5 scary scenarios DIYers face
Halloween is right around the corner, and any number of scary ghouls and goblins will soon be at your door asking for sweet treats. The holiday got us thinking about DIY experiences that don’t leave our minds so easily. A few projects still keep us up at night, and the thought of repeating certain procedures can provoke a cold sweat. We aren’t saying cars are cursed or possessed—we’ll leave that to the movies—but we all know at least a few vehicles for which it was hard to prove otherwise.
From losing tools to stripping threads, here are the scariest scenarios we’ve encountered in the garage.
Using a spring compressor
The McPherson-strut front suspension design has a lot going for it, like easy installation and cost-effectiveness. Sadly, changing springs or dampers in McPherson struts can be a terror. A spring this powerful is essentially a pipe bomb, and cheap or home-fabricated spring compressors that underestimate the spring’s stored tension are legitimately dangerous. Just the thought of hearing a creak from the spring compressor and seeing a spring shoot off at full force gives us nightmares that would make most horror flicks look tame.
Discovering rust under a paint bubble
You would never pick at a scab, but sometimes you can’t help but give a light poke at that discolored spot on the quarter panel of your classic. Next thing you know, your finger has promoted inner fender to the prestigious status of outer fender. The damage only gets worse from that moment: Iron oxide takes over, a pestilence that no spooky campfire story could ever conjure. Rust is a threat that hangs over everything in your garage. You’ll start seeing the brown-ish red everywhere, until even your mixed drink seems to include red rum. It can drive a man insane, that rust.
Losing a bolt
We all know what it’s like when the bolt or tool that you just had in your hand is—poof—gone. A portal to the fifth dimension opened, swallowing that one small but critical piece of your project. The thought of where that piece of hardware went will haunt you. I’m not scared of Casper, but I am terrified of where that piston pin circlip might have gone.
Stripping a bolt
At last, final assembly. Your workbench is covered in perfectly clean, ready-to-assemble parts. You painstakingly kept all the threads of all your fasteners clean, but somehow a hard-to-reach bolt that only requires 35 foot-pounds of torque just … won’t … tighten. All of a sudden, “righty-tighty, left-loosey” becomes “righty loosey, lefty also loosey.” The split second your wrench meets no resistance, the horrors of dealing with the consequences come into sharp focus.
Burning through paint
The paint on a vehicle can get really shiny if you remove enough of it to eliminate scratches, scrapes, and other imperfections. However, the mere thought of burning through the paint of their beloved classics has kept thousands of owners from so much as looking at an electric polisher. Thanks to modern compounds, this automotive horror story no longer needs to strike fear in your heart. Random-orbit polishers and diminishing-grit compounds allow you to be gentler with paint than ever before, even if the process requires a certain touch and understanding, and the fear of burn-through lingers in the room like a ghost.
What would you add to this list? Let us know in the comments below.
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Having a catalytic converter or a wiring harness catch fire and not having a fire extinguisher nearby…
Doing a tune up on an engine with sparkplug wells so deep you need two extensions, and the sparkplug snaps off leaving just the threads in the block!
Regarding the spring compressors; never put yourself in line with the strut, and treat it like the tool could slip or fail at any moment. I hate that my own lifetime warranty struts ONLY come preloaded now, meaning I have to remove the new springs, install my lowering springs, and install the new springs on the old struts for the warranty return.
What’s worse than stripping a bolt? Breaking one off in the head or the block after an attack of the “Stupids”.
He’s a tip that has worked for me many times: When the little fastener falls to the floor, do NOT move your eyes or head around frantically looking for it. Simply stare straight down (quickly) at where you think that it fell. Chances are very good that the sudden bouncing/falling/rolling of the part will catch the corner of your eye and be easily revealed. Try it…!
Right. And NEVER grab for it as it falls. All you will do is knock it across the room.
Uh, how about a car dropping off some jack stands (or worse, a lift!)!!!
Taking a coil spring out of an Oldsmobile in a pit front end alignment, the spring compressor let go and the spring hit me in the chest and knocked me “Slam” up against the concrete wall of the pit. My older brother, while “Tuning” his 56 Merc. caught the carb on fire. He panicked and thru dirt on the fire. After many miles, the car developed a slight knock. He brought it to my shop and we pulled the head we suspected and nothing was wrong, so we started it up on the one bank and heard it there. We pulled that head and found a 1/2 in lock washer imbedded in a piston. If we knew what it was, we could have left it go and it would have finally stopped making the tapping noise and probable would have been OK, for normal driving.
Then there’s that 10mm socket that you can never find so you go out and buy a new one. Only then do you find the missing socket, and now you have at least 6 of them.
Or that wrench you threw across the garage in frustration and now you’ve searched everywhere and can’t find it.
I was replacing a crankshaft in a Yamaha ATV and the woodruff key that engages the rotor ( part of the charging function) went missing. The motor had been lying on its side and the question was: Did it go into the bowels of the engine? Would this be a catastrophic failure when the engine started up? I ended up dumping lots of oil into the engine, shaking it violently, and checking the outflow (filter and drain plug removed). The pesky woodruff key finally showed its face in the drained oil. Phew! Crisis averted!
Having an “extra” bolt or nut when the job is done.
A missing bolt, especially when you have bolted (enclosed) some assembles together. The frustrating part is when you have looked diligently and can’t find it. Tear apart the assembly to make sure it’s not in there. Put the unit back together, after getting a new bolt. And later, find the old bolt way behind something in the far reaches of the shop. Blah!
Years ago, installing new front wings (fenders) on my ’66 Ford GT Cortina I finished the welding (oxy-acetylene) and proceeded with spraying the underseal. I was short on time, as my mate needed his shop back for a project of his own, and missed one tack weld at the bottom of the wing by the rocker panel. I decided to correct the missing tack only to ignite the fresh underseal above it. Naturally, I was totally unprepared for a fire; I was alone, no extinguisher, no hose, nothing. All I had was my brand new work coat I had been issued a couple of days before. I stuffed the coat into the burning wheel well to snuff out the flames. To this day, I bear the scar from a cut I suffered snuffing out the flames and, as an added reminder, the is some black underseal within the scar. I survived, the car survived and my mate’s garage was none the worse for the experience which has left me with a healthy respect for flame and sparks and the potential consequences.
Oh, to be 20 again!
my worst fear would be forgetting to disconnect the battery and having a mouse “accidently” chew through a positive wire while grounding it and burning the car, garage, and possible house down.
Removing a body bolt from a GM A body, and the cage nut between the frame and body spins. The only remedy is to cut a hole in the body from above. Nooooooooo!
you would not be able to change the strut using the home made spring compressor as pictured … compressing springs is dangerous without using the proper tools. if replacing at home it’s worth removing the strut assemblies and spending a few bucks to have an auto parts store or shop to do the actual swap out
The master cylinder on my ’49 Packard is cross-threaded. I finally marked that socket “MC Left tight, Rt lose.”
Saved wasting a lot of time and PB Blaster!