Fatal Mistakes....

[JODY]

Well, I have a few.

#1. I was trying to restab the distributor after changing the intake and it wouldn't go in all the way. Looked down the hole to see the towel I had placed in there to keep the trash out was still there. Being the ambicious and very unexperienced mechanic at the time, I "fished" the full size towel out of that hole. It took about 1 hour and about 3000 twists!

#2. Forgot to put in the rod between the distributor and oil pump. Good thing I figured it out before I test fired the engine. All the guys had a good laugh because they thought I was gonna have to pull the motor. I just dropped the pan after I pulled the steering linkage out of the way.

#3. Rebuilt same motor after a few ring lands lifted later on. Didn't check timing after the distributor freaked out and I just got it running about where it "sounded" like it did before the freak out. Again, same guys giving me hell cause I was gonna have to pull the engine... HA I'll show them. I did a rebuild with the engine still sitting on the motor mounts. hahaha Sure is hard getting everything clean when the block is still in the car. It did run great after that though. Oh yeah, when I did check the timing before pulling the engine down it was at 64 degrees. I didn't know a small block could run that good with that much timing and no pinging or clatter to be heard.

Jody

[stock z/28]

This isn't fatal but I think its funny.

I rebuilt a 305 for a shop that removed it for a customer. They reinstalled it, and all was well. About 2 weeks later the owner of the pick up that was involved called and said it had started knocking at about 40 mph and got worse the faster he went. No knocks slower than that, I guessed spark knock.

He asked me if I would go for a ride, and I was happy too. He was driving, and sure enough at 40 it started rattling and got worse. The happy part for me was the noise was caused by his seat belt that was hanging out the drivers door.

He was embarrased but I was releived. All was forgiven and he is a great customer.

Jeff

[jackdaniels]

put rear camshft plug in to far. It holds the cam ahead and screws up the mesh on the dist gear plus it eat the casm plug at the back puttiing all that into the engine.

Isnt something to avoid this, i think i read something in summit raging about avoiding this big problem...

[jackdaniels]

Ill be honest here, I have never ever, built or habe been close to even taken heads off an engine,..
Now I loooove engines and everything that has to do with them..
Race cars, I think every night I dream about those!!
Im currently installing roller rockers on a 289 sbf, and Im so trying to know everything about installing, well for you guys is a simple switch, but i want to do it very good. Trust me I dont want to kill my engine, and definetly not be one of this stories,,,
but you know, we all start somewhere and I know ill make mistakes, and expensive ones of course (hope not ), but its a great forum, i read, and read, and read, and sometimes ask dumb questions..
Hey we all need to learn,,
Great forum and great thread,
Lets all learn !!

[PackardV8]

Bonneville competitor making his first run of the year, was raving on the radio to his friends and crew about how those modifications over the winter had worked wonders "winds up so fast, it feels like its got another 200 horsepower." Then before the 2-mile-marker, he noticed the engine was red-lined in top gear. He had installed his quick-change gears upside down.

thnx, jv.

[jackdaniels]

I had a 1990 chevy caprice, 305 engine,
how do you call the fuel sistem that has like a carburator, but with 2 injectors?
So it ran out of gas once, And i remembered that once my brother ran out of gas, he put gas on the tank and some on the carburator to star up the car again...
So I said ill do the same thing, went to the gas station accross the street and got some gas.
I put some on the gas tank and opened the hood and put some, you know where, the thing is that i forgot how much... Half a litter is ok???
went back inside and turned the key, guess what?? it did worked
but i saw a BIG flame on my windshield...
I went back to the front and everithing was on fire, I stood freezed, the only thing i coud think of was taking off my shirt and started swingin at the fire,, it didnt turned off, so i ran into a store runing like crazy half naked and without saying anything grabbed the extiguisher and went back at the car, and sprayed.....
Burned everythin burnable on the engine compartment, burned a very nice shirt, and the guy on the store told me,, hey is $50.00 for the refill on the stijguisher. I was whiter than a ghost
hey i was like 17..

[MisturG]

Installed a clutch disk backwards. But i still got the car on the trailer...took about 5000rpm in first gear.

