my Dodge. The points on the headlight bezels poked holes in the tail gate on both sides. Now All I could do is drag the whole mess to the side of the road and walk home for the floor jack and wood blocks to get it back into place. I added new tie down locations and a whole lot better hooks before leaving the driveway again..

 

I flat towed my 1947 Mercury from Corpus Christi to Abilene Texas one very long nite. I was driving my grandfathers 1956 Chevy 1/2 ton with bad slack in the steering box and had a buddy to help drive. I had learned that the only way to get the truck to go straight was to steady rock the steering wheel from left to right, slack to slack. Once you got the rhythym matched to road speed, you were good. Of course it didnt drive it very fast and with the car behind it went even slower. About 2 in the morning I was seeing things that werent there and asked my friend to drive. He couldnt figure it out so I had to keep driving. The tow bar width didnt match the Mercury so I had used long bolts and lots of washers. This is no good and eventually it flexed so much that the frame horn broke and flexed until the bolts broke and the Mercury was free from the tow truck. I had a bench grinder with me and took the tow bar into a gas station and used the bench grinder to cut thru the brace on the tow bar so I could more closely match the width. This worked almost as well as before so we had to drive even slower. It was a long 400 hundred miles and I slept for 18 hours after I got there.

 

A Suburban on a 16' trailer does not have enough tongue weight and will fishtail you right off the road. And you will destroy the Suburban, the trailer, and the F150 you are towing with. Don't ask me how I know this...I am still recovering from the head injuries.

 

Yeah, young and stupid. Many years ago my buddy bought a 41 Willys coupe. No engine, trans or steering box so he got me to help pick it up. Hooked a tow bar to my car, take off and every bump the Willys would bounce hard (no shocks) and front tires would turn to full lock. Found some rope, tied the drag link to the frame, that works till the first turn, broke the rope. Found some wire, same thing, my belt, broke that too. Half way home and out of anything to tie the drag link. Buddy hops in the engine compartment, sits down on the frame, grabs the drag link and says "shut the hood, let's go" so I did. Drove the rest of the way with him "steering" from under the hood looking out the grill. After we got there he told me he was scared sh--less, said it kept trying to bounce him off the frame but I couldn't hear him yelling to stop. I guess if the wheels had gone to full lock again I would of had to gone back and looked for his body! What were we thinking!
Then there was the time trying to flat tow a car with no brakes with a chain. No problem, just run the chain thru 6' of pipe, as long as you kept the car centered to the tow car it'll stop, right? Actually, it worked pretty well...least till the chain broke.

 

Buddy aat work tells me about a 35 IHC 1/2 ton his ex wife's uncle has in Southern Nebraska so I borrowed a trailer and hooked it to my subframed, Pontiac powered F-100...went down there through the rollling hill country and bought it. I had to torch off the brake drums to get it to roll and loaded that mo-fo up and used chains and turn buckles to cinch it down....headed down the road to come home.
On one of the hills I felt a little "bump" and looked in my inside mirror to see the cornbinder all the way up against the front bar of the trailer. That's NOT where it was when I cinched the turnbuckles down! I was going downhill and slowly pulled over to take a llittle look-see.
All the turn buckles had popped over and the chains had fallen off because I'd hooked the chains to the frame, not the axles! Nothing was holding the pickup to that trailer except gravity....I learned that day to attach the tie-down chains to the axles, not the frame..

 

1965......just out of high school running dirt tracks in eastern Iowa. Really basic old homemade trailer that was used previously by local guys to haul a 40 Ford coupe stock car. We built a 1955 Chev modified stock car. We were thrashing late on a Sat afternoon to get ready for Sat night. Didn't have the brakes fixed/bled. Decided we needed to get loaded and we would fix/bleed brakes at the track. Thanks to two of our team members from farming families, we had two new 1965 Chevrolet pickups that we used for tow vehicles. We had one hooked to to trailer on the gravel road adjacent to the farm where we built the race car. Rolled the car without brakes down the gravel road to get enough speed to get it up on the trailer.....made it up on the trailer.....no brakes.....went off the front of the trailer .....caved in the tailgate and rear box sides of the new Chev truck !!!! Our team member and farmers son who borrowed his dad's truck, didn't know whether to go home that night or just run away from home forever !!!........the best of times !!!!

