Like: Your own car, rental car, some one you know who has a car etc and like accident, issues, whatever... My Story: Blown Rod on 2006 Escape Hybrid... The 2006 Escape Hybrid was bought brand new from the dealership in September 2006 and it was worth around $31,000 new as it was loaded blah blah blah. On 1/14/2017, my dad was gonna go home after staying at a party and wanted to go home so, The truck was running fine until knocking noises @35mph and then it became louder. When he pulled over, the engine made a grinding noise and then a BOOM and the rod blew through the oil pan. The Dash said "check emissions control" and "change oil". Interestingly there was no "Check Engine" light so it happened without warning. The engine was a total loss and he was 2 miles from home. Had it towed to home and here is the pic of the rod thrown... The Escape had 228K miles on it and it was running perfect. Never again are we buying a Ford! Yet this escape had Japanese reliability in it which is why there are so many in the NYC taxi fleet.
Oh boy this thread will be good. I spun a rod bearing in my last car, and had a tie rod come loose a few times which is a lot of fun. One time my shifter fell down on the hi way and I had to stick my hand thru the hole, and pick it back up sneaking it past the exhaust. Once my coolant froze, and droving to work I saw my temp maxed out. I was forced to stop in the breakdown lane of the Whitestone bridge. The cops showed up after 30 seconds and I explained the problem and my idea to turn the car on and off till the coolant melted and after a few minutes everything was fine. Lucky my water pump survived that ordeal. I also had a rear trailing arm fail putting my suspension on the ground while driving. Good times in the Honda game.
That all happened in my first project car. 1997 civic dx hatch. I first swapped a jdm b20 (crv) into it, than after that spun a bearing I bought a b18c1 gsr block and than bought a gsr head with type r cams to complete the package. It was a fun car.
Wow, that's why I like certain Japanese cars... Bulletproof reliability and fun at the same time! (The Escape and a Silverado are the only american vehicles we have in our yard)
Ok, the worst one I can think of wasn't really a side of the road problem, but it was trying to get a hunk of shit roadworthy in the middle of nowhere. I went with a buddy of mine to pick up a parts truck that was about 110 miles away from where we live. We both have second gen full size Dodge trucks, and we took mine, and the parts truck was one as well. The kid on the internet who owned the parts truck said it was rough, but he said it ran and drove fine, so we decide against borrowing a trailer. We get there, and the kid who owns it can't be but 14 or 15, not old enough to have a license, and the truck is way rougher than we though. First thing, driver's side rear axle is about 3 inches too far out from under the bed, look underneath, the diff cover is gone, the carrier is gone, the ring gear is laying in the grass, and both C-clips are gone. Great. We go up front and look under the hood, there is no battery, and both battery terminal connectors have been cut off, there are only 7 plug wires, and no air cleaner. We figure that we drove far enough and the truck was cheap enough, we should just try to make it "roadworthy" enough that we could try to drive it home. We go into town to see if we can find a rebuild kit for a 9.25 Chrylser axle, a battery, and some plug wires. The only store we find is a little hole-in-the-wall auto parts store, but they didn't have much, no rebuild kit, not even a C-clip kit, and we couldn't buy just one plug wire, we had to buy a whole set of 8, that we didn't need, They did sell car batteries though. We headed back, and started to improvise. we stole a plug wire off an Astro van he had sitting in his yard, and he found us a "welder", And by that, I mean he found an ancient stick welder that ran on what I assume to be 1 amp, so we took our freshly borrowed "welder" and tried to weld the spider gears on the axle shafts, just so they wouldn't fall out and kill us. After about an hour of trying, he had sufficient booger welds on both of them. We then put the battery in it, vise gripped the cables onto the terminals, and tried to see if it would move, and it did! But then we noticed something else, the steering box was totally shot, two full turns of the wheel before anything happened. We took our battery out, and went home.
Fortunately, nothing has ever happened to MY car yet. If speaking about my family members, then there are some stories. Once (I don't remember the exact date, but it was in the 90s) my grandfather parked his circa 1994 Ford Escort (European model) on a river pier and forgot to put on the parking brake or put it into a gear. When he came back, his car was gone and the water was suspiciously muddy with lots of air bubbles coming to the surface. The car was succesfully located, rescued from the river and repaired. In fact, this car still exists (my father saw it on the road a few months ago), outliving its owner. On the 17th of December 2016 my mother had her 2008 BMW 116i totaled in an accident. She was turning left from a small street onto a major road and didn't yield to a circa 2013 Toyota Corolla, which she didn't notice. Her car's speed was around 20 kmh and the Toyota was going at around 75 kmh at the time of the impact. After the impact, Toyota drove onto the median strip, bringing down a pole (so, our insurance had to pay for the pole, too). Luckily, nobody was hurt. Toyota's fate is unknown and the pole was completely destroyed.