Trouble shooting a "miss" in the rain on a 1974 bronco. I held up the "steel" hood with one hand and felt around the distributer and coil with the other. It happened to be running and Ohhh the coil was cracked and arcing to any gound it could find......

Friend left a rag under the intake. Ran like crap.

[melsie68]

Not to do with an engine directly...
Wanted to pull the gas tank out of my '68 Camaro when I began a backhalf project. Unfortunately the tank was half full of Sunoco 110 which is now about $6.00/gal and my dad wanted it for his car. I said great I will pump it out and this will make handling the tank much easier too. I took from work a small water pump that in order to use you simply hook a hose to the pickup end and another hose to the discharge end. You just plug it in and go- right? I hooked up all the hoses, one from the tank and one into a gas can. I plugged it in and flipped it on and it when just fine and started leaking a little. I said oh crap and unplugged it. I tightened the hoses and wiped up the fuel which had spilled on the floor. Then I threw the rags down next to the gas can. I walked back over to the wall in the garage and plugged it back in. Just as soon as I plugged it in I heard a POOF! Yeah so DC current makes a spark when you plug something in or flip on a switch in a motor like that. The spark ignited the fuel which the pump was now filled with. The pump and hoses were on fire as well as the rag, the gas can and all the gas spilled on the floor. I began kicking everything away from the garage and house meanwhile flaming gasoline was spilling out all around me, my car and all over the driveway. After melting all the stuff, nearly burning down my house, my car and not to mention catching myself on fire I finally put all the big and little fires out. I picked up the pump and looked it over, because it belonged to my place of employment. It wasn't worth taking back. At any rate, as I looked it over I could barely make out a warning label which said something on the order of: WARNING! NEVER USE WITH GASOLINE OR FLAMMABLE/COMBUSTIBLE LIQUIDS! Imagine my surprise. I wasn't thinking too hard that day apparently...

[SilverFox]

Built a mild 302 once for a guy to go in his 36 Ford....He picks it up one Friday and I gave him a few plugs and nipples so he could put them in the intake manifold once he got the engine in the car and figured out where he needed vacuum and water fittings in the intake......Well Monday morning I arrive at the shop to find his rantings on the answering machine talking about how my motor was junk.....it ran for a minute then locked up. So I call the dude and tell him to trailer the car to me and I'd check it out......Come to find out he had hooked one heater hose to water and the other hose to VACUUM on the intake!!!!!!

After this dude paid me to fix this screw up, I showed him where to hook the water and vacuum hoses....he leaves with the engine again on a Friday....

Monday morning again and the machine is full of his rantings about a rear main seal leak......Now I'm no pro builder as far as being able to call a cam grinder and rattle off some specs to get the power I want and where I want it, nor do I do my own machine work, HOWEVER I am darn good at assembly and doubted a rear seal leak.....I figure everyone makes mistakes though so I tell him get it to me and I'll look at it.....Well sure enough it has a leak so I tell the dude I'll make it good......

So I get one of my young apprentices to pull the motor and later on he comes to get me to look at something......The dude had apparently lost a flywheel bolt and instead of finding one he just LEFT IT OUT.....Oil was pouring out of this empty bolt hole! BOY was the dude pissed when I had to call him and tell him what we found and that he owed us $$$$ for pulling the engine since it wasn't our screw up!!!!

[dwilliams]

A couple of times I've run into problems with AFB carburetors on Edelbrock intakes. For a while they just had a 1/4" skeleton outline around the bores on some of their intakes, and the air passages in the carb baseplate hung off into empty air.

327 and early 350 Chevy oil pans on 383s and 400s. Mr. Connecting Rod introduces itself to Mr. Oil Pan. Of course, the rods are never in a negative-clearance region when I drop the pan on to check the pickup tube height...

Rocker arm clearance to the intake side of the valve cover on small block Fords. I'd clayed the rockers to make sure they weren't hitting the top of the cover, and indeed they weren't... but the rockers were hitting the side of the cover, not the top.

