I love cars. And motorcycles. And pretty much anything with an engine or motor that’ll allow be to catch a half a thrill. But, this hobby… this interest… sure comes with a lot of pain.
The thing that sucks about pain is that it hurts. Yes, I know what you’re thinking. “Of course, it hurts. It’s pain.” But, what is pain? What is hurt?
In the above photo is my middle finger after being slammed between a sliding glass door and its door jam. This isn’t an automotive injury — this time. I wasn’t wrenching away on some heap in the garage or driveway to earn this badge of manliness, but it did get me thinking about the pain we grin and bear for our love of the automobile. I’ve collected a number of little injuries over the years while working on my own and others’ vehicles.
When I moved back from the U.S., I didn’t have much in the way of money. Over the previous year, I lived the highlife, but I did so paycheck-to-paycheck even though I was making nearly $100k a year in a state that doesn’t tax its citizens’ income. Before moving back to Canada, I sold my Bronco and many other larger-than-new-life things I could no longer afford and, upon my arrival home, I was car-less and in need of cheap wheels. My father took pity on me and bestowed upon me a well-used Suzuki Vitara.
The Suzuki was a basketcase. The driver’s seat belt didn’t really work. My father had affixed a clothespin to the belt because if it went into the retractor it wasn’t going to be coming out again. The clothespin was a stopper of sorts. The retractor failed because the spot where it is mounted, way down in the B-pillar, had rusted out and the resulting iron oxide particles had gummed up the works. Other than the seat belt, the air conditioning no longer worked, a couple of the windows wouldn’t roll down, and only two of four brake calipers were still doing the jobs they were designed to do. This all added up to a painful daily commute to my new job.
I needed to do something about those incredibly questionable brakes, so I spent the day on the garage floor wrenching, hammering, and eventually angle grinding the calipers free of the brackets. During this DIY dance of sorts, I pulled what I thought was a muscle in my back. To this day, my back hasn’t been the same.
Sometimes we make questionable financial decisions that inflict monetary pain or maybe we buy a vehicle that’s a bit more than our skills can muster back into shape. Or maybe we can muster it, but the path to success is riddled with landmines. It all hurts. It’s all pain, just in a different forms.
What’s the worst pain your car/truck/vehicle has inflicted on you? We all have our war stories. Let’s hear them, B&B.
Underneath the hood of my 1978 Lincoln, I was trying to break free a rusted bolt with a socket wrench. It suddenly let go with such force that I flew back and dislocated my shoulder against the air cleaner housing.
True to my username, my Alfas have hurt me so many times and in so many ways over the years it’s hard to remember them all.
One does stand out, though. I was removing the spark plugs on the spare engine I was rebuilding and one of them was pretty seized. I probably should have used a bit longer extension on the ratchet, because when it finally came loose all at once my left thumb smashed against one of the cam cover nuts and absolutely shattered the thumbnail. I howled and instinctively started shaking my left hand in agony, sending an arc of blood drops spattering across the garage ceiling. It looked like a crime scene. The nail took the better part of a year to grow back.
About 10 years ago I was getting into my car in a mall parking lot. I had one foot in the car and one on the ground when a sudden gust of wind blew the door. I twisted my leg trying to catch my balance and dislocated my knee.
I’m not sure if I should blame the car for that one or not. :)
Photos of tissue damage are not what I want to wake to.
But Bertel might be interested.
It could be video of me draining the blood out of my fingernail this morning, but I decided to keep it PG-13.
Female viewers would be unperturbed, many males would faint.
Pain don’t hurt.
In martial arts and in the Marine Corps, we were taught that pain is 95% opinion, and that much of it can be blocked out. But the key word is much, not all…
Three memorable pains of the physical type, and one psychological.
Pain #1) a now long-gone ex had a Type III VW squareback. To shift into reverse, you had to push down, then give a Vulcan salute to get the lever through the gates (manual, obviously). And since I had gotten an injured back from what amounted to a brawl between me and some brother Marines vs. some local yokels, my back would hurt and keep on hurting every time I shifted the beast.
Pain #2) Bending wrenches for a VW/Mercedes dealer. Trying to break a bolt loose. Bolt head was already partially wrung off. Box wrench slipped, hand flew forward suddenly, right hand middle finger scraped agains a different protruding bolt head. Took many days to heal, with a long white scar that remains to this day, a reminder to be careful about what will happen if a bolt suddenly gives way. Just a faint white line now, but for years, it would hurt if I even just rubbed the scar against my jeans pocket reaching for keys or change.
