If you’ve been a CC reader for any length of time, you’ve probably figured out my first car was a 1971 Vega. I got my start as a wrenchologist at an early age, in other words. Over the time I owned the Vega, I think I rebuilt every major, and most minor systems in the car, some while disabled along the side of the road. My latest vehicular repair project is turning out to be one of the messiest, dirtiest jobs I’ve ever had to deal with on a car (or truck in this case).
The rear fuel tank in my ’95 F150 started leaking back in the spring due to rust-through, and I’ve finally gotten around to pulling the bed to replace it, as well as repair the fuel sender on the front tank.
What’s making this such a bear of a job is that the truck is thoroughly rotted out underneath. Every whacking session leaves a hefty pile of rust flakes to be swept up and picked out of my eyes, and getting recalcitrant bolts loose without snapping them off has been an exercise in patience, perseverance, propane and prodigious amounts of penetrant.
After finally getting the lower straps off from the rear tank, I discovered that the highly coveted DMI bumper hitch has some substantial structure that blocks removal of the tank without at least partially dismounting the bumper, which led to another couple of fun- (and sweat-) filled evenings out in the machine shed (note the cheater pipe).
So what’s the messiest, grimiest repair job you’ve had to make over the years?
I did a intake on a Chevy Venture that had a huge sludge problem, it was everywhere, to the top of the rocker arms. We took pictures to cover ourselves, the engine died about a year later.
When I buy an older truck & it starts to have fuel tank issues, I replace everything at the same time. New tank, pump, sending unit, straps, ect. Then I coat it with spray on undercoating.
Rust-wise? Living in Minnesota, I’ve probably forgotten more than most southerners can remember.
But dirty, messy jobs does conjure up some other memories. Like the ’01 Silverado extended cab pickup I bought for $200 a few weeks ago. I’ve bought some filthy cars over the years, but I swear, there are sewers that were more pleasant than this thing’s interior. Had to gut it down to the bare metal, then wash *and repaint* the floorpan before finally exorcising the stench of death and rotting fast food from that cab. I filled up FOUR – count ’em, FOUR – 55 gallon trash cans with the contents of the interior. That, plus all three seats, console, carpet, and headliner, made for one memorable dump run.
Normally I’m pretty good at cleaning up dirty interiors, but this stuff was just… beyond recognition. Had to buy a replacement EVERYTHING at the junkyard.
I’m also normally not one to lose my lunch, but this cleanup was an exception. Or would that be a few exceptions? Best of all, I was ill for a few days after. There isn’t enough Lysol in the world to have disinfected those interior parts.
With the new stuff, in it’s smooth sailing now… but gawd, NEVER again will I buy a vehicle whose backseat has been used as a trash compactor!
Wow! I had some lame little story I was prepared to write up until I read Keith’s writeup. I think I’m going to be ill.
I got a Mk3 Cortina from a girl for braiding her hair like Bo Derek in 10. The car had been flooded during a high tide and smelled awful.I got it running but gave up going any further as the smell was overpowering.I sold it my brother’s mate who needed the glass as his psycho ex had smashed the windows.
Runner up was changing the fried auto box in my Sunbeam Rapier,deciding to save a bit from the hefty bill I wrestled out the dead auto box after many skinned knuckles,broken nails,covered in filth and enough swearing to make a sailor blush.The guy across the road trying to sell his house wasn’t impressed.I let the auto box specialists put the rebuilt box back I wasn’t going through that again
Nothing on the scale of these epics, but working on a ten year old VW Bug on the curb in a Boston winter was my ugliest job. It wouldn’t start. No car, no getting to my girlfriend that weekend.
So I stood in the 10 degree wind and slush, changed the plugs, points and condenser, adjusted the timing and it still wouldn’t start. It had gas at the carb, and a recently changed filter. Nothing left but to lie down in the filthy freezing Boston slush, slide underneath and adjust the valves. Hardest part of that is muscling the heavy clip back over each valve cover. Success! After a hot shower I was off to Providence.
File this under the mating behavior of young male homo sapiens.
Your description really took me there. Fiddling with the valves on any air-cooled VW is a gungy job but subzero temps and laying in the New England slush takes it to a whole new level.
Story is that ZAZ, from Ukraine, had a V4 air-cooled engine was that owners did not have to lay on the ground to adjust the valves.
Sorry Mike not the worst thing I’ve heard of, I knew a guy who climbed over a razor-wire fence – only to find she was not home. The fact that he then climbed back over the fence rather than use the gate (unlocked on the inside) might give a hint to the amount of blood in his alcohol stream at the time…
Outdoor repairs in subfreezing weather are in a special category. In college, my 71 Scamp failed to start one day. About 5 degrees F that morning, with biting winds. When it is your only car, you simply have to fix it. Thankfully, my brain stayed warm enough to figure out that the nylon gear on the distributor had broken. It was not a particularly difficult job, but the conditions made it a brutal one.
