I left some scissors under my hood once. They managed to find their way into the power steering belt and rode their way all the way down where they cut the crank sensor off the block leaving me stuck in the partially snow covered drive through of a McDonalds.

 

On my first time working on the Miata, I attempted to jack up the front of the car from the cross member. I was working in my apartment complex parking lot (not allowed) and the wheels of the floor jack dug right down into the asphalt. When the jack stopped rolling, it slipped off the cross member and the car dropped, punching the jack up into the slash shield. Fortunately I hadn't raised the car very high so only the splash shield was damaged.

I am forever getting the car up on jackstands and then realizing I didn't loosen the lugnuts prior to jacking it up.

When I did the CAS o-ring, I removed the valve cover, set it upside down on the garage floor...after aligning the CAS I picked up the valve cover and was just about to flip it back over into place before I noticed that my wife had dumped some topsoil into it as she was carrying the bag through the garage.

Upon reflection, I think I've gotten off very easily so far.

 

Thats hilarious I am the same damn way I hate working on Neon's. My brother has one and he overheated it so we were swapping in a new engine got the engine in everything was great except I let my brother put the timing belt on and I forgot to double check his work as I am the more experianced mechanic I was test driving the car and the engine just died.

I couldnt figure out what was wrong it wouldnt run it had great compression and the timing marks lined up correctly I started replacing Crank and cam sensors to no avail so then I said **** it and pulled it all back apart and found out he didnt torque the cam gear down and under load it spun on the cam and sheared off the key pin.

It had compression because miraculously it spun 180* off. So I took the head off and checked the valves all 8 intake valves impacted the pistons. We had to buy another motor because it was cheaper than replacing the jacked up ****.

The biggest pace palm of all is that when he put it back together again he did the same thing and wasted the new engine.

Moral of the story dont let my brother work on your car......

 

lol you guys are freaking warriors!!!

 

Leaving out $5 worth of parts for my oil pump relief valve and having to take apart my engine again for a second time this year.

 

I helped a friend who was restoring an old VW bus remove the rear bumper from a bus at a local junk yard. It was snowing. It was cold. The bumper had been on the bus since 1962 and was not eager to leave home. The bus was parked 3cm from a tree. Not the best wrenching conditions, in other words.

After hours of wrenching, heating, hammering, wrenching, warming ourselves in his old Opel, cursing and hammering some more, the bumper came loose… and hit the tree. We needed to slide it out about 10cm to get it of the bus. We had 3cm. The bus had been parked there since early 80is, had no wheels and was pretty permanently bonded to the ground. Moving the tree would be easier.

We ended up borrowing a gasoline driven die-grinder from the junk yard owner and cut the bus apart.

 

i will top you all.
(I was young and had my hot rod mustang 5.0)

forgot to tighten my battery hold down and was driving to work.
turned left rather quickly and all of a sudden car died and i caught glimpse of a fire under the cowl hood.
turns out the battery had tipped inward towards the engine and the + terminal hit the hard line for the power steering line severing it.

THANK JESUS it wasn't a fuel line.

But yeah not only the force but the voltage as well. ugh.

F'ing idiot.

 

what the hell is a cm. . . .

 

put some oil in the car right after i had been driving with it, and im not the best pourer, some oil got on to the hot manifold and caught on fire.. tried to blow it out, and that was not working. ran and got a towel and managed to smother it out, but that was a pretty close call.