Regular commenters here at Curbside Classics may have noticed occasional comments to the effect that we’ve been testing the comment notification system – if you check the boxes when you comment, you can receive email notifications of any future comments on that post, or each time we publish a new post (note that “rerun” posts don’t trigger this feature). When we recently had some reports that folks weren’t getting email notifications, I tested it myself and sure enough – no notifications! So what does this have to do with spark plug wires, you may ask?
Well, some years ago, I acquired my grandparent’s former ’66 Pontiac Tempest with an OHC-6 which by that point was non-op. I spent the summer rebuilding a Chevy 350 (SBC, FTW!), which I mated to a THM350 and dropped into the car one Autumn evening in my grandmother’s driveway with Granny assisting by working the engine hoist. After a few false starts, she fired up, but was running rough. I checked and re-checked, but couldn’t get it to smooth out. Finally, I drove it down to a local garage, and after about five minutes, the mechanic shut it down, swapped two plug wires around, and said “no charge – it’ll run fine now.”
Which made me feel about as sheepish as I did when I realized I had checked this setting in my WordPress account (under the Notifications > Reader Subscriptions settings). Unchecking that box restored my comment and blog post email notifications, and I told the fine support folks over at wordpress.com to “stand down until further notice.”
So if you’ve not been receiving comment or blog post notifications, and you have a WP account, please check your settings and report back with a comment to this post if you had this same problem and it’s now fixed, or if you’re still not receiving notifications, let me know that too, and also whether you have a wordpress.com account.
Oh, and the QOTD is, what’s the most embarrassing “operator error” you’ve made with your car, and how long did it take you to figure it out?
That would be the time I took my car to the shop because the drivers window would not roll up. Mechanic called me an hour later to tell me I’d pressed in the button that turns off the window controls. He says he sees this a couple times a year.
I’m not surprised. A friend from overseas arrived in a rental car with the window stuck down in the pouring rain. This was the first thing I checked.
I tried to post a couple of days ago to respond to a couple of threads. In both cases when I clicked the post button nothing showed up. I tried to repost but it came up as a duplicate post. Just checked the threads again and posts still aren’t showing up.
Yep, that’s actually a separate issue, I hit it every so often, too.
Hmm… That looks like the “standard issue” distributor Ford used on the V8s for a couple decades, as installed in a 1987 or later 5.0 V8, but then you show a Pontiac Tempest. I’m confused!
Nah, seriously, worth noting. Since it seems like the posts pretty much fall off after the second day, I don’t worry about it. Good to know, though, in case someone ever responds with something even more witty and clever to something witty and clever that I wrote.
I unfortunately took no pics of the engine in the Tempest! That’s just a random pic off the interwebs…. (c:
I went through a stretch several weeks ago where nothing was coming through, not the new articles notifications nor the follow on comments. I tried everything I could think of to fix the problem but nothing seemed to work. Then, all of a sudden, everything was back to normal. Voodoo, phases of the moon, started holding my mouth right again, I have no idea but there we are.
Your sparkplug story reminds me of a friend who managed to install the distributor rotor 180 degrees out of phase and then wondered why his car wouldn’t start. It wouldn’t have been so bad except that he had used nearly an entire tube of Permatex Form a Gasket #2 (uckem pucky to us) to help seal the distributor cap (yes, it was a ChryCo product with the distributor mounted low on the front of the block where it was guaranteed to get wet). We learned a couple of valuable lessons that day.
I forgot to retighten the hose clamp that holds the air intake boot on to the air sensor on the ’86 Jetta after cleaning out the assembly. Then while a family member was driving it the hose popped off and stranded her in the hospital parking lot a couple of months ago.
Many years ago after checking oil in my old ’70 C10 I forgot to put the cap back on and left it resting on the valve cover. As I pulled out of the gas station it fell, bounced under the truck and flew into the windshield of a patrol car, cracking it. He thought something flew out the bed of the truck as the tailgate was off, (threatened to write me a ticket for “unsecured load”) but after I showed him the bed was clean and empty, he got back in to his brand new car and sped off pissed. It wasn’t until the next time I checked the oil and saw the oil cap was missing that I realized what happened.
I’m sure there’s other mistakes that have happened over the years, but I try to block out bad memories!
Another fun one I just remembered happened years ago when I was changing a clutch cable on a friends ’69 Beetle. After removing the cable the clutch arm moved all the way back and I heard a “clunk” back by the engine. All the tension was gone on the clutch cable arm. The throw out bearing fell off! Not really off, but it slipped off the crosshaft arms, and the clips were laying in the bottom of the transmission housing. They must have fallen off years before, but as long as the adjustment was right the tension held the bearing in place. So for a simple cable replacement I wound up having to pull the engine.