Messiest valve adjustment? Two, on American V-8’s. First was doing the final hydraulic lifter adjustment on a rebuilt Chevy. You take off the rocker covers and do it with the engine running and hot oil spraying on you and the exhaust manifold. I wasnt clever enough at the time to make some cutout junkyard covers. The second was the 273 in the Dodge A-100. It had mechanical lifters adjusted hot. A V-8 in an A-series van requires removal of seats and dis-assembly of the doghouse for access. Since this was a hot setting, it was quite a hassle for just a routine job.
Not sure it’s the messiest, but the rustiest is definitely the 92 Exploder that I’ve been working on this year, from my fix or scrap question post a little while ago. Your story and pictures look a lot like mine, only the Exploder left piles of mud, rust and transmission fluid everywhere in my garage.
Messiest job is hard to pick for me, but crawling around under a 70’s Lincoln in a muddy u-pull-it scrap yard to help a friend yank it’s C6 transmission out is probably close to the worst that I remember.
Put it in the folder you want. The biggest job I did on one of my Isuzu cars involved removing the front sub-frame to fix among other things, the leaking steering rack.
The sub-frame had to be pressure washed by 30 minutes to remove all the oil+grime crust, then welded (one of the supports was broken). All that crust ended there because the steering rack was badly leaking. I remember turning to the right and seeing the oil gushing through and “decorating” the floor.
During that job, I serviced the CV joints, inner and outer. Oh dear, no matter how carefully is done, you are bound to end covered in grease… like everywhere.
That’s for me. I saw my compadre (who is an excellent mechanic and BBQ cook) removing the sludge on a couple of engines. And that is for sure a messy, dirty and crap work, but he charged top money for it.
I’ve got to do the same thing on a ’93, except I have a bad sending unit on the front tank. I figure I’ll have a few buddies over for beer and steaks when I’m ready to remove the bed.
There is a special place in hell reserved for the engineers of that particular dual-tank setup.
Why remove the bed? It drops out from under the truck pretty easily. Yeah you don’t want to do it with a full tank but it is easier the removing the bed.
You ever tried disconnecting the fuel lines and wiring before “easily” dropping it out from underneath? My arms don’t have that many joints, and aren’t that skinny! (c:
Probably at least a hundred times in all sorts of vehicles including more than a couple Ford trucks of this era. There is enough slack to drop them pretty far before you have to disconnect the wiring and fuel lines. Release a few wiring/hose clips and you can have them all the way down before you need to disconnect them in a lot of Fords.
Well, I did make the effort, and decided pulling the bed would be the easier of the two routes… Of course, getting the six bed bolts off turned into a Major Production, too. Six one way, half a dozen the other.
Good grief, seeing pics of that Ford Truck makes me thankful I lived in AL and NC! There’s no fun quite like rounding off rusty bolt heads and those rusty captive nut clips that break off allowing the nut on the inaccessible side to freewheel.
This is interesting as I’m experiencing the CC effect. I spent the first part of today underneath a ’78 Firebird, changing oil & scraping 119K miles of grease & old rustproofing off the front suspension with a credit card. What a mess. I held the shop vac hose under the control arms to catch the largest chunks: one grease glob was golf-ball size. Too bad the car experienced a few northern winters..as rust flakes combined with the grease globules to make a sort of Goo Stew.
We got a call from our tenants today also asking if we could please remove the ’94 Cavalier I left in the backyard as they are having a birthday party in a few weeks (only ME!). I was just thinking about that car & remembered how nasty the car was when I bought it ($100 at an impound auction in AL 10 years ago). It wasn’t as gross as the truck mentioned above, but there was a big juicy dog or human terd under the back seat bottom when I pulled it out to clean it (how did it get there?). I dropped the seat back down & ended up buying an identical ’94 Cavalier that had been rolled for $100 & swapped interiors.
I’ve gotten quite fast at removing car interiors but the mouse/rat piss in a lot of my “rescues” still makes me sick despite the use of fans/etc.
“94 Cavalier that had been rolled for $100″…
I would have done it for $50.
I have done some truly nasty jobs, usually involving laying on my back beneath a vehicle and unintentionally ingesting said nastiness. I just replaced the steering rack on my in-law’s ’05 Caravan. Power steering fluid. Yum.
Speaking of animals, there is one vehicle I can think of that would have been worse. I was just a tike at the time, and so was spared the first-hand experience, but hearing about it all these years later still makes me cringe.
Back in the late eighties, my old man was restoring his first Grand Prix, a ’71. (He’d go on to do three more over the years.) Parts were scarce even then, so you had to go the extra mile to get what you needed. Buying a whole car for parts really wasn’t his goal, but when a buddy told him about a complete ’72 for $200, he knew it was an opportunity not to be missed.