 

Well guys this story is a good one, Back in the early 70's I was working at this used car lot that sold real shitboxs. the owner was a old timer that knew all the tricks of the trade. One winter he decided to buy a shitbox Shaster motorhome to drive from Mass. to Florida with his wife. Well this motorhome was a mismatch of all kinds of faulty parts, for one thing it looked like a big box with the wheels about 2 feet in the wheelhouses. The shift lever was out of a mustang floor shift, but it was mounted up by the drivers window. the release button was on the left that you would normally use with your right thumb, now this old buck would look like a monkey screwing a football to get it out of park with both hands. the gas pedal was a floating G.M. pedal out of a Camaro, but it was mounted in a way that you couldn't pivot your heel on the floor to accelerate, so it was full throttle or nothing and to make matters worse he wore a heavy steel brace on his right foot. So after terrorizing Florida for a month they headed home. In Georgia he pulled off 95 to get some gas at a small town filling station and after loading up this monster he arm-wrestle it in gear and stood on the throttle and launched it across a island planted with flowers between the station and the road promptly ripping a massive hole in the bottom of the shit tank [that was full] spewing raw sewerage all the way back to the interstate , now as they are driving home his old lady has a bladder problem and diarrhea to boot, and she's on the crown all the way home , so any vehicles that came up behind them suddenly had their wipers on, but anyway he brought some nice Florida oranges back for all the guys at the lot . the bad thing was they were covered with mold.

 

What does a stone stock 354 HEMI with a stock cast iron case transmission weigh? I bought one and brought it home on the wooden deck of a single axle trailer. When I got home it had fallen through the deck and was riding on the axle. Took a lot of time with a floor jack and 4x4 blocks to get the trailer higher than the mass of cast iron. Some make shift ramps and I was able to drive the trailer forward and off the lump. This was all done on the street in front of my house. Sold the transmission, still plan to use the HEMI some day. Bob

 

My only "towing" accident involved me hitching my 56 Pro Bracket 56 Chevrolet to flat tor it to the track with a towbar. Had my girlfriend at the time, now my wife of 28 years, in my 74 Nova tow vehicle. I wanted her to creep the Nova back in reverse, and i'd tell her when to stop. Well, she jabbed the throttle, the Nova lurched backwards, and caught my right hand between the towbar hitch and the rear bumper on the Nova. Four broken fingers. Still went to the drags after an ER visit. She also never said "sorry", but was mad because "I asked her to do it". Another comical transport idea involved me borrowing my younger sister's 63 Chevy II Station Wagon to pick up a 56 fiberglass front end, and bring it back to my garage where the 56 Bracket Car was. I sat the fiberglass front end onto the back of the Wagon "backwards", and tied it down. Got a bunch of looks transporting the fiberglass front end strapped backwards on the Chevy II Wagon. I ultimately did't use the fiberglass front end, but made the stock steel hood and fenders into a tilt steel front end. Sold the fiberglass front end for twice what I paid for it to a guy with a 56 4 door hardtop. I bet that was the only 56 4 door hardtop with a fiberglass front end in the world. I am Butch/56sedandelivery.

 

Sounds like you must know the bloke who bought a flathead and trans from a friend. I was helping load the thing up in a trailer, which had a water-bloated particle board floor. The buyer said "it'll be OK", and drove off. The first bump he hit on the street the floor just collapsed, the mill hit the axle, and he just kept driving into the sunset.

 

Great thread!

 

In the late 80s we had a flathead D/A Fiat my buddy and I built from tubing and an Anderson glass body. We trailered it on a single axle unsprung trailer. We had been to Englishtown to the nostalgia drags and were returning to NH. That year we had seven flathead cars to run with at Englishtown, including the HAMB's RonnieRoadster. We stopped around Danbury, CT to have lunch and when we got out of the tow vehicle, we walked back to check the race car. It was sitting on the trailer but only held there by gravity!. The cable from the winch had come loose and the rachets straps had too,probably from the beating the unsprung trailer took on the highway! Damn, we had been going 60mph with the possiblity that the race car could had slid off the trailer into the travel lane. One other thing in our favor was the car was in gear, '39 box, and quickie had some deep gears in it. All of a sudden we weren't hungry anymore. Here's a picture from that year at our home track, NED.

 

My brother was involved in a stock car racing team back around 1977. They had a borrowed trailer, which was made from an old drive-on lube rack. Heavy as fuck is an understatement. It was virtually impossible to jockey around with no car on it and it had no springs.

They're on their way to a race and heading up to the LI Expressway, traffic stops suddenly and they have to go onto the shoulder between a light pole and guy wire. This is at 55 mph. They're waiting for this wide dolly of a trailer to get caught on the pole or wire.. they make it through somehow. A car following them must have been watching them and not where he was going, he creams the pole in a Vega.

 

I may have posted this elsewhere on the HAMB. It was early 1984 and my '65 Belair craps out on the parkway heading to work. I was able to walk to a phone and call my wife so she could get me. Can't get the car going so she drops me at work and goes to work, she would pick me up on the way home.