Pain #3) Had a used Isuzu Trooper. Wiring was a bit shaky, much of it not original. Probably had electrical problems before I bought it. One day, it started smoking under the head, near the firewall. Popped open the hood, saw smoke turn to flames as it got more oxygen.
Visions of a totally burned out car ran through my head. No extinguisher, though since I always carry one easily reachable. So I decided it would be better to start swatting the flames with my bare hand. Got the fire out after several times of hitting at the base of the flame, but hand blistered up pretty nastily. To top it off, the doctor I went to, who was near where this occurred, refused to give any pain meds, saying that they wouldn’t help burn pain. I say let me be the judge of that, but I suffered for a few days from that one.
Psychological pain, actually two of them. The worst was when my son, who is 21, got his middle finger pinched under a barbell while lifting weights. He didn’t want to go to the ER, and nothing was broken, but the pain was too much, so the next day we went and got the nail drilled…actually, punctured with a laser tool that burned, rather than drilled. He is tough, but it hurt me to see him suffering until the doctors finally gave him something to relieve the pain.
The other psychological pain was relatively trivial…my Norton seemed like it might need to have the head pulled and the combustion chamber decarbonized. The manual said to loosen the cylinder head nuts from the studs and “simply lift the head and remove it from inside the frame.”
My best buddy and riding partner at the time, who also had a Norton, both tried for a couple of days to figure out how we could turn the head to get it out of the Norton featherbed frame. I finally explained the problem to a mechanic, who taught me that the block had studs coming up out of it, which had nuts on them to hold the head on. And the studs had a tendency to work up after a while.
The solution was a combination of a lot of rust-busting liquid, some patience, and finally putting a pair of nuts on the end of the studs, locking them into each other, so that the studs could be turned and lowered back down into the block a bit. Once that was done, it was easy to “simply” remove the head, but until my mechanic friend taught us that trick, we anguished for hours over how we could get the head out of the frame.
I don’t know if I felt more stupid before I learned how to reinsert the studs, or after. But I had much less trouble questioning manuals that said to “simply” do something, after that.
But the back pain from the heavy springloading in the VW tranny was the longest lasting, whereas the blistered hand was the most intensely painful. But the Trooper survived, with no signs of further damage. Replaced a couple of wires, used some electrical tape around a couple of splices, and never had any more problems.
Considering all the cars I have owned, many of them used, and all the miles I have driven (well over a million, likely more than two million…I guess I have gotten off pretty lightly.
Oh, and I once rolled a sunroof VW old Beetle on a high crown country road, when a tire blew out. Got banged a bit, more back problems. Then got sideswiped in my TBird, later sideswiped again by a second car, finally sideswiped by a semi. In an earlier day, had a front tire blow on a V8 TransAmAll led to more back problems, but I can still walk and do things, so I can’t complain.
Keep on trucking…onward, into the fog (stolen from R. Crumb).
Every day above ground is a good day, and any wreck you can walk away from is not a severe wreck.
I’ve crossed VWs, Isuzus, Nortons and weight lifting off my “might do” list. Thanks.
@WhiskeyRiver With the possible exception of the weight lifting, your life will not be impoverished in any way by foregoing the above-mentioned “pleasures”, such as they are…
One of the best epigrams ever:
“You gotta be tough to be dumb.”
Yep, your #2 is what gets everybody at some point. You’re focused on putting as much pressure as possible on a wrench, and you don’t think about where your hand will end up when it eventually turns.
@cwallace Well, you don’t think about it at least until you have been snakebit once…now I think of it all the time, and it is even one of those little pieces of wisdom I passed on to my son to try to keep him from getting hurt.
Not sure if he takes it seriously, but if he doesn’t, he’ll earn his credits in the school of hard knocks.
Did that myself recently. Mercedes S55 AMG, was trying to take the ABC fitting off with a line wrench. Those fittings were either super easy to remove or on tighter than hell. I’m guessing Deiter was having a bad day at the factory and took out all his anger on that fitting. I Pushed and pushed and pushed and PUSHED and POW, that MFer let go and sent my wrist into a sharp piece of body leaving me with a charming lengthwise gash. Big smashy cutty injuries hurt, but smear some ancient fouled hydraulic fluid in there and it stings so bad you make up new swear words in new tongues. Earlier during the same job, that car fell off the jack (jackpad was covered in yet more hydraulic fluid) and set off the alarm in the garage while the kids were sleeping. Now I know what the anti-towaway button does and I wish I did before.
I was adjusting the ignition points with a screwdriver in my ’65 Mustang with my brother at the key. The starter caught, the engine fired up, and I got a healthy dose of electricity through me, fortunately with no serious ill effects.
+1, but it was a Renault 5 LeCar when I shook hands which Zeus.