The car was about 60 miles away, stuffed into a tiny one-car garage that barely fit around it (they’d scraped it on both sides getting it in). It had been there for an unknown number of years, likely due to the incorrect and blown up Pontiac 350 under the hood. Clearly the thing had seen better days, but it had minimal rust and could readily provide lots of the sheetmetal he was in need of. He spoke with the old lady who owned the house (seems her son had abandoned it there), and after a short while it was bought.
Turns out there was a good reason Dad didn’t let me see the car the night it arrived home. In the trunk were several trash bags, each containing multiple deceased and decomposing felines.
I can’t help but recall that story every time I close the trunk on my ’71 SJ, which happens to be wearing that car’s decklid.
Replacing a sealbeam headlamp on my 1968 Fury III in a 10 degree blizzard in an interstate rest area. It was one of those ‘college kid huh,’ don’t pull back on the highway like that or we’ll run you in’ deals.
Having a heck of a time adding’ ‘yes, you can do this using only a nail file for a screw driver.’
Spending an entire afternoon at the local Pick-A-Part, on my back, underneath a junked ’66 Impala four door removing all the front and rear suspension. The car had been sitting flat on the ground, so I had one of the yard employees bring a forklift and set the metal carcass on top of stacks of tires.
For the next several hours I lay on the dusty ground with rust flakes, grime, and globs of grease falling into my face and eyes. Some previous scavenger had already removed both rear axles, so a steady stream of old, rancid gear oil dripped onto my denim mechanic’s jumpsuit as I fought with the rusty bolts holding the rear control arms on. Lucky for me, a nice fellow yanking some engine parts from the same car helped me remove the front suspension.
Making matters worse, it was mid-July and hot. My jumpsuit was soaked clear through with sweat, which mingled with the gear oil and made me even more of a grime magnet ( and also made me smell even worse ) . Just 30 minutes before closing, I freed the last rear control arm and triumphantly rolled my loaded yard cart to the cashiers’ window.
Why did I put myself though that torture, you ask? Well- thanks to the previous owner’s interest in lowriding, the original suspension on my ’66 Biscayne was completely wrecked. Everything was butchered beyond repair and had to be replaced. Second, it was Pick A Part’s half-off sale and I wasn’t about to pass that up.
I only paid $150 for the complete front and rear suspension. Even after buying new bushings, ball joints, and hardware it’s still WAY cheaper than one of those fancy setups from Global West, Hotchkis, or Edelbrock.
These are great (war) stories! Brought back memories of some other projects I had “selectively de-remembered” for obvious reasons. The ’72 Vega we bought for parts was full of trash… my ’71 VW van; the same, plus doobie butts and (apologies to Jake Blues) “prophylactics, soiled.” Yikes.
I remember doing a water pump on the ’71 Vega in a blowing snow storm, trying to wire up a hot, dragging muffler on the ’73 Vega Kammback (do I sense a theme here?) on a trip from Spartanburg, SC to Athens, GA (we lost the muffler completely about a half hour later)… dropping the caked-with-grease-and-dirt transaxle out of the ’71 VW van with a single bottle jack and a few bricks with the temps and humidity hovering in the high 90s…
Yeah, actually the truck is starting to pale a little by comparison!
This year? Grinding all of the paint out of the interior of my Scout, laying POR-15 on all the metal, and spraying bedliner in over top of it. I was scrubbing paint and bedliner off my skin for days (and I shot it in a paper suit).
You think that’s dirty? Should have seen the back seat after I… oh, never mind.
All of this pales in comparison to the time I redid the back brakes on my ’83 Honda Civic and replaced/repacked the bearings in the brake drum, per instructions in my parent’s garage.
I’ve been under the same car to adjust the rear parking brake (never could get it well adjusted, cable stretched?) though to be honest, it was not terrible underneath it as it was a fairly rust free vehicle.
One of the worst though was digging around in the interior of a base 83 civic at a junk yard while it rained to retrieve the windshield/turn signal combination thing to put in my car as my windshield wiper stalk had quit working, and in a fit of frustration to get it going one day, I broke the stalk off. Mine had intermittent wipers, but not the base Civics, thus lost that feature, but gained functioning wipers again. Oh well.
Another fun job was replacing rocker arms on a ’74 Chevy Nova with the 250 I6, though not a difficult job thankfully.
Dirty Jobs. There were a lot of those. When most engine gaskets were paper and cork, everything leaked and mixed with road dust to make a nasty tar like mess over everything. I worked at a Texaco station in the mid 60s A guy brought in a 48 Ford with a leaking passenger side water pump. Those pumps doubled as motor mounts. First you had to get thru the half inch of previously mentioned grime to find the bolts. Getting it apart was one thing. You would think it would just require putting the new one in and you’re done. Not so simple, my boss warned me these would not always line up when being put back together. He was right. When you remove that mount, built up stresses get relieved and things move, not all lines up when done. After much prying cussing loosening and retightening it all went back together. It is at the bottom of the engine, but on top of the frame, so no easy access. I had a thick coat of grease up to my elbows and more than a few bloody knuckles when I finished. But it didn’t leak and worked great.
