after working a 12hr night shift decided to change my girls brake pads which were well overdue (had rotors turned the night before), finished all 3 pads and on the fourth installed the inner pad backwards, didn't check my work and went to sleep. When i woke up my girl said that her cars squeeling now and questioned my work. Instantly i realized what i probably did and sure enough the rotor was FUBAR. No worries though, I played my man card and just told her that I noticed that the rotor was pretty bad when i changed the pads and that we now need a new one. I told her this happens if you don't change your brakes on time. Of course she didn't know any better... She still thinks it was her fault....ha/ha

lol...:wtf2:

You guys have some epic DIY screwups! I have two mistakes of my own and both were with my 1996 Saab 900se.

The first time, I was swapping my turbo for the first time to a slightly larger OEM turbo from a later generation. At the time, I was working at a performance shop in Stamford CT so I was able to use the lifts and tools after hours. The guy I worked with was the top Ferrari USA mechanic for 3 years at the time, and he agreed to help me out. We got the old turbo out and got the new one in, but there is one banjo bolt for the oil inlet that was sandwiched in between the exhaust manifold flange and the turbo's housing which made it nearly impossible to tighten properly.

I went to start the car up for the first time and all I see is a huge spurt of oil and the Ferrari tech motioning frantically to cut the engine. Well, I didn't do a good job of tightening that banjo bolt down and within a matter of seconds, drained 3/4 of my oil. No harm done, but the car smelled of burning oil for the next few weeks.


The second screw up was when I did the big leap to a GT28 turbo, 550cc injectors and a new tune. I did the turbo swap just fine and the ECU was a breeze to remove and replace (done it sooo many times). I did not know how to install injectors at the time, so one of my Saab friends who has had dozens of Saabs helped me out. Everything went well, and a short test drive went well too. However, on the 60 mile drive home, I started smelling gas. I kept driving a bit and pulled over at a rest stop. I popped the hood and there was gasoline literally bubbling out of injector number 4 between the intake manifold and the injector. I waited for the car to cool off a bit and (rather stupidly) decided to see if I could make it home. I did, but by that point the leak was much much worse and the garage wreaked of gas. My parents were not happy. It was towed to the local Saab dealer and it turned out the bottom o-ring was not seated correctly.

I wonder if the story of my flaming wheel hub belongs here...

Years ago I changed my oil on a gloomy day, and while putting on the new filter it starts to rain. I hurry up and screw the filter on and the drain bolt. Refill the engine and start the car to move it. Before i get a chance to move it my dad starts screaming at me to kill the engine. Apparently I forgot to tighten the drain bolt. Silly me begins to run to get the socket wrench forgetting that there's oil and water all over the ground. I looked like a cartoon character flying with my feet in the air and my head rapidly approaching the ground. Luckily I didn't smash my head on the ground but i did hurt my back pretty bad and ended up covered in oil and water while my whole family laughed at me.

forgot to bolt down the battery on a Suzuki Samurai, hit a bump and the battery welded itself to the hood for a short period before burning 2 holes through the hood

CEL said I needed a new o2 sensor, bought an o2 sensor wrench, ordered a new o2 sensor, picked up o2 sensor, crawled under Jeep to replace o2 sensor, found original o2 censor unplugged, returned new o2 sensor.

Never seen one that bad, but not to worry.... you're not the first.

Wow, and I thought I'd had some stupid mistakes.

I can't really think of anything major besides a 16 hour coilover install. That was horrible. Pro Tip: Don't have 5 guys drinking and working on a car together when you can get the job done with only 2 people.

It seemed like since there were so many people messing with the car, it just kept causing us more problems. To top it off, the coilovers were prototypes for a brand new Honda Insight, so we had some troubles with that too. No damage to the car besides 1 broken wheel speed spensor... But we had to redo a few steps more than once, and somebody didn't support the knuckle properly, which pulled the drivers side axle out of the transmission. By far the worst axle I've ever seen in terms of getting it back into the tranny.

Might as well throw it in.

Had to replace a bad upstream O2 sensor on my old grand am. Broke the bolt heads holding on the heat shield so i had to drill them out. Apparently the exhaust manifold was really weak/thin or I had the worlds greatest drill bit because i went straight through the manifold and through a coolant line.

I have two semi recent ones with my 300zx.

First one wasn't so bad. Did my oil change just after getting back from my road trip (brought the car home from florida) and we had the hurricane hit NY. It was a blackout but i really wanted to get that conventional oil out since i was still breaking in the motor. I did the oil change just fine in the blackout but i kept misplacing tools left and right. The only real screwup here was that i loosened the drain plug and because it was dark, i failed to see that literally NONE of the oil went into the catch pan. I drained out the entire contents of the oil pan onto my garage floor.