My mechanic has a toe for a thumb. He’s a weird combo of kind and friendly, but tough as nails; I was lucky to find him, he does first rate work.
My sadly now departed mechanic was missing the end of one index fingers. He was trying to show one of the guys where the timing mark was on a running engine, and pointed a bit too close to the spinning bits “it’s right HERE” OOOWWWWWW!!!!!!!!
Hmm.
This injury wasn’t directly related, but I aggravated a hernia (just had surgery a couple days prior) when trying to put my transmission back in place after a clutch job.
Or, perhaps the burns I got to the eyebrows when I was trying to diagnose a no-start on the MGB I was restoring with my dad. Turns out we installed the distributor 180 degrees out of phase, and I was trying to tune the carbs thinking they were the problem. The backfire was shocking.
@Chris Tonn No the distributor was shocking. The backfire was illuminating.
Thanks, poor choice of words on my part.
@Chris Tonn Not really. Just having fun with the words…kind of left me with a setup too good to pass up.
But my more or less joke was about on a par with the one about a flightline crewman who got sucked into a jet turbine…when he came out the rear of the engine, he was exhausted.
Yes, I know. Terrible. No more, at least in this thread. Promise.
I guess I’m pretty lucky. The car that hurt me the most is my current car. I had parked and opened my door to get out, but my car door bounced against a post while I was getting out and slammed my head between the door and the top of the car. Oh yeah… I felt that. I was spinning for a little bit. Fortunately for me, my eyeglasses took the brunt of the force. They were bent like a crazy straw. Despite its old-car faults, I still love my car.
My last car’s airbags gave me first degree burns. Hardly an “injury”, though.
Don’t drive around topless.
I was shaving the door handles on my Z, and was grinding something inside the door. The grinder bucked and hit a part of the door, shooting sparks right into my face. I was wearing safety glasses, but it didn’t help. My eye felt “itchy”, but I continued working. Fell asleep exhausted, then woke up at 3AM yelling about my rusted eyeball.
Had to go to the ER to get my eyeball dremeled.
My brother and one cousin have both had to get that done. I’ve been lucky in that regard, and I always wear goggles when grinding.
85 Corvette, broke a finger when I was trying to yank a ball joint from the lower swing arm. Thought I could do it with it on the car but couldn’t get the car high enough to get the tool under it. I had given up and was taking the tool off when it snapped away from its position hitting my left ring finger. It was a hairline fracture but I was unable to get the prescribed feel-good meds as it was a holiday- so I suffered until the next day. Considering all the work I have done on cars/bikes over the last 30 plus years, I consider myself quite lucky that is all I have suffered.
Late ’80s, underneath my dad’s ’78 Chevy G10 Van doing a clutch job (crapped out work vehicle, he hauled a ton of tools and ladders with it and often a trailer as well). The rust was such that pretty much every underbody surface was razor sharp. Trying to get leverage on a wrench, swung my left leg up and sliced about 8″ of my thigh and knee, sharp and quick as any scalpel could have.
Mine are not car related, but look a lot like yours. First day of the season, i forgot my umbro speciali soccer shoes are tight, and for a reason. I go out there and play two hours… come out with both toenails black like yours. THat was February. The left is dangling now, the right – mind you, a one year old new toenail from another soccer injury – may or may not come off, as the blackened part seems to be moving along.
Sorry for your pain that must have hurt.
Jump starting my V8 Mustang, it runs over my foot. While it does’t hurt as mush as it sounds, it doesn’t feel *good*. Having pushed it back while the gf gets her Sentra in front of it, I left it in gear. The battery was on the right so I was too lazy to walk around, saw a screw driver in reach, so I jumped the starter solenoid. It starts at high idle, goes over my right foot and smashes her corner marker light. I was dancing around with a stinging foot, laughing my ass off, but she wasn’t as amused.
As hard as I’m trying to think of pain being inflicted by my cars, I can’t think of a single thing.
If “pain” can include financial pains…then I can say that the REAR TIRE BUDGET and JEEP TIRE BUDGET for Pirellis has been more painful than Cancer.
Busted knuckles – common.
Grinding out a rusted stuck motorcycle swing arm pivot shaft and having the grinding wheel explode in your face – not so common. (Foretunately as an eyeglass wearer, my eyes were safe.)
Pulling out a shard of the grinding wheel’s fiberglass matrix from my face about a week later- definitely not common. And early 20’s me thought that it was just bad pimple.
Remember be safe while working on the vehicle- emergency brake on, in park or neutral, wheel chocks (or at least a brick). A man in my wife’s hometown died pinned between his truck coor and side of the garage door opening. Truck apparently rolled backwards or went/jumped into reverse and pinned him there killing him. There even was a picture in the newspaper of the truck in the garage door with the driver side draped with a rescue blanket from the fire department.