The good thing about those water pump/motor mount combinations on old Ford flatheads was that it made it super-easy to put a newer flathead into an old Ford – just use the water pumps that would fit the old car. Since water pumps were wear parts you could always get new or rebuilt ones.
In July I replaced a rotted out gas tank strap bracket on one of my Chryslers. While the gas tank was out, I also decided to clean up the floorpan and frame rails in that section and coat them with POR-15. Lots of grime from almost 50 years of use, plus I’ve had the car oil sprayed at Krown a few times.
With sheets of cardboard on the floor, and wearing swim goggles as it was the only thing I had that would keep the falling gunk out of my eyes, I started with a scraper, then a heavy wire brush, then hosed it down with 2 cans of brake cleaner, then some wire wheels and paint/rust stripping discs mounted on my electric drill. Then it was ready for the POR. It took me a few evenings, and each night I was filthy at the end.
Penetrant.
Penetrant. *uh huh huh*
shut up Beavis.. you’re gonna get us in trouble!
Many years ago I ran the detailing department of the Holden dealer in
Alice Springs in Central Australia.
One day a customer brought in his Commodore station wagon that hit a
Wedge Tail eagle whilst he was travelling at 100 mph. The eagle punched a baseball sized hole through the windscreen and coated the whole interior of the car with blood and tiny specks of eagle. It took two of us the entire day to clean it.
This reminds me of Sons of Anarchy were Half Sack the vegetarian prospect was given the task of removing a dead deer stuck halfway through a windscreen of a customer’s car
I have two that I will never forget, they were both horrible.
The first one was working on a friend’s ’70 or ’71 429 Mustang, We did head gaskets to get the “clean” job over with, then we were going to change the rear end gears and axles.. I had done it once, on a Chrysler 8=3/4 rear, but never on a Ford 9″ and he had never done one at all. We had a Chilton book or something. It was in Vegas and it was only 90 or so, so how bad could it be? Pretty bad. As we were taking it apart, it’s two years in New Jersey became obvious, as the rust flakes started coming down, and we used up our can of Liquid Wrench pretty quickly. And just before We got the rear end apart, I somehow tore most of my right thumbnail off. I taped it up with some of that white adhesive tape, just to keep the rest of the nail from being torn off, not thinking how the dried blood would glue itself to the tape, making removal more painful than ripping it off. We somehow managed to hit the right settings on the first try, and his new 3.5x gears were all set. He was pumping lube into the rear from the squeeze bottle and he overfilled it, and I got a huge blob of it on my head. Between the acne storm it set up, and the smell, I washed my hair 3 times that night, twice with shampoo, and finally with dish soap (Palmolive green), and I could still smell the shit, I wasn’t happy about it at all.
The second one was just a flat out train wreck. I had a ’77 Dodge Macho Power Wagon, with a 360 in it. It had ported heads, a cam, headers, a Carter Thermoquad on an Edelbrock intake, with 3″ turbo mufflers, and it ran pretty decently. VERY LOUD. One thing that never worked right was the electric choke, so I put a manual choke on it. It worked fine, except when the cable would break, about once a year. The same friend who had the Mustang above came over and we were going to change my oil, put in new header gaskets, and replace the choke cable. First thing that went wrong is I somehow managed to break off one of the header bolts. We had to pull the driver’s side header completely off and I got vice grips on the tiny part of the bolt that stuck out, and managed to get it out. The second mess was whoever had changed the oil at the dealer the last time had stripped out the oil pan plug. It just spun and we used the ever handy vice grips to get it out after half hour of messing with it. We went to the parts store to buy one of those plug kits to fix a stripped plug, and came back and that went as ok as any time you had to lay down under a truck that leaked fluids from everwhere it could leak on a 110 degree day could. Then we did what I thought would be the easy deal, change the choke cable. The cable went through a rubber plug in the dash. I had drilled a hole through it, and the old one came out in about a minute. We put the new one in, and I took a can of carb cleaner and sprayed the carb linkage down, just to get the crud off of it. There was about 6″ of extra wire sticking out past the little clamp, and I was about to cut it off. I was standing on an old milk crate, and just as I had done a couple of times before, I slipped on my own sweat that had dripped on it, and I started to slide off. I grabbed at anything I could to catch myself, and the wire I was about to cut went into my wrist where my hand joined it, and it went under the skin about 5″ and popped out of my forearm! Between the carb cleaner, and the wire, it hurt like hell, and I yelled like hell, too. After I calmed down, I cut the wire off with my nice new hardened jaw clippers and then pulled it out of my arm. It bled, a lot! Hurt really badly too, so I went to the ER. For some reason, the people at the ER seemed to think I did it on purpose, and a psychiatrist came in and started asking me odd questions. My friend, who was the poster boy for aggressive East coast types, suddenly yells, “How the hell does him hurting himself working on his truck suggest to anyone he needs a shrink coming in and talking to him?”