The 2nd involved installing these z1 gauge rings into the gauge cluster. It takes about 30 seconds to actually put the gauge rings in, but to get the cluster out is kind of a pain in the *** and theres no DIY anwhere so its really just a matter of removing every screw from the drivers side dash area and pulling on stuff.

I had gotten the cluster out installed the rings and was almost done buttoning things up (after 3 hours) then i dropped a screw into the abyss of the dashboard, so i had to take EVERYTHING out again to find the screw. 2 of the screws on top of the shroud above the gauge cluster are very close to the windshield and i was lazy. I decided to just use a screw gun to take them out again and the screw gun bucked up and hit my windshield and cracked it. i was so furious. Imagine taking 4x as long to do something as it should, and then at the end, instead of that satisfaction of 'oh well at least its done' is replaced by 'fvck, i just broke my windshield' :mad: Zero deductible glass coverage FTW. I called insurance and told them something must have hit my windshield. I neglected to inform them that that something was me being an idiot.

Before:
http://i1086.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1319070810

After:
http://i1086.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1319070846

Aftermath:
http://i1086.photobucket.com/albums/...g?t=1319070838

You said it. :icon17:

Steve can contribute the following to this thread:

:bowrofl: :roflpuke2: :icon17: :rofl2: :inoutroflpuke:

Well.. he did buy a Mustang. That counts as a screw up :icon17:

:icon18:

Not major but I left my wheel lock on and drove to town and it was still there.

:bowrofl::bowrofl::bowrofl: repped :roflpuke2::roflpuke2::roflpuke2:

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:bowrofl::bowrofl::bowrofl::bowrofl::bowrofl::bowr ofl:

:tiphat:

:iagree: :iagree: :iagree: :iagree:

I have had two occasions where i screwed up.

Changed the pads on my brother's mustang for him and then took it on a test drive to realize that the car would barely stop. Came back and had no idea what went wrong. Took the car to the dealer and found out I had placed a brake pad backwards and messed up the new rotor and had to get new pads. My brother didn't care because he was borrowing my mustang at the time which was way faster than his...haha

Second was when i changed the brake pads on my mustang. I finished everything up and lowered the car and told my dad to finish tightening the lugs on one wheel while i clean up. Drove 200 miles to go back to college and kept hearing a squeak. Next day was about to jack up the car to check the pads and realized all my lugs were loose. Guess my dad was trying to kill me!!! haha

ive made a few.... probably the worst was trying to straighten up some bent fins in my intercooler on my old GTR....with a screwdriver..... once i started a couple broke totally off and others got bent in the process..... before i knew it my OCD kicked in hard and i had taken about an inch and half of one of the rows out

I got 2 off the top of my head...

I remember I was swapping turbos on my Accord, so I ended up disconnecting the turbo oil feed/drain lines and took the entire manifold off from the head. Of course my curiosity kicks in and I want to hear the car open header. Fire it up, and I completely forgot to plug the turbo oil feed line...that was a mess to clean up

More recently I was jacking up my Honda with a standard 2 ton jack with a piece of wood on my front traction bar. The wood slipped off the metal, the car started to fall and shifted, but the jack caught on the thin metal under the radiator support. It bent the metal up about 3 inches, pushed the radiator up 3 inches, and the top radiator bar too (which also had the hood latch on it). I couldn't even close the hood anymore, had to bent it all back in place.

Changed the oil in my dad's minivan a couple of years ago. I always start the car with the car raised up to make sure there are no leaks. Started the car when I finished the job and looked under the car to check for leaks. Oil was pouring everywhere... Turns out when I removed the old oil filter the rubber ring stayed on the car and then I installed the new oil filter and there was not a proper seal. Had to buy all new oil and a bunch of kitty litter to clean up the garage!

Sub scribed

Haha, no way. I just did this a week ago. Only thing I did different was in addition to my car losing all of its oil, when I was backing up my car off the two ramps, one of the ramps kicked out and hit the bucket I had used to catch all the old oil. So...two huge puddles of oil.

Once is all it takes to never do it again :tiphat:

Laugh...............

:ugh2:

Aren't you supposed to use a comb for that? (I don't know)

I can think of two screw ups....