That was some read. Really makes me laugh at the fact that weather it's an early 90s Honda, or an old American anything, the song remains the same when things go wrong. The fact that you got there and even tried to save that situation is evidence your a more learned and more persistent mechanic than I am. I bought this 91 Integra a few years ago for 500 dollars and a set of pistons I didn't need. Alternator was shot so we had to keep switching batteries, and the auto Trans was stuck in second. I only picked it up for the shell but what ride home that was. Leaked coolant and the brakes were hardly working.
So, this happened about an hour ago. Was helping dad on a job, just finished and loaded up the truck, next thing we hear what sounded like water splashing underneath the truck, jumped out to see this.... We thought the radiator had busted again, since it's happened before, and the previous owner had done a half-assed job in repairing it, but nope, that big puddle is most of the transmission fluid. So a hose is busted somewhere and of course, being a Nissan, it's in a hard spot to patch, so the truck can't be driven until we can manage to tow it back home or to a garage. The joys of buying a used truck..
Worst thing that has happen to my volvo? Uhhh..... Maybe the time i forgot to put the oil back in after a oil change. thankgod i noticed it before the engine got destroyed.
Caused a puncture at night and drove at 70mph on it without even realising....till I got home and it was a few days later I realised what I had done....oops......
As far as the sketchiest thing I've done, That would be using layers of aluminum cans to make an improvised rod bearing. Not as awful as you'd imagine. Not that good either.
Get the hell out. Did you drill an oiling hole? I thought using a drop of red loctite on rod bearings to make them spin proof under momentary oil starvation was backyard. That Is hyper grassroots shit right there.
3 layers of can, with a oil hole at where I assumed the passageway came out, and grooves cut going both ways from the hole. We've done some pretty hillbilly shit over the years.
It's still in there, but it only needed to run long enough to get it from my house to a friends, where we pulled that engine back out and put a big block in. That was about a year and a half ago, in a half dead 305. That engine is still sitting under a different friends work bench. This is the newest addition to our "shared" engine collection, a 71 350, clean up cut taking it to a 355, roller rockers, solid lifter cam, 10.5:1, dynoed in 2008 at 430 HP @ 7,000 RPM, was a guys backup engine for his derby cars.
When I bought my 1974 Datsun pickup I had no idea that the previous owner decided to use stop leak for the head gasket. I drove the truck for two years without knowing that this problem existed. One day I was leaving school and I started up my truck, I noticed that I was having a bit of trouble, but it started. After letting it warm up for a bit, I look back and there is just a giant cloud of steam coming from my exhaust. I make the (stupid) decision to limp it over to my uncles house that is about 2.5 miles away. The truck is not having a good time at this point, it is misfiring like crazy, and wont build revs, idling is the only way the truck will stay running so I would just let idle in gear and slip the clutch and by the time I was 4th gear I was able to give it a little bit of gas, but I was only able to get up to 20-25mph. I finally get to my uncles house, the truck has developed a nasty rod knock and we start checking to see whats wrong, the oil looked like a chocolate milkshake, so we changed that out for a heavier weighted oil, but we knew the head gasket was shot. We check the coolant level and it is about a gallon low and we fill it back up. We start pulling spark plugs to find out what cylinders were effected, every cylinder is fine except for cylinder 4. When we cranked over the engine with cylinder 4's spark plug out water shot out about 15 feet. We start looking for the cause of why the head gasket blew and we checked the thermostat and it was fused shut, and when we took out the thermostat we notice a orange deposit coating the thermostat housing, my uncles says "It looks like somebody used stop leak or some sort of liquid head gasket repair." So at this point I start tallying up the repair costs and as a completely broke college student I realize that I could not afford to either get the engine rebuilt or buy a used engine, and if I was going swap out the engine I wouldn't have the time to do it, and I would have no transportation to school during that time. This happened on a Thursday afternoon and I made the very difficult decision to put it up for sale. I took pictures that day and I put it up on craigslist at midnight and it was sold on Friday at noon. I knew the truck was going to a good home because the people who bought it rolled up in a 240z with a rb26 swap. On that Sunday when I bought my current car a 2003 Mitsubishi Eclipse from my friends brother.
Not really a vehicle but my old dirt bike. I ran the 1981-ish Yamaha YZ80E out of engine oil and locked it up. I was going to check the oil before I went out next time but as you can tell that didn't happen. Once I pushed it back to the house I tore the top end off and checked the piston rings and stuff and decided that the crank bearing was out. Pushed it in to the shed and it has sat there for probably 3 years now. I should get back to that.