For that reason I always put my vehicle’s wheels under it after taking them off for an extra margin of safety if a jackstand collasped or is pushed aside.
Sub zero day at an ATM with a booth. Left the car running so the window wouldnt freeze. Damn thing locked itself. In my efforts to shut it down before hitching a ride home for another key I pulled the coil wire from the distributer. The damn thing deiseled while I did the twitchy dance. Dropped trousers and long johns to inspect the damage to my pride when I finally let go of the wire.
Slammed my left thumb in the passenger side door. Pain was intense, and I couldn’t sleep that night. In the morning, my thumb was about twice its normal size, and when the cuticle started breaking free from the nail a few days later, blood and fluid drained everywhere. Then the nail fell off, which looked really strange. The nail bed on your thumb is much more pronounced than you’d think. Anyway, it all healed perfectly, and you’d never know I smashed my thumb in a car door.
My Prelude Si bite my wife’s finger with similar results. Door slammed with her index finger inside! Natural reaction was to yank said finger out ASAP, but too late… the damage was done. It was broken in 3 places and cut pretty badly requiring stitches. Her nail feel off as well and turned every possible shade of purple while healing.
The first time I climbed under my Z to swap the transmission I had that horrible feeling that car could come off the jack stands and squish me. It was very secure but the squeaks and creaks that occur while you wrenching are very worrisome. Then you reach that point when the last bolt has to come out and the jack is positioned but the tranny drops suddenly scaring the crap out of you. Once again I was totally safe but there is that moment of dread.
I really wish jack stands worked like the ones rally cars use where they insert a pin thru the frame of the vehicle and the stand cradles said pin/post. Seems WAY safer.
So a Prelude bit your wife? Prob time to find a new home for her since she attacked and all, I have room at my place…
Mine is only a shop class in middle school story.
Using a wide belt sander on a rectangular piece of wood (7th grade) unsupervised of course, holding it with both hands. As I sand the edge, the block of wood turns and slips off to the left, and I grind the knuckle of my index finger against that coarse belt of sandy bits.
I think “Ow, that kinda hurt. Better wash it off.” And go rinse it in the big sink. Except when I do that, I look behind me and see a trail of blood on the floor, and then look at my finger where I can see all my layers of skin and cartilage, right down to bone.
The school gave me a few band-aids, did not call my mom, and told me to go back to class. My mom was furious later when she saw how bad it was. I definitely needed stitches. Still have a thick scar there today.
Not exactly my car but on Valentines day this year we had a terrific snow storm. When I was coming home from a dinner out I found a car stuck in the alley just in front of my garage. I thought I would try to help push it out. The front wheels were stuck in a bit of a rut and I thought a bit of rock and lift would get it out. As I pulled up on the bumper of the car I suddenly heard and felt a pop – pop and intense pain in both my arms that went away as soon as I let go.
I went to the hospital and found I had ruptured the distal bicep tendons (tendon that connects the bicep muscle to the forearm) and had surgery the next day to reconnect them. I was in soft casts for the next three weeks followed by another 3 weeks with both arms in slings and now just doing the rehab. Complete recovery will take 9 to 12 months but I’m well on my way.
If this happens again I got a cell phone and a credit card so my assistance will be to pay for a tow.
For me, yours sounds the worst thus far.
Directly or indirectly.
Directly was when I had to jack up a car using a scissor jack when the jack slipped and momentarily pined my thumb between the tire and fender. Thankfully a deflated tire is pliable and nothing on me broke.
Indirectly was when I slightly burned my right hand throwing molotov cocktails through the window of a machanic’s home who defrauded me 4 grand who also totaled my car while it was in his custody.
You sure you want to put the admission of a felony in electronic writing for all time?
I’ve long since taken the necessary precautions to prevent any kind of connections to said event from following me. My usage of this website included.
And it isn’t all time. Just until this website shuts down in 25 years or until someone transfers all the content to a different host and lose or deletes the commentary by accident or pure laziness. Or until humanity blows itself up, gets hit by space object, gamma ray burst from close star, Trump becomes President, infectious plaque, Apes take over, etc. etc.
Just making sure!
Thank you for your concern.
You sound like a true Reservoir Dog IRL, Mr. Orange.
(Loved the line where Steve Buscemi, after complaining about being Mr. Pink to Harvey Keitel and being told to forget about it, tells Keitel “That’s easy for you to say. You’re Mr. White.”)