1. I bought Swift springs and decided not to listen to my buddies about paying a pro to do the install. I tried removing a 19mm nut from the front end of the car that holds the shock in place..... using a standard set of sockets. I ended up stripping it fairly bad so I mad a midnight run to Walmart and grabbed a set of 1/2" metric sockets. I was able to get the 19mm socket on the nut a tried to remove it. It just stripped it worse and so I take a quick look at it and realize I had purchased 12 point sockets...:facepalm:. So at 1am to take another ride to Walmart and bought 6 point 1/2" metric sockets and I was able to pound it into place using a hammer and then attached the socket and it came off with ease.

Then while I was putting it back together(just about finished) I began screwing that nut back on with my fingers and got it finger tight and then used a breaker bar to tighten it since it was so difficult to get off I thought it should be rather tight, especially since it was part of my suspension. Needless to say, the nut never stopped spinning. I drove for 3 weeks with a stripped out nut without issues. I ordered both the nut and bolt that also goes to the sway bar because I wasn't sure which one I had stripped. The nut was like $2 and the bolt was $32 from Nissan. Well I removed the stripped nut easily just to find out that I ONLY stripped the $2 nut and the $32 bolt was not needed and Nissan won't take it back since it was special order.

2. I recently painted the inside of my headlights. Everything went nice and easy but then I used the larger of the tiny screws for inside of the headlights so by the time I got to the final steps of putting the bulbs back in I needed those larger screws because the extremely tiny ones that I had left would not catch at all. Luckily I'm a cable guy and I had a brand new splitter laying around and they come with the exact same size screws that I needed, so I was able to finish the job without any real issues.

Sounds like your buddies are a bunch of vagina's.

BTW, what were you using that stripped the 19mm socket? Tell me not a crescent wrench...

No lol. I said I used a standard set rather than metric lol

Surprised I didn't see this thread earlier. It's a shame. So, here's the story of my six hundred dollar pedal upgrade...

I have a base, and I bought Jeffblue's touring pedals. Now, I've run into a problem numerous times. Whoever assembled my car emptied the barrel of loctite into it. My shift knob didn't come off without a fight (channel lock, strap wrench, couldn't budge it without torquing too hard), but that's another story and an easy fix.

But they also used too much loctite on the bolts holding my accelerator pedal down. I went to unscrew them and snapped the heads off of them both. "Problem", I thought, so I decided to save myself the exorbitant costs of using a garage and go buy myself a screw removal kit and new drill bits.

Ok, so after trying out the kit on some old wood screws to understand the method behind the madness, I tried a few times to get the suckers to bite the bolts. The screw remover snapped off inside the bolt. I tried another bit on the other one and same result.

I had the car towed to AAM, where they assured me they could get any bolt out. They've got a machine shop ffs, should be no problem.

After failing to remove the bolts, they had to order new bolts and drill new holes.

And that, the370z.com community, is how you can spend 600+ dollars on a slight aesthetic upgrade in the pedal region.

:bowrofl: you're welcome :tup:

:icon18:

Oh geeze lol

Both you guys get repped for that one! :tup:

most recently bought led reverse light bulbs to do a swap. went to remove the rear facia panel in the trunk with the 4 clips. heard a loud pop and figured it was loose, but one side had come undone while i managed to put a 4 inch tear in the other side and it still secured. luckily i have a buddy who owns a bodyshop so he is ordering me the part wholesale to soften the blow. $16 upgrade turns into a $75 one lol

Was installing camber arms in the rear with toe bolts. Drilled the hole for the camber arms by mistake, then realized and drilled the holes in the rite place for Toe Adjustment. Got the car aligned and all is well, but **** the metal shavings were embedding in my skin for at least a month.

This is too good of a thread to let die. In two years, there should be some more good stories :icon17: And since I somehow found this searching for something completely unrelated, I'll go ahead and bump it with a story from my first DIY maintenance on the Z.

I was changing the transmission and differential fluids to Redline early in the life of the Z. I hadn't yet accumulated enough tools to do much work on the car myself, so I was at a buddy's house, where we put the front wheels of the Z up on ramps (the surface was slightly downhill, so the car actually sat very level on the ramps). The clearance was just enough to get access to the transmission but made the differential very difficult to get to. So we turned the car around after the transmission fluid change and backed the rear wheels onto the ramp for the differential fluid change. While the Z was up on the ramps, we put jack stands under the suspension in case the ramps failed or something (just being cautious). When we were done with the transmission fluid, I started to back the car off the ramp before I heard a nasty metal crunch as the car caught on the jack stands that we moronically left under the car - one of the stands was inches away from causing some major damage. Luckily, no harm done as I carefully drove the Z back up onto the ramps so we could remove the jack stands. That was pretty dumb. But what was really fucking dumb was we did the same damn thing after turning the car around and finishing up the differential fluid :facepalm:

:icon17: