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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Just finished removing a stripped wheel bolt on a BMW. Pretty much crushed my desire to do the brakes and oil change.
You guys are making my skin crawl. We’ve all been there. How about the “simple” disassembly that is so obvious you don’t need to take notes or pic’s, only to find the expected 2 minute reassembly later takes an aggravating 40 minutes and numerous “This doesn’t makes sense…” and other colorful comments until it magically falls together with a final “Oh yeah- of course that makes perfect sense”
I have to say anything that involves handling spring compressing. Working in production in Buick Plant#40 the spring production scheduling line extremely hazardous handling even with all protective safeguards installed. Springs were compressed with a hydraulic compressor and you installed solid metal spring locks in the process any of which could fail at any time and overwhelm existing machine or personal safeguards. This Hazard closely followed by failing or insufficient floor jacks when working under a car or a truck.
This one didn’t scare me at first- I was welding a steering bracket under my cougar and I noticed that I could see better and better through the welding glass. I thought that my eyes were just adjusting to the darkness. Pulled back the helmet to see that I had struck an arc off a fuel line, pierced it and the pool of fire was steadily increasing in diameter as the fuel leaked. I took a deep breath and blew it out and rolled out, breathed a sigh of relief and put a quick piece of gum on the leak.
A Diabetic car friend of mine was removing a gas tank that was “as empty as he could get it”
When he got the last bolt out of the last strap the tank shifted and gas came out and went across the floor to POOF his trouble light. He got severely burned (he did live). Almost burned down the house. The garage and car were totaled. He was “lucky” he survived.
Lost a socket open end wrench that had ridden on the inside of my 1927 Studebaker fender for over 34 Years!! Looking for the end of the headlight wires when I found it right where I left it when the fender was put on after restoration. Had looked for the wrench for years before I gave up. The car had moved to three different states, can’t remember how many different shops and parades and it still hung in there. Still have the complete set of wrenches.
I would have to say the spring fling would be the worst and then the rust as they both might require new body parts
Rust is the worst. Everything else is fixable
Worse than breaking a bolt, stripping or cross-threading a fastener is breaking or cracking a piece cast as part of the engine block! Case in point: Overtightened the distributor hold-down bolt on my 1972 Opel 1900, and the mating surface for the bolt that was cast into the block cracked and a piece broke off, so you couldn’t tighten the bolt! We had the car towed to my mechanic, who installed a Heli-coil insert and added a washer to the bolt to spread the load, so he was able to fix it, but for a while there, I thought I was going to have to put another engine in it!
My method for installing coil spring struts and lower control arms is to loop a nylon motorcycle tie down strap or larger yellow load binder strap through the sencond coil from the top of spring/contol arm combination and hook both ends of the strap to the axle of the floor jack…and carefully jack and place assemblage into position…It has worked wonders for me in the past…you only need to compress as much as actually is needed for assembly…
I found a loose bolt in a skid plate of a brand new 4Runner’s skid plate doing it’s first oil change!
My vote is for the home made spring compressor, but you have to add “Breaking A Bolt Off” to this list. I am restoring a 1965 Mustang and i have lost count of the suspension, bumper and cross member bolts that have just sheared off at the most “convenient” locations. And yes, i did use penetrating oil on the bolt/nuts i could get to. It gives you lots of practice in drilling, tapping, cutting and welding.
The home-made spring compressor in the photo is a bomb waiting to go off! If the turnbuckle eye bolts don’t pull open first, the S Hooks will straighten out when they get too much spring pressure (they will see it as tension) on them. You MUST use fasteners rated for lifting in an application like this. They will be Grade 80 or 100 alloy steel. If the turnbuckle bodies are strong enough, you can just replace the eye hooks and also add a “safety” nut to each one on the inside of the turnbuckle so they don’t rip through if the turnbuckle threads give out. S Hooks should be replaced with Quick Links so it doesn’t pull open. That photo has been used elsewhere on a Hagerty tool article and I posted the same comment then. Why Hagerty continues to use this photo without a giant red WARNING plastered over it and a caption below that says “This is the WRONG way to make this tool” defies logic. There is a reason Snap On, OTC and other tool companies make actual spring compressors that are used by trained professionals at dealerships and service stations. There is also a reason they are expensive: because life and limb is at risk every time you use it and even one of the professional tools can fail if not properly set up. I’ve seen it happen and a spring shot right through the shop ceiling and the 4″ hole was left in the sheetrock as a reminder to everyone who pulled that tool out of the box. Fortunately the tech that was working on the strut assembly was not hurt, but if he was standing just a few inches closer he would have lost his face before he could have blinked. This Rube Goldberg contraption will work up to an unknown spring rate, but someone is going to get seriously injured if they duplicate that tool and exceed the limits of the Cheapo Depot made-in-China bargain-bin hardware.
Agree 100%. The very existence of that suicide spring compressor photo is scary. The black hole that is the internet ensures that the photo will live on forever. Eventually someone will encounter it and think, “…. Hey, that could work!” Watermarking it with warnings won’t scare everyone.
Fire, or vehicle falling off a jack, don’t ask how I know. I’ll continue to drop and misplace bolts, strip threads, damage paint, etc. and continue to live with it.
Hands down a spring compressor. Even using the OTC is scary as it has 800-1000+ stored kenotic energy just waiting to escape. Like picking up a descented skunk, it’s still unnerving.