I have a friend who is considerably better off than most people, and self-made. A true entrepeneur. And he has taken some risks in his time. It once came up that he had been burned for a few stacks, and I commented that I’d be holding someone’s feet to the fire to find out what happened.
His reply was that it wasn’t worth it for a (to him) small amount. But if it got to six figures, he said he would be damn sure he had some answers as to what had happened, and there would be payback one way or another…that he would let the smaller stuff go, like Sonny advises T to do with the $20 in Bronx Tale, but that the big stuff demanded some form of settlement or another.
And the level varies for each person.
One Sicilian fisherman (who doubtless had a dual career) appeared in a coffee table book of photography of Sicily. He was asked about mafia in Sicily. His reply was that in Sicily, mafia was not so much an organization as an attitude…the attitude of not so much as suffering a fly to land on your nose without responding to it in a way to rid yourself of the problem.
Usually best to nip problems in the bud, if you can stand the heat. Sounds like you literally could.
Too many people screw other people over because too few people are willing to do what is necessary to prevent them from profiting from their crooked dealings.
Sounds like you are not one of those people who just lets injustice slide. I don’t know your circumstances, but it sounds like you were.
Good for you.
“Sounds like you are not one of those people who just lets injustice slide. I don’t know your circumstances, but it sounds like you were.”
Yeah, because responding to someone defrauding you by risking burning to death their wife and kids, and who knows what other consequences, is *totally* reasonable.
There’s a reason we have courts, and it’s not because the best response to a civil problem is to attack someone’s family in the dead of night.
Sometimes I wonder about people.
@Perisoft If the facts are as you framed them, I wouldn’t disagree…however, it was never stated that there was anyone else involved other than the two parties, Mr. Orange and the mechanic.
And in many cases, courts either cannot or will not provide a remedy to injustices.
A friend of mine, a former Mexican citizen, now naturalized as a US citizen, once lent several thousand dollars to a supposed friend in their line of business (small food store retailing) and he got totally burned. No evidence, as he operated on the idea that a man’s word is his bond.
While he decided that being in a vendetta wasn’t worth it, since he has a family, the courts were useless in that situation.
Though his ethnic background is Mexican, he understands the Sicilian saying, “If you go for revenge, dig two graves…one for your enemy, and one for yourself.”
So I refuse to condemn Mr. Orange absent any evidence that he created a situation that endangered anyone other than the person who defrauded him.
You may not agree with that point of view, but manufacturing a possibly non-existent family doesn’t make Mr. Orange an evil person, just a desperate one bent on not letting injustice prevail.
Wow – can’t compete with any of these stories, really. I wish that I’d had good automotive gloves in the 80’s, though. Putting in an aftermarket stereo in my ’81 Z-28, hanging upside-down under the dash from the passenger seat. Chevrolet must have saved a ton of money by not grinding or rolling the edges of all the metal under there, because by the time I was done my hands looked like I lost a fight with a mountain lion. I always told people afterwards that working on a Camaro was like solving a Rubik’s cube made of razor blades.
My Audi 5000 gave me the clap. It couldn’t possibly have been that nice girl I hooked up with after a high school football game…
Condoms are your friend.
So are antibiotics.
An ounce of prevention…
Well yeah. I was 17 and dumb. In reality, I got lucky. Could have been worse.
Now, I don’t have to worry about such things as I am married.
Antibiotics are not the foolproof one hundred per cent friend they once were.
When I was in college I had an MD who had done six or eight years as a Navy doc, so he knew exactly what he was doing.
But I lived my youth in the midst of a golden age that came and left, and will never return again.
It began with the Pill, and ended with the advent of what was first called GRID, and later AIDS/HIV.
During that brief interlude, pregnancy was no longer a constant threat to casual dating and there had not yet been a disease that couldn’t be cured with antibiotics.
Not so any more…and as to condoms being your friend, they are that friend you can rely on 99% of the time, but not always.
Remember the scandal during I believe it was Wild Bill Clinton’s term, Surgeon General Elders, who was exposed for having declined to recall faulty condoms being handed out by our great white father in Washington, because they had a documented one per cent failure rate.
Her reason was that if the government admitted that they had a one per cent failure rate, it would destroy people’s confidence in the use of condomes, therefore it was better to conceal the failure rate.
I have had to teach my son that in today’s world, using condoms as protection is better than not using them, but it is very much like playing Russian roulette with a gun that has one hundred chambers instead of six.
I wish that he could enjoy the freedom that I had, but that is not how things have unfolded.
But @bball40dtw I am glad you pointed out the dangers of auto interiors…I had thought I got mine from the toilet seat, but perhaps not. But a word to the wise…it is not the nice girls who are safe. That would be the good girls. The nice girls are the ones that often left you with a present you had not bargained for, or so I have found out in the past.