Then there was the time when I was 14 and I decided to check the fluids in dads brand new 19 ft. Winnebago Brave class A motorhome. There were 2 long extensions behind the little service door in the grill which had caps that were shaped like radiator caps. I took off the cap, saw no water so got the hose to top it off. After about a minute it still hadn’t filled up. Then I looked at the cap, engraved on it was the word “oil”. On the other side of the compartment was an identical cap that said “water”, and it was full to the top. I pulled the dipstick and milkshake was up to the top of the stick. I drove (without license) my dad’s 66 Beetle to the parts store and bought 2 oil filters and 12 quarts of oil. Changed the oil and filter, ran it for a few minutes and changed oil and filter again. Parents were gone for the afternoon so got away with it. The next day we took off for our coast to coast trip, after a couple of hundred miles the engine started sputtering and bucking. As just about shit myself as we pulled over to the side of the road.
It turned out dad had a second fuel tank installed, and when he switched tanks a loose fuel hose clamp was causing the engine to suck air and sputter and run like crap. While the dealer was figuring out and repairing the problem, I thought sure the engine blew and they would tell him it was because someone mixed water in the oil!
After it was repaired I convinced dad they should change the oil as well since it was a new engine, and he did. During next 7500 of the trip the little 318 ran perfectly.
After years of driving Fords, I bought my first GM car (which I posted about last week when the ’97’s were covered). My then wife and GM & ASE certified auto-mechanic and I were out for a drive in my newly purchased Teal Green Grand Prix GTP (I’ll spare you all another picture ;o). Just for fun I thought I would try out the emergency brake when no one else was around. Well, I figured out my ‘operator error’ and embarrassing mistake IMMEDIATELY! The right rear wheel promptly locked up.
You see, in my defense, Fords just simply squeeze the rear calipers (or deploy the rear brake shoes on them there ‘older cars’)…. I got a real quick education from my freaked out then wife and GM & ASE certified auto-technician about something called a PAWL, and the fact it’s a parking brake only and NOT an emergency brake.
In my red-faced embarrassment, all I could think (as any Mechanical Engineer would think) was “What a dumb-a$$ design!” Operator Error / Engineering Error (and some would say around here GM Deadly Sin)… You be the judge. ;o)
My new commuter car (a new Honda Civic Coupe) has an Electric Parking Brake (which already has an F’n Recall for a software update, BTW. REALLY?!?! – I’m just waiting for the slip in the mail). Needless to say, I will NOT be testing this system as an emergency brake, unless I have to of course. So much for those oh-so-fun brake handle slides in the snow! ;o)
Yeah, I don’t get comment notifications but that’s just fine.
Most embarrassing error was the time I just about ran myself over with the 72 Matador. One morning I hopped in to go to work and it wouldn’t crank. After some checks I concluded that the starter solenoid had expired (which had happened before) and since I needed to get to work I started the car using a jumper cable to jump across the solenoid while standing in front of the car. That was a stupid thing to do at the best of times but it had worked before.
Turns out my roommate had borrowed the car the night before and left the floor shifter in drive. When the car started it bumped me across the knees but I was quick enough to get out of the way and reach in to kill the ignition.
Could have very easily done myself in there, all these years later I’m red in the face typing this….
I worked with a mechanic who had installed a remote start in his wife’s automatic VW Rabbit convertible. She was standing in front of it in the garage and started it with the remote. The car was in drive and he had bypassed the neutral safety switch. She was killed.
Did something similar a couple years ago. The family and I came home in the wife’s Durango, and while we were gone we found some objects had fallen from a shelf in the garage so I couldn’t put the truck away. So I stopped it just out of the garage, they all got out and went in the house, and I jumped out of the truck to clear the floor.
I had forgotten to take the truck out of gear. It drove itself into the garage and pinned my leg between the bumper and some boards I had against the wall. Yelled like hell for the wife, who came out and backed the truck up.
I was mostly fine. The pain calmed to a dull ache after a day or two, I just had deep bruises for months afterwards.
Very glad to hear you’re OK. A much less happy ending for one of our neighbors back in the 60’s. Despite being quite inebriated she made it home OK from the local bar but left her 64 Grand Prix in Drive when getting out to manually open the garage door. The leg had to be amputated.
You were lucky. No one was home when his wife was pinned, he discovered her hours later coming home from work, engine still running in drive.
There are few of the why won’t the car start after doing something like adjusting the points and not putting the rotor back in and other simple stupid mistakes like that over the years.