. The doctor looks at him, looks at me, and says, “You didn’t do it on purpose?”, I said, “Are you f’in nuts?”. He leaves, and then the first nurse comes in and she starts yelling at me, saying I told her that I had done it on purpose. I have no speech impediment, so I don’t know where she came up with that nonsense, but she insisted I said that I had done it to hurt myself. My friend went ballistic and started screaming at her, “You’re f’in insane lady, he slipped on a milk crate!” over and over again. She said, “Don’t lie for him!”, and we looked at each other and cracked up laughing. The shrink comes back and asked us what’s so funny, and we laughed at him too, the whole thing was just ridiculous. The ER doctor walked in then, and he recognized me from several previous ankle sprain visits, and looked at my arm. The nurse took him out in the hall after a couple of minutes, and we could plainly hear her tell him I had told her I did it on purpose. He said, “You know they think you’re out of your mind, right?”. She kept insisting I had told her I did it on purpose. When we were leaving, I had to go to the bathroom, and I saw the shrink and told him she needed help, as she was delusional, and maybe she shouldn’t be working there in her condition. She heard me, and went off on me, eventually bursting into tears, and then she ran down the hall. I found out about a month later that this was the first of several bizarre incidents and she was soon discovered to have a serious drug issue. My arm healed fine, and I have two little dotlike scars on my left arm to remember that day by. I found out about the nurse’s issues when I managed, while walking my dog a night, to turn my left ankle both ways, and my right ankle one way, when I stepped into an unmarked hole dug by the maintanance workers earlier that day. I ended up getting a free months’ rent, and the complex paid my ER bill in compensation. I was happy with it then, now I would be looking for some cash.
Water pump on a 2.7L engine in a Dodge Stratus. Tight engine compartment for starters and you have to disassemble what seems to be half the engine to get the job done. Including several monstrous timing chains which run the water pump.
Oy. Did one of those with a friend. I’ll never buy anything with a 2.7 in it!
My takeaway from these wonderful stories: Oh, what a sheltered life I have led. Some of these have jogged loose some old memories. One of my first jobs turned out to be one of the dirtiest, replacing the rear bumper on an 11 year old northern Indiana Ford Galaxie convertible. This is where I learned about undercarriage rust. Of course, when you work at the extreme ass end of an old car, there is no leaking lubricant to slow down the corrosion. Removing those rusted-on brackets from the frame – sheer joy. I think I finished off with a big hammer and a cold chisel. I have never forgotten the taste of rust flakes.
I have done some rear leaf springs in a couple of cars too, and again, lots and lots of rust to contend with. The job in the 61 Thunderbird also involved grinding rust off of the entire rear underbody before priming and painting it. Like BOC, I was filthy every evening.
Thank you all for reminding me why I’ve always made a point to treat my favorite mechanic as somebody to be appreciated.
I have pointedly never been in this situation with an automobile. Motorcycles, yes, but that’s a much easier situation.
Exhaust systems. Mild steel exhaust systems driven through a few northeast winters and then changed while lying on my back.
Thank God GM introduced stainless steel exhaust systems circa 1990.
Amen to that. I just brought home a pile of exhaust parts to finish up the F-150 (everything rotted and fell off one section at a time – we lost the cat a couple weeks ago).
My 2000 New Beetle TDI (a.k.a. Herbie) went about ten years before the welds in the stainless exhaust rusted out – the pipe still looked new. Redid the whole thing from the turbo back – lo-flo cat and a glasspack. Sounded pretty good after about six months!
Last month I traded my 14.5 year-old, 136,000 miles, Tahoe that endured eastern Ontario salt winters with a vengeance. It still had the complete factory exhaust with no signs of rust.
Reading all your stories above, I realize how lucky I’ve been. Probably my worst jobs have been cleaning the interiors of smokers’ cars that I’ve bought, where the dirty water comes away brown from tobacco tar instead of gray from normal dust and dirt. And there was the old DeSoto station wagon I bought to resell – there was a 5-gallon bucketful of detritus in the spare tire well, but it was just dusty old crap, not septic at all.
With my construction background I of course had a good deal of experience helping to replace parts on bulldozers and such at various jobsites under less than ideal conditions in typical Pacific northwest weather. My father had the worst one of all though – this was when I was still in grade school. He got a job at a chicken ranch which involved among other things removing a gigantic pile of chicken droppings. Well, guess where the cat broke down…. I remember a couple of days when Pop wasn’t fit company for man or beast.
It’s amazing what cigarette byproducts get into. Circuit boards in vintage televisions, radios, etc that were in smokers’ homes sometimes short out between the traces & cause all sorts of problems due to this conductive crap.
My Dad smoked pipes for years, and it brought back a lot of memories when I cleaned out the interior of the F100 after I bought if from him when we moved to The Middle West. I think I used a whole roll of paper towels and half a bottle of windex. Yuck.
