from the other way, there is a tight right hander the other side of that bridge (slip road for the A40 which the bridge is) and i wasnt concetrating, white line in wet, lost back end and fishtailed it that far before i finally lost it.
Oh it was, force of impact to nose then roof bent EVERY panel on the car. and when i finally got to look in the engine bay, the rad was on the block, and the block was on the firewall. lol I only had a concussion, injured shoulder and cuts and bruises. a very lucky boy.
Changing a seat. Pretty difficult job to be blonde about huh? Even swapped my harness over to the new one. Get back in from working the doors at 3am and I'm thinking there's something different by me door. It's the old and now soaking wet seat.
cracked my rallye headlight from the insdie while adjusting it down too far with the audi hid's in... DOH!!!
1)Put my car on a rolling road but couldn't be arsed to move all the tyres stacked up behind the car touching the bumper, after a few runs there was a burning plastic smell the exhaust had warmed the tyres enough to melt the rear bumper. 2)Drove about 10 miles into work in my old beach buggy, got there no problem, a few hours later my mum phoned to ask if I got to work ok I asked why and she told me there was around 4 litres of oil on the driveway. The oil cooler had blown up and dumped the lot, still managed to get to work without noticing a thing! 3)Crashing (writing off) our soon to be family car on the day my girlfriend sold her lupo gti which left us with sweet f-all to drive.
stoopidest thing i did was talking to my mate while i had a fag im me gob with a buffer machine on the bonnet with **** loads o T cut on and took all the paint off.. now my car has a nice white stripe up one side of the bonnet gutted !!!
I sheared off the pivot bolt on the drivers side wishbone twice and had to cut the floor open both times to weld a new one in [:^(] on the up side I only melted the fuel lines and set her on fire the first time! I learnt from the mistake second time round
Several months back I fitted an ABF engine into a MK2. It all went very smoothly and didn't take too long at all; the engine also started very nicely pretty much first time. I had virtually finished everything down to the last detail when I was suddenly aware of the smell of burning oil while I was sat in it with the engine idling on my driveway; the engine was quickly turned off and bonnet lifted to reveal oil absolutely everywhere over my previously clean engine bay and driveway beneath. I had forgotten to put the bolt in that secures the distributor blanking plate on the block. But not the end of the world, though - I topped up the oil again and discovered that only somewhere between 1 and 1.5 litres had been lost; most certainly not enough loss to cause any damage, especially when it only happened over the space of ten seconds while idling. Yet once I had spent a few hours cleaning up and I finally got round to starting the engine again, I had this most awful knock knock knock as I attempted to turn the engine over. I finally did get it to run and it sounded totally knackered. Bottom end sounded like it had been totally cooked. I had already written a revised 'for sale' advert to sell it as a MK2 with a f*cked ABF engine. Then my mate called round, and he refused to believe that the little oil loss could have caused any damage. We set about prodding at the car again. After lots of head scratching and listening around, he declared the loud noise was coming from the airbox. I left the K-Jetronic system on this car. Yes - it was the metering plate banging up and down as the engine rotated. It wasn't long before we discovered one or two somewhat loose spark plugs. With everything tightened up properly, the engine ran absolutely lovely, sounding just like a low-mileage ABF that it was. The two stupid blunders on my behalf - not securing that plate properly and not checking the spark plugs (which I assumed were still torqued up, forgetting that I had often removed them during storage to put a bit of oil down the bores) - so happened to manifest themselves at exactly the same time.
Changed the dash bulbs that light up the clocks at the weekend; job went quite well, for me. The old ones weren't actually blown, just 'fogged up' on the inside with condensed filament metal, so a bit on the dim side. First time I drive in the dark after this 'improvement', I find that: (a) The foglight switch backlight bulb now doesn't work (b) The heater control trim now isn't lit up (c) My homemade 'lights left on' beeper no longer works. Lollocks. Foglight switch thing wasn't too bad to sort out, but what a nightmare getting that heater control trim apart and a handy LED in there. Big respect to pigbladder (?) who casually talks about modding these things with multicolour LEDs etc (IIRC). The lights left on thing can wait...
been there. had to put old oil back in from catch tank. best service ever. last vw faux paus was on my aircooled camper. went to start it and it wouldn't start, turned over fine but would not fire, checked fuel, spark and battery. battery eventually went flat. took battery out and charged it and tried again next day, still no joy and battery went flat again. spare battery put on charge and tried again next day, still no joy. left it for the day and went to tidy my shed, half way through tidying shed found a rotor arm on top shelf! aah..........now i remember removing it to stop some thieving scumbag starting my camper!!