I get some rope from a guy at work and me and my wife go get my Belair and tow it with her Olds Cutlass. We had to go north on the parkway, turn around and take the back roads home. There is a little slack in the rope and sure as shit... some imbecile tries to get in between us on the ramp, which is all backed up. I'm on the horn and cursing out the window.. the other driver is oblivious. I had to get out of the car and bang on his window and told him to back off.

We get the car home and my poor wife is a basket case. I had to promise never to ask her to do something like that again.

 

Nothing as exciting as you guys stuff. Helping crew for a buddy one night, we were on the way home from Pacemakers (?) in Mt Vernon, Ohio, about a 3hr tow home. Lotta cars, made it to the semi's IIRC. We didn't get outa there 'til after midnight. I was in the back seat of his Wagoneer tow rig. Hot, clear, summer night, windows down, nice ride home. Somewhere an hour or so outside of Mt Vernon, I felt a pretty big 'bump', and was awakened with corn tassels slappin' me in the face. Seems all three of us decided a nap was in order. We were so deep in a cornfield, we had to scout our way back out to the highway. No damage, but everyone was WIDE awake the rest of the way home! Thank God for flat land & shallow ditches...

 

Back in the summer of '73 my brother and his girlfriend took off on a vacation in his '65 Nova SS from his apartment in Waukegan, IL. I had just gotten out of the Army and was staying at their apartment with their lab mix Murphy while they were gone. An hour after they left my brother calls and says his Nova has broken down on the side of I-294 and to grab his tow chain and come get them. So Murphy and I hop into my '68 Mustang, find them on the freeway, hook up the tow chain, and his girlfriend rides with Murphy and me because it's safer. Instead of pulling him to the next exit to turn around I decided to make an illegal U-turn in the middle of the interstate. While attempting to do this the chain came unhooked from my car so I was in the center divider between 6 lanes of traffic and he was on the right shoulder. I ran across three lanes to discuss our next move and all of a sudden here comes Murphy running across the road. There was a brand new semi tractor with no trailer coming at him at 70 mph that locked up his brakes to avoid hitting him and it skidded sideways onto the grassy area next to the road and rolled over. We both just about shit our pants while watching this because the truck barely missed his Nova and us too. My brother grabbed the dog and I ran back across to my Mustang and pulled it back onto the shoulder in front of the Nova. My brother unhooked the tow chain and put it in his trunk and we hid Murphy, who was shaking pretty badly, under a towel under his girlfriend's legs in my Mustang. We ran down to the truck and saw a man and a boy about 10 lying in the grass. Fortunately they weren't seriously injured but the truck was a total loss. The driver said a black dog had run across the road in front of him but he never mentioned a yellow Nova or blue Mustang which was very lucky for us. We had to wait around for a couple of hours until the truck was towed away and the police left and then we hooked up the chain again and this time we went down to the next exit to turn around and we managed to make it back to my brother's apartment without getting pulled over. They took off the next morning in my Mustang and had a nice vacation....

 

This one time...ah, nevermind. I can't even come close to these stories.

 

WOW, mine is not as scary as all of your stories. You may of remembered I told you my brother bought a 57 convertible back in the late 70s with no motor or trans.{he had just wrecked his other 57 chevy and was going to put the motor and trans in his car and put it in the car we were bring home}We started towing it back with my 64 buick special station wagon with just a chain. On the way home we had to go through a couple of towns and then go over a big mountain to get back home. Up the mountain I went slow and everything went fine till we started coming down the mountain and the chain had dropped off. I still remember my brother passing me in the 57 with a Minny Miller beer in his hand toasting me as he passed me laughing. At the bottom of the mountain we hooked the car back up and limped it home. AHH good times. LOL. Bruce.

 

The best one I remember (and there have been more than a few) was a trip to snowy northern Missouri to pick up an off-topic British car that my buddy was buying.. My buddy was driving his new Chevy pickup and pulling a real car trailer. We got to the address in this little town and my buddy made the deal and drove the car to the ramps of the trailer. Did I tell you it had snowed and the roads in this little down were covered with packed snow. Here is where ir starts to get interesting.

He had parked with the truck parked slightly downhill but the trailer was on level ground. As he drove the car onto the ramps a funny thing happened to him. Not to me but to him. When the front wheels of the car got to the top of the ramps the whole weight/balance thing changed. Suddenly, the truck rear was light on the skids and the whole thing started down the hill.

I'm running along side of the truck to get in and steer or so I thought. As I got to the cab door I tripped and fell and the whole mess is sliding by. I then decided that being run over by the trailer was survivable but I did not want to be run over by the steel angle iron ramp with a TR6 on it. I rolled out of the way, stood up, and started down the hill to get to the truck. This time I got in the truck and attempted to steer a little. I had no time to ask my buddy for the keys as he slid by the first time so I just held on to the locked steering wheel and let gravity do it's thing. Now we were both passengers-me in the cab with the column locked and he in the little car pointed up on the ramps.