A friend who’s a fire and accident buff once showed me a pickup in which the owner had shot himself. Doors sealed with tape and biohazard stickers, visible sprays of bloodstains on the insides of the windows. I’m not sure I even want to know what happens with vehicles like that.
Back in the mid 80’s when I was young and dumb (and poor), I picked up a 1974 Pinto wagon with a bad motor but nice body, and another ’74 Pinto wagon that ran great but it was a wreck. Both were really cheap. A quick swap of the engine & automatic transmission, and I’m good to go, right?
Armed with a meager set of hand tools and a rented engine hoist, I set to work in the driveway of my apartment building on Thanksgiving Day in North Dakota. I got everything loose and cranked up the cherry picker, only to have all the tranny fluid drain out the tailpiece onto the pavement. Then the fun began.
After I yanked the second motor and transmission, I made the discovery that I was dealing with 2 different transmissions, of unequal lengths. So much for the quick swap. The transmissions and engines were both separated and rejoined, spilling more fluid on the driveway. My landlord was not amused.
Eventually, it all went back together. I sold the surplus car (in running condition) for enough cash to cover the cost of floor dry, and I drove that Pinto for another 3 years.
Mine is the infamous head gasket repair on a 2001 alero with the LD9 2.4L (updated version of the quad4). Money was tight at the time, and as I understood it GM mechanics had 12 hrs to complete the job, so even at the local repairs shops the total cost was close to 2 grand, which is why most of them got junked if they were over 5 yrs old. (Mine was 7 years old and had 140000 miles on it.) Any how, with a chiltons manual and a membership to Aleromod .com I stripped the engine down to the block. The engine was extremely carboned and sludged up, which surprised me as I was always diligent about oil changes and using good oil. Ended up also replacing timing chain, water pump, (timing chain driven, Yikes!)all hoses, gaskets, o-rings and seals on the top of the engine. Really sweated timing the camshafts, but lo and behold, after about 40 hrs worth of work she started right up and ran flawlessly. I would never do this again without pulling the engine, as the contortions i put my body through left me aching for quite a while afterwords. Oh yeah, and BTW I had a 94 ford F150 with the same gas tank issues on the rear tank, I ran off front tank all summer and let rear on dry out and used JBweld putty on the tank. Hasn’t leaked since ; )
My most messy repair stories always seem to revolve around transmission ordeals. The job that stands out in my mind is pulling an all-nighter to fix a leaking pump seal in a 1981 GMC 3/4 ton pickup. The entire underside of the thing was rust and trans fluid. By the morning, I was entirely covered in rust and transmission fluid. All because a couple small bolts wiggled loose. Thankfully that pickup continued on for many years after that with only minimal repairs.
I’m surprised no one has made mention of stale gas as a nasty fluid. I just finished draining the fuel tank of a 1994 Isuzu Pickup that has been sitting non-op in a garage for 11 years. Motor seized, carburetor locked up solid, fuel that smells like, well, stale gas. A 45 minute shower is required after this job.
Old automatic fluid from 50s/60s cars used whale oil as an ingredient and has a nauseating smell.
Oh boy do I know that smell… maybe a smell worse than death. Way back when I bought a ’59 Edsel Ranger that had been sitting for maybe 10 years, and one of the first things I did was to drop the tank to clean it out. When I took the sending unit out chunks flew… gawd that smelled awful.
I’d like to report the ’95 F150 is back together again, sans leaks, and with a new exhaust system I cobbled together from various adapters, elbows and a Thrush glass pack picked up from the local parts store this morning. Not to mention at least eight u-bolts to hold it all together (had to weld one of the joints, as I couldn’t find an adapter that would work).
I do exhaust systems the same way I do plumbing – buy a big bag of everything and hope there’s enough in it to avoid having to go back for more.
One problem with extreme luck…is that so often you don’t even know it at the time.
I learned wrenching, out of financial necessity, on Blazing Saddles, my 1973 Pinto Squire Houston ghetto-cruiser. Now it was of sound body; and most of its life it had been cared for…but in its senior years it had been beaten horribly. So some work was unavoidable; and I, the neophyte with K-mart tools, was ready to barge right in.
First off, the radiator was…beyond shot. About five cooling tubes had been crimped off and the tank holes plugged with chewing gum. So,…out comes the radiator, and I go in search of an air-conditioned Pinto for one. Or for a junkman to burn the different holes into the different support frame, which was what happened.
Radiator came right out. Hey, that was easy!…except that a month later, the water pump followed.
Again, it went real smooth, even with cheap tools. Then the starter; and then the front brakes. Man, this is almost FUN! Now, keep in mind…I’d never done serious work on a car before. Certainly not one from my native rust-streaked Ohio.
THEN…came The Winter Car. Why run my jewel-in-the-rough through all the brine, when I can get a $500 beater to use in the salt season? And…I get lucky. I find a Pinto with the same engine…a 1972. Most parts interchange.
And this one, too, needs work. No…PROBLEM!