I had a 383 Chevy balance job come back. I weighed everything, compared it to my notes, spun it up on the machine, and yep, the rear is bouncy. I took a good look at the flexplate - which I should have done before I did anything else - and the bolt marks and paint (not to mention the raised lip around the pilot hole) showed the customer had installed it backwards. Run it that way most of a season, too.

Fontana Cleveland block. There are lots of gotchas with those, but I almost missed one. The Fontana's timing chest is absolutely flat, while a real Cleveland is recessed slightly from the retainer plate. There was .001-.0015" clearance between the front of the block and the Rollmaster timing set I'd installed. I disassembled it and cut some clearance with the die grinder. I guess the previous timing chain was narrower.

Sprocket alignment. I learned that one in the days of cutting down 400 cranks for Windsor blocks. I've since run into alignment problems with aftermarket "Cleveland" and "Windsor" cranks... and you need to check the thrust main width *before* you do anything else!

The worst thing I ever opened up was a "race car motor" with a "thrown rod." It was a 350 Chevy with aluminum rods. The cap and bolt bolts of one of the rods was laying in the pan; the shank had gotten tangled up with the counterweights and camshaft. It had a pair of aluminum heads; I don't think I ever looked at them. But I tore the short block all the way down, just out of amazement. Some of the bolts were finger tight. Others were way tight or stripped. Blobs of gummy blue bathtub caulk were everywhere. The rotating assembly had been balanced... many times. Some pistons were done with a ball end mill, some were drilled, some had had the skirts shortened. There were four matchine pistons, and the other four were the same TRW part number, but with different amounts of wear. All had big dents where shrapnel had been embedded in the tops and skirts. The rods had big divots and dings in the sides. It looked like someone had built a motor out of the scrap metal pile.

The capper, though... the pistons had snap ring grooves, but they had used ordinary odd-length pins instead of the specific-length pins. So some pins rattled around between the snap rings, some had one ring on one side and two on the other, one on each side... and several had only one snap ring, and big wads of blue bathtub caulk on the other!

The scary part is, the bathtub caulk actually seemed to be working; the engine tied because the "engine builder" had neglected to tighten one of the rod caps. Well, that's what failed first, anyway...

I called the guy and told him to come get his stuff. He was *very* angry; I was an incompetent jerk, he was going to take it to someone who knew what he was doing. I think he was mostly angry because I'd taken it apart. Uh, yeah. I haven't quite mastered "laparoscopic rebuild" even yet. In retrospect, I should have had a ticket made up with "disassembly and inspection" on it.

It was a good example of, "there are some jobs you don't need."

[nipsy_5.0]

My first engine rebuild SBC put the rods in backwards, wondering why the engine wouldn't turn over. I was 18 at the time, now I know better to check the chamfered side of the rods and match the bearings. Aaah youth.

Gil

[Masher Manufacturing]

How to blow up a new engine.

Watch the first few minutes and the last min for the full effect.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN16PHJvfII

The guy that built the above motor.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cysbKf1k ... annel_page

[jason snyder]

no joke , a guy said he was having troouble seating his rings !!!!!! sooo, he said he poured some comet in the oil and complety destroyed everything !!! HE SAID A GUY at kragen auto gave him the bright idea. needless to say i think he stays away from kragen now .

[bobbybigblock]

At 16 I threw together my first "rebuilt 350" and was so proud of how fast I did it. I threw the carb I "knew" was good on without the thought that it had sat in the shed for a few months. Filled both bowls for a good quick startup ran it a few minutes then had to STAB the gas Just Once. It wound up high and STAYED there and instead of shutting off the key I ran out under the hood to pull back on the throttle cable and It was too late by the time I got her under control!! Taking it back out wasn't nearly as urgent as putting it in!

[mike ramirez racing]

when I was 16 I put a V8 in my 64 nova and used a moroso pan. I forgot to check the oil pan drain plug and took the car on a drive. when I got home I noticed a trail of oil following me straight up my driveway!!!

Then I put a motor together for my 70 nova, just a bunch of junk laying around. I had installed too short pushrods and the car ran like shit!