More recently, my problem was resolved by finally having found the love of my life.
I am very grateful that I no longer have to play the dating game. In retrospect, it was as much heartwrenching madness as it was fun and games…I’m glad I got to experience it, but I don’t miss it.
Perhaps the worst automotively induced pain occurred in the back seats of my vehicles. The damages I suffered under the hood or underneath vehicles was minor, compared to all the damage done in back seats, both by me and to me, all in the name of love.
right up until the night I was struck by lightning, when I met my wife, and it all changed for me.
Prior to that, knuckle damage, burned hands and such were really nothing compared to playing with fire in the backseat of vehicles.
Paradise by the dashboard lights. And consumed by flames on the installment plan, in the rear.
Wish now I had just thought of skinned knuckles, but when all is said and done, some of the worst damage done with vehicles is invisible. But I blame no one but myself…I was a willing player, and I both gained and lost.
But Russian roulette with condoms is a scary concept…better than playing with a “loaded gun” but dangerous nevertheless, in a way that it never used to be.
Welcome to the brave new world…
Do you need two grammes of Soma, citizen? Your travails have earned it to you.
A while back I was reinstalling the interior door panel on my Grand Prix, on my inclined driveway on a windy day. I’d left the screwdriver I was using on the torx screws in the hole for a second while I turned to grab something. The door promptly fell shut, jabbing the handle of said screwdriver into my ribcage. No real damage, but I definitely felt it for a few weeks afterwards.
Rental Chevy HHR, filling up at a gas station. Got out of the car, shut the driver door then realized that I needed to release the filler door to the gas tank. Started opening the driver door while simultaneously bending down to find the filler door release and got conked in the head by the edge of the deceptively large door. Right at the corner of my right eyebrow, blood everywhere. Took me a while to figure out what even happened
“Rental Chevy HHR…”
Dude, that’s painful.
Less painful than your parents owning an HHR.
sigh…
Three big boo boos…
1. I owned an ’88 Volvo 240 wagon with a broken drivers door hinge. I went to slam the door in a parking lot and it bounced back with enough force to bend my right thumb back 180°. Torn ligament.
2. My college summer job at the local Cadillac dealership I was doing an oil change with a Deville on the rack and the plug wouldn’t budge. I put all my weight into it and it finally gave. Smacked myself in the mouth with the ratchet, which tore right through my lip and cracked a tooth.
3. Doing something behind the block against the firewall on my old Ranger. Forgot what I was fixing, but didn’t disconnect the battery and shocked the hell out of myself. My hand was lodged in there somewhere and when I pulled it away, I tore my wrist apart on something. Stitches.
Volvos are safe, but they can HURT
1. Trying to put better sway bars on my 240, I didnt have ramps or anything that you should be using. Hurt my head a little bonking it on the driveway, some cuts, sore back. Didnt have much to lie down on beyond a cloth.
2. Volvo 850, made my wallet sore wallet with all the trouble it was taking to get that thing to pass emissions.
3. Riced Nissan S13, they make me sore just looking at them.
4. Not entirely car related, but when I was making a puppet I had to pull out a shard of plastic from a toy bowling pin. The plastic shot out, cut my eye, and made me near-blind for a week. I recovered at home, grateful it wasnt the exacto blade I was using, that got me.
My first car, an AMC Hornet, had a spark plug wire that tended to wiggle loose. An easy enough thing to fix. One day I skipped the “turn off the engine first” part of the process. After a couple of nice,quick jolts I learned not to skip steps when working on cars.
My worst pain came from rotating the tires on my Caravan. The combination of lifting and twisting blew out my lower back (again). After I woke from a nap I spent 5 minutes rolling out of bed onto the floor. Then used a closet door to pull myself up. I spent the rest of the day shuffling around like a 90 year old man because I could lift my feet or take full steps.
Aren’t lower back spasms enlightening?
At least you knew what triggered yours. Fortunately, both of mine passed after a few days, leaving me with plenty of the spaz meds for any recurrence.
I tweaked my back reaching into the engine compartment on the smart car one day. Was fine until I finished and stood up straight. Bad idea; I staggered into the house and laid down for half an hour.
My worst incident isn’t bad compared with most of you. Trying to cut a tab off some plastic trim while installing aftermarket speakers in my ’87 Taurus… blade slipped and I sliced my thumb lengthwise. About a 3/4-inch piece of the thumb flapping around. Healed in a few weeks.
I also had a hateful rental Explorer’s hatch give me a deep cut at the base of my finger that left a nice little scar, still there 10 years later.