…Famous last words. OMFG…you haven’t LIVED until you’re in forty-degree weather trying to bust free a rusted nut with a cheap box wrench…and then the cheap wrench does what cheap wrenches are wont to do. Cold, frustration, busted finger…can’t get it free…no torch; if I had one it would have been the gas tank, not the stuck nut, that I’d have used it on.
To the question: No particular job stands out. Almost all of them are dirty, unless the car is new or a Southern car. And I don’t wrench on new and I haven’t had a rust-free beater in a while. Dirt is all types…but wrenching is always sloppy.
Pulling the engine in my Riviera for an engine swap was possibly the dirtiest jobs I’ve ever had to do, and the one that I cursed about the most.
It all started simply enough, I wanted to pull the 5 litre and install a 350 Rocket. I had a three day weekend to do it. Now, I’d bought a ’78 Olds 350 from a Cadillac Seville, and I did extensive research on what would swap over. I also rebuilt a TH-325 from a T-type Riviera at this time. The reconditioning of the engine was the easy part, and pulling the 307 was simple enough. Greasy, but simple. I got it out in about a day, which was fine.
I knew that putting the engine in assembled would be harder, and I chose to basically assemble it as a short block with just the cylinder heads and valvetrain to ease re-installation. I had to reuse the original oil filter bracket gasket, which was mistake #1. I bolt the engine all together and attach it to the transmission with the original flexplate from the Seville, not the Riviera, which became mistake #2. We get this thing in the car, and it all goes together like a dream. It all gets assembled to spec, and then I try to start it. No dice. Only electrical device on the car that worked was the headlights.
I get pissed off and I checked every single ground and cleaned every wiring connector. I thoroughly research the wiring system cross-referencing every other period GM car that was remotely similar as well. I’m stumped and furious.
I discover that two fusible links for the electrical system have pulled themselves apart due to the strains of the engine being removed from the car. They were conveniently hidden by the plastic heat shield that covered the starter wires. I repaired them and for the first time I get to see if the engine turns over. It doesn’t. Starter makes a loud *PING* and sounds like it’s running without load or even contact with a gear. Turns out that Mistake #2 had come to haunt me, as the flexplate was the only part I didn’t swap over from the 307, and the pinion gear was hitting the front side of the slightly larger diameter flexplate and just spinning against it. I ran out of daylight by this time as it was a work day.
Next day I shim the starter motor and get the thing to make contact. The starter motor screams but engages. I build oil pressure first, and then I find that the distributor 12 volt wire was too short because I had to shorten the wiring loom to the starter when I removed the fusible links, and the distributor was a quarter turn out of it’s original place moving the terminal farther away (wires in correct timing though). I add a length of wire with spade connectors to make the difference temporarily. I just want to see this thing run. While I’m adding the wire, I see oil gushing out of the old gasket, Mistake number one coming back to haunt me. So, between the incorrect flexplate and the inaccessible oil bracket, I have to pull out the motor again.
I wait until the weekend and spend three hours to fix a ten minute mistake. I swap the flexplate and goop the gasket on the oil filter bracket. I put it the engine back in, finalize the install, and I’m under this thing arguing with the passenger side axle shaft because it passes under the strangely shaped oil pan and it has to be on a specific angle to fit. The E-body Rivieras were front wheel drive, you know. And it’s easy to put the axle shaft in when the engine is out of the car, but when it’s in the car, you have to fight with a CV joint and the motor mount harp.
I get it all set up for the first fire-up. The starter motor still screams but the engine started up and ran like a champ. Oil pressure light was on for a few seconds as the filter bracket filled up but didn’t leak. The transmission I rebuilt without assembly lube begins to suck up all the fluid so it would fill all it’s voids. I put seven quarts of fluid into that thing, and she moves. Sort of.
Next day I buy another seven quarts of fluid and I start driving it around to get it circulated. I had only eight quarts in it and it shifts into second at 35 mph. Something like 4500 rpm, and didn’t seem to have a third gear. I chalk it up to low fluid level and thus low fluid pressure, and I put quart after quart into it and it keeps taking it up. After the level finally stopped getting low and it had the proper fluid level, I discover that the late shifting hasn’t gone away. And it leaks! Out of the bellhousing, the worst place it possibly could. It shifts late and leaks a quart every 75 miles, which drips onto the exhaust crossover and catches on fire. I decide that I would rather shoot myself than tear out the engine again.
I limp the car to my work in second gear and have them replace the governor from the old transmission and have them replace the torque converter seal, as well as swap in the old TC from the old tranny. Still shifts late and still leaks like it’s got a hole in the side of it. I’m angry enough to total my new transmission and I pull out onto a two-lane highway with a speed limit of 70 mph and I floor it. Once I hit about 60 it shifted into third gear. I had enough and drove it for a week with the late shifts and leak, and then had the original transmission reinstalled. Since then, it has run like a champ.