1) buying the atlas grey mk2 8v for miself for mi 25th birthday 2) buying the current ride - mk2 16v 3) losing the locking wheel nut for the gf's mk5 when having limited time to change the wheel bearing, then with after stripping the car of all the junk in it, and with ten minuites to go i found it - where i had left it last and hadn't looked properly . unfortunately the bearing needed the one spline soclet we didnt have, and it was seized like fook, so had to go back again another time to fix it!
My heater Matrix exploded whilst driving on the motorway on Sunday morning. I didn't know wtf was going on at first. The whole car was full of steam. My first thoughts were that the car was on fire. The whole inside was fogged up. I couldn't see my steering wheel, let alone what was outside. I instantly opened the window, leaning my head out and guided it over to the hard shoulder!!! Lucky escape , could of been alot worse!!!
lost my gf's locking wheel nut key the other week and I had to change her wheel bearing over the weekend - so I searched high and low - all over her and my car, all over the house, shed, parts bin. She was flat out telling me I hadn't given it her to keep safe and I didn't remember putting it anywhere, so I finally sat down and had a think "well if I haven't seen it and she hasn't seen it then..." so I had a walk down the road and there it was in the middle of the road with little indents in the tarmac where people had driven over it! I'd only gone and left the locking nut in the last wheel bolt and she'd driven off with it still in!
had the same happen to me a few years ago richard, wasn't on the motorway just the local streets my friend and i practically jumped out of the car in the middle of the road thinking we were going to be engulfed in a fireball. lol Today a friend and me made a daft mistake. we had just fitted a set of coilovers and some vr6 brakes to my mk2, bled the system with all the wheels off. put the wheels back on lightly tightened all the nuts, dropped the car back on the ground, packed all my stuff away and binned all the rubbish, right time for a test drive, got about a mile down the road when everything starts clunking and juddering, i turned to my friend, "did we tighen up those wheel bolts properly after we dropped it on the ground" doh! even worse we had left the wheel brace on the floor when we left limped home sounding like the wheels were about to drop off. every single one of them needed tightening the front pass was as if we hadnt done em up almost. oops
May 2008 was going for a brisk country drive in my mk2 driver on ats cups. Hit quite a large pot hole and made quite a thump. Pulled over immediately to see the damage done. Front grill had popped off (was hanging) and outer lip had what appeared to be a slight knock in it on front offside rim but nothing too serious. Popped the grill back in place and continued on my way. Fast forward to MOT in september 2008 and front tyres needed replacing. This was probably due to the fact that once the tyre was removed the wheel resembled a D shape and had spilt on the inside!
1) While quickly putting the rear brake assembly back together on my Mk2 minutes before the MOT put one of the pads on the wrong way round. Even Copper Eased the pad and not the metal bit. Had to try and bed it in a little bit before being tested so did the standard driving with the brakes on. Grind Grind Grind... failed MOT and new rear discs needed. Bad Times! 2) After finally getting Mk2 through the MOT took it to Santapod for BugJam. Bumping over the campsite as we arrived to get to our mates pitch... Brand new grill bumped its way off... drove straight over it... bring out the cable ties!
wow this thread is still going My latest blunder is taking my car to Benfield for a service!! A few months ago I reversed into a bollard causing 400 worth of damage (which i chose not to do, as it wasn't that bad!)
My worst, and thankfully i was only 19 at the time, so a good 10 years ago blunder was this: Mk1 GTI - Bought some Slick 50 gearbox treatment. Stuck it straight into the clutch/timing inspection hole on the bell housing. That was a fast learning curve, watching it poor out onto the floor and need 2 new clutches in the space of 1 month. Expensive!!