The plug wire mix up got me a 69 Tbird cheap. It was advertised as running poorly despite a recent tune up. Got there and he told me he had tuned it up (replaced the spark plugs) and it never ran right again so he was getting rid of it. I fired it up and it certainly sounded like it could be the plug wire swap. Did a quick look at the firing order and wire routing and said sure I’ll give you your $200 asking price. Drove it down the block, stopped and switched the wires and it ran a million times better. Proper adjustment of the dwell, timing and carb and she purred like a kitten.
Trying to alternately turn the ignition and steering wheel to get it to unlock – person parked next to me reminded me to turn them at the same time. Oops!
Sitting in an idling car doing something on my phone and then trying to start it. Thankfully the car seems to be idiot-proof.
It was on the distributor, just like the picture. I had made a weekend trip from Norman to Eufaula in my ’69 Squareback, and as always had checked the timing and injector wires before the trip. After returning, I was driving from Norman to work in OKC when the car sputtered, popped, and froze up.
I had forgotten to reattach the vacuum hose. The timing on the bloody air-cooled engine was so critical and brittle that a couple hundred miles with a SLIGHTLY wrong timing curve melted the valves, leading to complete destruction of the pistons.
I replaced the timing gears on an OHV Volvo red block. Lined the dots up just right. No start.
Only after doing a lot of online research did I learn that when the dots are lined up right, the engine is at number FOUR tdc.
oops.
I once started my 87 Caprice in drive and nearly hit the family’s beloved 95 Voyager.
I think I now know where one of my comments vanished to now I checked no boxes just posted in the regular way and later it had gone, I had a JAP import Mitsubishi and could not make it go it wouldnt come out of park until some pointed out the foot on the brake safety feature something not fitted to the automatic Aussie cars I’d driven for the previous twenty years or the NZ assembled 93 Corona I also had at the time, DOH.
Put my ’88 Prelude oil filter on my parents ’95 contour. It actualy seemed to fit very well, but it ultimately fell off while my mom was driving the car. My dad had a similar experience recently with his ’09 rx350.
I don’t ever click the “notify by email” because it notifies me of every new comment on that post, which fills up the inbox rather quickly!
I don’t know that I’d call it operator error per se, but the most entertaining snafu I’ve had with a car is when I left my ’83 Lesabre idling in the driveway of our former cabin, on the top of a slight rise, in neutral. Exited the car briefly to ask my dad a question, looked back and noticed the car driving towards the garage! I ran over to it and jumped in the drivers seat just as it was hitting a tree, lol. Somehow the shifter had slipped from neutral to drive.
A few years later, I had a 95 C1500 and a 91 Spirit R/T, both sticks. I parked them nose to nose in my driveway. On two separate occasions, once with each vehicle, I started one up, accidentally popped the clutch without taking the transmission out of gear, and lurched into the other. Sigh…
A couple years ago, my wife called me from work saying that she couldn’t get the ignition key out of her car. I told her to lock it with her fob and I’d go over and check into it. She had forgotten to shift from drive to park when she turned it off.
Since I have T-Mobile and Comcast, I’ve grown used to the concept of just being able to connect to the internet being an accomplishment! As for a mechanical glitch of my own doing, Putting two cycle mixed gas in a four cycle B&S mower was the more recent one. ?
In high school, I swapped a 455 into my 77 Grand Prix. I tightened the transmission cooler lines at the radiator while the engine was running and my hand slipped into the spinning 7 blade fan. I thought my hand was just covered in Dexron transmission fluid but it turns out it was my B-negative blood.
I still have the scars on my left knuckle.
I still have the car too, and when I rebuilt the engine and transmission a couple of years ago, before tightening the lines, it poured ATF out at the radiator again (which led to my kids and I naming the car Christine, since it looked like it left a trail of blood into its parking spot) I shut the engine off this time before doing any more work on it.
Drove in my new-to-me Citroen CX25 GTi to the supermarket, came back, and it wouldn’t start. Nothing at all happened. Called the auto club, waited half an hour, and the guy pointed out that I’d left it in Drive.
[facepalm]
My previous Citroen DS was a manual, and I was used to leaving it in gear.
My story requires a bit of backstory. My first ever car was a Saturn Astra (an Opel Astra H with a Saturn badge), which I got when I started college. Due to some budgeting events, I ended up having to trade cars with a friend for a while; he got my Saturn, I got his ’98 Mercury Mountaineer. It had been running ok for a while, but it was never great. I bought some tools, gave it a tune-up (oil change, plugs/wires, air/oil filter. That very last one is important), and it was now running much better. This went on for a year, up until the beginning of this summer, where we ended up trading back. Since I learned from his car that he took a laid-back approach to maintenance, I decided to give the Saturn an oil change. I got it up on the ramps, did the oil and filter change, and fired it up to take it off. Only when it’s off the ramps do I see a puddle underneath the car. I put it back on the ramps, where I found out that I had not put the filter on correctly. The reason? The old Mountaineer had a screw-on filter, whereas the Saturn has an element filter that’s sealed with a rubber ring which I had not properly put on. I replaced it, added a little more oil to cover the loss, and the car now purrs like a cat. There’s still a huge stain on my parents’ driveway thanks to me. I marked my territory well.