The most recent messy job, one that was far worse than anticipated, was doing rear axle bearings and seals on the ’74 VW Thing, with IRS, not swing axle. The left side was leaking grease on the rims (and the brakes), so it had to be done. The service manual shows an involved procedure, called for every 60,000 miles, and on most cars its never done for the life of the car. No one at the VW parts houses had any advice, since they had never done it themselves. When I got it opened up, the problem was obvious. A PO had reversed the bearings, Inner ball and outer roller. Driving out the bearings now became the messy and difficult job. Of course, there was black moly grease everywhere,
I’m not particularly handy or mechanical. I can change a tire, add oil and start a car using jumper cables. But in 1981, I replace the rear floor of my ’71 Super Beetle convertible with an aluminum cookie sheet — the battery and general northeastern road conditions had rotted the floor through and cookie sheet fit perfectly — there was even a bolt sticking up from the rear of the battery compartment that the whole to hang up the cookie sheet fit over perfectly. It passed NJ state inspection! I guess they didn’t look too closely!!
The job that I had to do in the dirt outside and away from home was a clutch on the ’72 VW bus. Yes, Im a glutton for punishment. We rolled into Santa Barbara, still over 100 miles from home at 30mph with the engine redlined. I had never done a clutch on one of these and the engine would not come out, as with my previous VW experiences. So, the engine and transaxle had to be dropped together and separated on the ground. Fortunately, the clutch disk, while it had turned to powder from slippage and heat, had not damaged the flywheel.
The topic of Ford trucks brings me to another one. I’ve only ever owned one, an ’89. 2WD, 5spd, 300 I6, looked nice but rusty as hell underneath. Previous owner had just put on all new brake lines and tires before the clutch stopped working. Got it for next to nothing, so I figured I’d break my “no Fords, no imports” rule just this once. It was worth it for the rubber alone.
Turns out the clutch was the easy part – just needed bleeding. The fuel system turned out to be the real pain. After three times of being stranded – each resulting in some combination of dropping tank/s, blowing out lines, junkyard “build one out of two” pumps, etc. – I finally said “enough!”. Bought a newish tank with low-pressure pump and sender, new lines, a new high-pressure pump, and some chain (strap replacement). Cut out EVERY-freaking-THING and put in the new. No more dual tank headaches, no more rust clogging the filter, no more corrosion and leaks around the straps, no more pump and sender problems. It was solid after that, but I sold it anyways. I’d had my fill.
Sorry for being late to the party on this one……
Round here its not at all uncommon to see a two or three year old ford truck with a rotten box ( ribs, floor, box sides the whole damn thing). Four years ago my brother got a smokin(smokin and dripping was a better discription) deal on an 05 f-250 quad cab hadda stroke diesel for $4000 cdn loonies. Knowing the box was rotten as soon as he got it home we replaced the ribs and box sides and patched the floor with parts fabbed from better than what was there gauge steel. A week later and the truck had a shiny new gunmetal paintjob and some new tires and the entire interior gutted and cleaned (and dried) to like new. Well it wasnt three months and the rust had set into the box again and the sides where bubbling and back panel had taken on a rusty hole in one of the lower corners. More work was done and the box shined like a new one. Two months later the pvc system started acting up followed by the turbo ingesting some of its impeller and bearings. My brother sold that truck after more than two and a half years sitting in his back yard for $2500. I guess it was a lesson learned and a messy repair.
Back in ’99 I picked up a super clean low mileage ’89 Cadillac Sedan DeVille for cheap money, it had been parked for a little over a year having been broadsided by Bambi. Replaced the right fender and had it and the right front door repainted and thought I was good to go. It was a warm early fall when I got the car back on the road and thought life was grand until the first cold snap. Fired up the heater for the first time and nearly hurled my lunch due to the gawdawful smell emanating from the vents. Turned out while the car was sitting chipmunks decided to use the heater box as both a condo and a toilet… took the blower motor out and stuck my hands in the heater box and scraped out handful after handful of foul smelling goo while doing my best to resist blowing chunks all over the engine. At the time I worked at a Ford dealer and we had this wonderful Ford chemical called disodorizer that could pretty much take the stink right out of a skunk. It took three bottles of disodorizer to de-stink that poor car.
SII Landrover gearbox overhaul that my ex-BL mechanic Dad did in the 90s (I helped). Gearbox wouldn’t go out through the bottom, had to come up through the floor (I don’t remember why). So the seats, seat mounts and floor had to be removed. Helpfully the Landrover was designed to allow for this to happen. Unhelpfully the floor was glued, screwed, rivetted and bolted into place. The Landie in question was also owned by farmers who used it for the offroad work it was designed for, so there was a healthy layer of baked-on dirt, straw and grime on the floor. Overall it was an incredibly messy and time-consuming task. And once the gearbox was reinstalled, trying to get the screw/bolt/rivet holes to line up again was the square icing on the round cake… But bizarrely it was an interesting and life-building experience!