Scar tissue that I wish you saw,
Tough call.
Dislocated my shoulder twice. The first time it popped out of the socket backwards, which is the worst.
Ethylene glycol poisoning when lower rad hose popped off while I was under it and dumped the rad’s contents in my face.
Set my pant leg on fire from sparks while welding.
Burned my palm pretty bad catching something I had just welded that slid off the sawhorse and was going to fall on the floor.
Caught one of my fingers in a moving fan blade. It was deep cut but fortunate that it didn’t slice it off.
Worst grinding injury was with my bench grinder. I was grinding something long with one of the wheels and shoved my hand right into the other wheel.
Electric shock from ignition systems many times. I can tolerate non-HEI systems, but once I helped a friend diagnose a miss in his Lincoln. Wow! I had never experienced a jolt from HEI ignition before.
Cut-up my arms from my hands up past my elbows installing power window mechanisms in some doors that didn’t originally come with them. Lots of sharp edges on the inside of the doors.
Oddly, my worst car related injury didn’t actually hurt much at all. When I was younger and dumber, I was putting new speakers into a Volvo 740. This required making some adapter plates from the weird Volvo holes to standard 6.5″ size. So wanting to do a neat job of it, I bought a 6″ hole saw. Now a 6″ hole saw is a hefty piece of metal with very sharp teeth, and when spinning in a drill at 900rpm it has a fair bit of momentum to it. The thing dug into the Masonite I was using and whipped up off the workpiece, nailing my left hand in the process. I was honestly afraid to look, expecting to see my thumb dangling or missing. But what I got was a 2″ lengthwise scar on the back of my hand directly behind my thumb, then a series of ‘tiger stripe’ scars down almost the length of my thumb. Oozed a fair bit of blood, but didn’t actually hurt much. People ask me about the scars to this day, they are VERY obvious.
I very shortly thereafter bought a drill press and have not used any big hole saws freehand since.
Otherwise the usual litany of smashed fingers and knuckles. Nothing serious, luckily. Probably about the worst is how beat up I am the next day after a day of wrenching. Sucks to get old.
An abundance of busted knuckles and small scars on my hands from always buying the cheapest car possible. I used to just put a rag around my hand when it started bleeding, and inspect the damages when the job was done. Road grime is apparently good for stopping infections from even starting. A combination of lacking proper tools, patience and basic motoric skills has given me a ot of grief .(I am a ‘booksmart artist’ not really an athlete or natural born craftsman )
My most serious injury (so far?) happened while changing a front spring on a BMW 525iX. The spring needs to be compressed to about half it’s original length to fit in the strut, and I had three cheap spring compressors on it.
As it was finally compressed enough to fit the strut, one of the spring comressors was just a tiny bit in the way of the top spring cap, so I tried to ‘nudge’ it a little with a wrench while holding it down on the ground with my left hand. Don’t ever try to do that…
All three clamps flew off as the spring went back to its original lenght, with my left hand still on it. Luckily they didn’t hit me or my buddy who was standing next to me.
For a few seconds my hand looked half a foot wide from index finger to little finger, surprisingly the skin didn’t rip. I pushed it back to original width with my right hand, and said ‘well, that hand is f***ed’. Then went into the house, told my other friend (it was his house and garage) that I would need a damp cloth and some painkillers, laid down on his kitchen floor, and then the shock was over and I could feel the actaul pain… If I had still been standing up I would definitely have passed out.
So he gave me some strong painkillers (he had a broken thumb himself at the time), and, when I was ready to get up again, drove me directly to the hospital, while I laughingly told my SO on the phone that I would be a little late (still partly in shock, I was nervously laughing the whole 35 minute drive)
The two middle bones(metacarpals) in my palm were both split diagonally, so the next day a surgeon spent an hour or something (I was under full narcosis)opening my hand up and screwing them together with some titanium screws,sadly my ring finger ended up a tiny bit twisted, so now my little finger and ring finger try to cross each other when I clench my fist.
A boat related story – but transportation so close enough.
I was 16 – parents divorced, father lived on an island on a lake. Summers in New England on an island on a lake are cool when you’re a teenager.
Attractive young ladies also close to 16 come to door – their boat is stuck on the shoreline can I help them free it. But of course I can!
No, the words, “hold my beer and watch this,” were never uttered.
So I go down to the 18 footer which is all but grounded due to low lake levels – their house was more of a weekend cabin so not there all around.
I got this.
Grab the bow, lift with everything I got, and work it free and back into the water.
Do I want to go with them?
I feel sick – very sick, weird in my stomach, low low in my stomach – almost down in my loins – what the Hell. They’re so attractive and impressed right now but I have this weird soft pain, upset stomach, nausea of sorts feeling.