It all stopped at the bottom of the hill....maybe a hundred yards. The truck did not jackknife oddly enough. I guess the ramps digging into the street kept the speed down and the whole mess going straight. As I got out of the truck I looked back up the hill. There was the previous owner standing in the street shaking his head. He then turned and walked up his driveway toward the house. My guess is that he was saying something like "damn city boys" or something like that.

 

you guys have some whoppers. best I have is helping my buddy who is an aspiring circle track racer. He always has some plan or deal going, just one of those kind of guys. well, he grabs this nascar Pro series east car for peanuts but doesn't have a truck trailer or garage to keep it. I let him keep the car in my garage for a couple months until he wheels a deal on an enclosed trailer. so he borrows a trailer from a buddy and they pick up the car and bring it to his house then he calls me and asks if I can pick it up to get it in my garage... ok fine... does the trailer have a 2" ball or bigger?? he tells me it has a two inch ball... fine I'm on my way. hooked up the trailer and notice it sounds a little clunky on my way home. back the thing in and start rolling the car off the trailer and the nose of the trailer goes 3 feet in the air.... if I wasn't so pissed at myself for knowing better than to double check I would have popped him one. brand new truck too I was lucky nothing got damaged.

 

Don't get in such a hurry as to load a junk truck on a trailer backward with a freshly painted tow truck regardless of how short the trip,too much weight behind the trailers axles can result in the tow vehicle,trailer & truck ending up in a ditch.. don't ask me how I know, HRP

 

My cousin, Darrell bought a 59 sedan deville flat top 4 door hardtop from a friend of my dad's and while it ran he decided to trailer it to his house on a trailer my dad had made for him from an old power line tower with mobile home axles. For some reason Darrell backed the caddy onto the trailer. His tow car was a giant '70 ford E-350 loaded with all kinda of tools, etc etc. Musta weight 7500 lbs. He tows up the 5 mile long hill [this is Oregon] and just starts down the other side when the trailer begins to whip back and forth and Darrell can't get it to stop...gets worse and worse until the trailer rolls up on 2 wheels and bucks the caddy off! The caddy skids down the hill and passes Darrell on it's top, throwing sparks and losing hunks of broken glass all over the the hiway till it slowly slides into the ditch upside down. Darrel said it slid almost a 1/4 mile.
Darrell had a buddy who also wanted that caddy, a low mileage sweetheart so Darrell calls him with his cell phone and tells him the story and says "come and get it...its' free!"
That's the last time he ever saw the caddy......

 

When I was a kid our family took a trip to lake Roosevelt in AZ. We were towing an aluminum airstream with an 87 suburban. We had removed the rear seat and had a queen size matress in the back, and my sister and I were sleeping back there, totally unrestrained. As we drove around a sweeping curve on the side of a hill, some sort of freak wind gust/mini tornado picked up the trailer, and threw it in front of the suburban. Attached by the hitch, we rolled 2 1/4 times. I woke up laying on the cracked side glass with grass coming through it. Only injury was a sliver of glass in my cousins finger.
After the truck was totalled, my dad retained it, and took it to a body shop. They straightened out the door tops, popped out the roof, replaced the glass, and we drove it for another 4 years. Tough truck!

 

I could write a book about my towing experiences.....
Chevelle's are not made to pull stock car trailers......
Don't have your tire wiper drive your ramp truck......
Make sure your safety chains are hooked up properly.....
Flat towing sucks.....
If you hear thumping noises in the night driving through the Montezuma swamp area in NY, keep driving.......
The length of a trailer tongue to the front axle is proportional to the amount of sway you will encounter towing......
Trailer brakes are great when they are working properly....
Semi's make great tow vehicles ...until you have to back up........
and the best times.....towing our modified with a 3/4 Ford Van to Iowa with five guys....ordering pizza on the way......

 

Bruce,
You have the best stories!!! LOL

 

So......who is going to start the thread on how to correctly attach a chain?

 

When you see the side of your trailer in the drivers door mirror you will find out quickly what the strongest muscle in your body is!!!!!

 

I've only got one interesting story. A friend needed a car trailer (this is early 80's) and my brother in law had built one for his race car and he was a great guy and loaned it to my friend. On the way to pick up a car they are cruising down a two lane road and he looks in the rear view mirror and sees the trailer trying to pass him on the right, the tongue broke off. The trailer rolled into the ditch and damaged some fence. I had an old farm truck so we went down and used planks and pulled it up on the truck and hauled it home. That could have been a bad accident, luck was with my friend that time.