I dropped a small-block Chevy into my ’56 to replace the old six. It would NOT run right.
It helps when you take the kink out of the fuel line you put in it to keep gas from spilling everywhere when pulling the motor.
I got my first Maverick, for free, because the firing order was screwed up. Was wired correctly, but for the wrong dist rotation. Fixed it, the 170 purred. Funny part? was wired for a CCW rotation, which Ford V8’s have. The Falcon six goes CW. On the Chev small block, very easy to get 5 & 7 plug wires crossed. Especially on boats, where the plugs range from hard to see, to impossible to see, under the exhaust manifolds. Went on many service calls for this, usually after the DIY owner did his own tune-up. And I charged buckets for it, and they happily paid. 🙂
At least a few times a year, I try to start the car when it is already running.
I’ve done that about as often as locking my self out! ?
I am not much of a mechanic, but I was occasionally intrepid during my younger years. If I recall correctly, I had changed out the battery cables on my 1972 Pontiac Grandville. I must have got something right, because I drove the car to a college party, and parked on open land behind a house. The car would not start, and a friend took me home and brought me back in daylight. I checked the cables, and could not get the car going.
After a tow, it turns out the cable connection at the starter was turned in such a way that is was grounded against another metal part. Our longtime family mechanic gave me a look and announced to his shop partners that Dave had been messing again. Not one of my more manly moments.
In modern times, involving boats, my family and another family drove our respective boats to a marina for dinner. I managed to somehow knock the safety kill switch below the throttle to STOP while exiting the boat.
When I had a no start after dinner, my friend and I spent 20 minutes looking at the engine, poking at it, and saying various manly things like I think there is a mechanic a few miles upriver. Eventually, my wife spotted the kill switch and flipped it to RUN. It did, in fact, RUN after that.
Oh yes, the safety lanyard kill switch. Has tripped up many a boat owner, and even professional marine mechanics like myself. I have been fooled by bad switches, even in the “on” position that were so corroded they could not complete the circuit. Learned quickly to bypass that, with a jumper wire, in a cranks but no start situation.
? What did you do with the OHC i6 engine ? .
-Nate
Scrapped it, alas, although I saved the valve cover, which now hangs in my shop.
Locked myself out of my Grand Marquis. I had the ignition key and the key fob but no door key. I can unlock the car with the fob or the key pad on the door. I was working under the dash so I pulled the fuse for the interior lights. I took a break and drove to Taco Bell. I locked the door with the power lock switch.
When I tried to unlock, both the fob and key pad did not work. Their power came from the interios light fuse and not the power door lock fuse. And my cell phone was also locked in the car.
Well at least I had something to eat while waiting for the auto club.
How about reversing into your garage door from inside? Not me I hasten to add, but my father.
Twin garage, with a two element sliding door. Open right hand door, get into left hand car and reverse a Hillman Hunter into the garage door from inside. Much adolescent mirth ensued!
Once, I parked my 79 Caprice, applied the parking brakes, and heard a strange noise from the rear.
Since my rear brakes were a bit worn out, I left the engine running and got out to check where that noise was coming out.
Yup, it was the rear brakes. So I lied down under the bumper to look if there was something wrong, checking each rear wheel lying on the floor under the rear overhang.
Couldn’t find anything. I came back inside and noticed I had left the car in Reverse. With the engine running… That noise was torque struggling against the parking brake.
I learnt that day that there’s truly a god for idiots.
Another time, with my 75 Rekord I locked the one and only car key I had in the trunk.
Had to remove the rear seat with my bare hands and a knife since my tools were also in the trunk.
Fun time.
I was having the “no notifications” problem but it’s been resolved for probably a week now.
As to a belated QOTD response, probably my most embarrassing would be the first time I endeavored to do an oil change on my ’82 Malibu. I had purchased a pair of ramps to get the front in the air to do the job. Lined them up carefully, and then rolled slowly up onto the ramps. They had a bit of a lip where the angled surface changed to the flat part the wheels were to rest on. I met resistance there and my roll stopped. Gave it a bit of gas, nothing. Gave it a bit more gas, success! Over the lip. Also, over the lip on the other side of the ramp as I didn’t hit the brake immediately. The front wheels were still slightly in the air and the metal ramps were wedged securely under the frame rails.
I ended up having to use the spare tire jack to raise each front corner high enough to drag the ramps out from underneath. My roommates at the time had a good laugh at that one once they figured out what I was doing.