No, no, I have…ummmm…I have to get back my dad has me doing something…
I keep feeling worse, by morning I’m in pain pretty bad pain where teenage boys are reluctant to admit they are in pain.
Doing my imitation of the East German weight lifting team – I herniated myself on a grand scale and it was strangulated.
Oh wait, the indignity gets better. After the surgery and it was time to remove the stitches, the surgeon who did the procedure was on vacation, so it was practice partner, a rather attractive MILF who did the incision inspection and stitch removal. I had to think about the nuns, the very unattractive ones from my high school to keep from having a rager.
My mom’s boyfriend keeps saying I should change the bad O2 sensor in my T-Bird by myself with a jack.
I can only imagine how I could hurt myself trying to loosen up a tight O2 sensor with barely any room to work with.
(As for injuries, all I’ve got is a big Exacto scar from building a model kit…)
I’m gonna put you in a Junkyard car story the next time it’s a Ford product.
For your sake, I hope Murilee writes up a MN12 ‘Bird!
I am so done with this effing car. I just want to fix the O2 sensor so the Check Engine light goes out and I can offload the thing.
What first name would you like used? I can’t promise you’ll get through the story unharmed, though.
Might as well use my real one, Vince.
Even my own mother doesn’t call me Vincent, so I might as well have Vince on my birth certificate.
Ok, it’s happening! Soon.
@ NoGoYo: Hey! After doing everything I could to fix my S-10 and get the Check engine light to go out, the bulb apparently BURNED out yesterday!! (I passed emissions) but at last that baleful yellow light is GONE, GONE, GONE!!!! :-)
Sounds like Mom’s BF wants you out of the picture.
DO NOT EVER DO THAT. Jackstands and wheel chocks are mandatory, for your own safety.
Don’t let that weasel con you.
He’s not malicious, he’s just an old-school DIY guy who does everything himself and doesn’t realize that this is something that’s not gonna work as a DIY repair.
Especially on a car that’s fairly low to the ground. I could probably do it on a truck though.
His name’s gonna be Darren in the story.
Worst pain of all from a vehicle was when I was impaled by the thick piano wire manual choke cable on my 1977 Dodge Power Wagon. It went in on the bottom of my thumb and it came out about 4+1/2″ inches up my arm, scraping the bone the entire way. To make it worse, I had just sprayed carb cleaner on it, so that burn added to it. It took about 4 weeks for the weird purple line I had to disappear, and it hurt 3 months later if I pushed on my thumb just below the “insertion point”.
A very close second was when I was looking at a friend’s sickly green Ford Torino, and without thinking, I grabbed the CB antenna just as he keyed up his radio, and he had the 400 watt linear turned on, and my left index finger smoked and sizzled. My finger had about an 1/8″ deep groove burned into the joint. It only hurt a couple of hours, but being an RF burn, it took a long time to heal up, and it seemed to bleed a lot.
The most common thing I had happen that hurt a lot was my dog Gus had a habit of going ballistic when he saw two things, a skinny guy in a light colored shirt with a baseball cap on, and if he saw horses. Either of them would send him into a rage. We always thought that some guy dressed like that had hurt him when he was a young pup, but the horse thing was a mystery. Either thing would cause him to attempt to go through the windshield, regardless of what was in front of him. Usually, it was my right arm. He would smash his head into the back of it, and this would either bend my wrist way more than it normally wanted to bend, if I was holding the wheel, or it would slam my hand into the dash if I wasn’t. 75 pounds propelled by the huge back thighs he had would leave my hand bleeding if it hit the dash, and it would turn purple a couple of hours later. If it got bent, I would yell, and wonder how my wrist wasn’t broken. He would barely blink when he hit, as he didn’t seem to feel much pain at all. One time, I had the passenger seat reclined because I had something sitting there previously, and he was in the back. A horse appeared and he launched himself and slammed himself into the dash, breaking the glove box door as well as if it was hit with a hammer. I yelled, “Hey!” and he was very upset, because I yelled at him, he didn’t seem to care that his nose was bleeding, and his lip was cut by his teeth. Pits do all kinds of damage to themselves, and they don’t seem to care. He would get upset when he hurt me, and he hurt me a lot. I was lucky, I found that door in a junkyard for a few bucks, the dealer wanted like $56 for it! I really miss that dog, gone almost 18 years now..
This is what happens when you get your thumb in a wheel too far while trying to spin it listening for a wheel bearing noise, and it gets jammed between the wheel and the brake caliper. Took it 3/4th’s the way off from the beginning of the nail. http://imgur.com/cyBnXl7