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Thu Jun 11, 2009 9:55 pm

Somehow forgot to finish tightening a spark plug and it popped out of the cylinder on the freeway

Fri Jun 12, 2009 7:47 am

RIOMX wrote:

Holy crap! Are you really the 26th owner of your vehicle?

Your question made my look this up on my V5C document and I find I am mistaken. There were 20 owners prior to the guy I bought it from, so I am only the 22nd owner.

I plan to look them all up one day.

Max

Mon Jun 29, 2009 8:46 pm

So after getting my bus in good running order i decide to take it on its first real test drive to a show about two hours away. It makes it there perfect so i was really happy. Being 16 and getting into the volkswagen scene i was like a young boy at a gentlemans club seeing so many volkswagens at once. So on the way home i see another bay wayyyy ahead of me on the highway and i wanted to catch up to it. So i pushed my bay away from my 55 mph crusing speed and was doing about 70 mph trying to catch up and soon enough i started slowing down. I was on a small hill but i definitly should have been slowing down that much. The engine started smoking and i ended up puttering up a tiny hill in second gear doing about 10 mph on the highway with cars flying by at 70 with my flashers on and smoke pouring out the back. So when i get a chance to pull over i check my oil and i barely had a drop. Like a dumbass i had forgot to check my oil before a long trip. Luck for me there was a walmart just about a mile away and after barely making it there i bought a couple quarts of oil and its ran like a top ever sinse. I now know to always check my oil, and carry a spare quart with me.

Tue Jun 30, 2009 12:11 am

d'oh kick his ass seabass!

Sun Jul 12, 2009 3:01 pm

So pulling the generator with the engine in was not the funnest job, but I did it and got excited when my new rebuild came. Good thing I marked all those shims and washers, cause a week had passed. Wonder why those thru bolts are so long? I'll just cut em back a bit. Put the generator in, carb, cables to figure out that it was in backwards. Good thing I cut those bolts off so they would not hit the pulley, cause the extra length holds a fan tin in place......

Sun Jul 19, 2009 12:27 pm

I've done so many stupid things that they'd take up a forum of its own, but here's a recent one.

I got a new compression tester from Harbor Freight. After testing cylinder #1, I unscrewed the tester from the head but didn't realize that I hadn't gotten the whole thing out, but left the adapter in the head. The spark plug screwed into the adapter just fine, and I didn't notice two things: not only was the tester hose about an inch and a half shorter, but the spark plug was out the same distance farther from the head than it was before.

So I did the other three cylinders using the shortened tester, finished the tune-up, and headed out for Buses By the Bridge. I actually was able to get about twenty miles down the road before the combustion in the cylinder burned a hole in the adapter about the size of a dime. It felt and sounded like a burned valve, so I limped back home on three cylinders and took my other ride (not a VW) to BBB.

The next weekend, I took out the engine and found the adapter. At first, I didn't recognize it for what it was, and thought it was some sort of "spark plug extender" that the PO had put it in for some arcane reason. It was only when I posted the pictures on another forum that somebody identified it. The boys at Kombi Haus got a real laugh out of that episode. (A few months later, one of the mechanics told me that he just found the same thing in a bug that somebody brought in. That made me feel a little better -- but not much.)

I still keep the "spark plug extender" in my glove box and take it out and meditate on it when I need a humility fix.

Sun Jul 19, 2009 6:44 pm

where to start

the beginning =)
i have tried starting my baja with a wrench still on the alternator it ended up in the middle of the street in front of the neighbors

differnt baja superbeetle first mistake
did you know that in a superbeetle if you drill a hole thew the fire wall to install a CB that you can drill in to the fuel tank =)

My personal fav is droping the nut down the intake of corse it have to be the one with the value open haqd to take to hole head off

the bus (other than buying it been 3 year and still have not been able to drive it.) with engine number two tring to get it to run cool i forgot to take the thing off that holed the flywheel in play when you tighten the bolts down. no matter how many hours you try to install it just want go in with that there =)[/list]

Wed Jul 22, 2009 5:12 pm

this is a little one but I laugh at my self every time.
every single time I have changed spark plugs I alway for get to pull the little conector where the plug wire attaches. this last time I did it three times in a row. I got the last one in whith out forgetting.

once on an hour long drive... I crested a long hill and all of a sudden my motor reved up, I quickly let off the gas and all seemed well so I stuck it back in forth and let out the cluch and nothing happened I gave it some gas and the engine revved. I'm now coasting down the hill and can rev in every gear. so I pull it over. I'm worried to the point I feel queasy. I'm think for a minute about the possibilitys my conclusion was that something in the trans must have broke. I look every thing over and all seems fine on the out side it's got to be the trans. so I walk to a store after a hour in a half trying to hitch a lift back home with no luck. so I call a friend to come get me and push the van down to the store where I aranged to park it far a day.
my friend arives and we push the buss into the store lot and I look everything over again to try to see something wrong. driverside cv was hanging down from the trans now and it was not before. shewww!
I was relived and fixed it right there in about a half hour. I spent three hours thinking I had to replace my tranny. might not seem like a big deal now but that was an awfull three hours. .
I did end up having to get a new trans three months later. but it wasn't as hard as I thought it would be

Fri Jul 24, 2009 1:05 pm

Stupidest thing I did was buy my first bus, paid WAY too much money for a piece of sh!t that had a seized piston, inches of bondo, a screwed up poptop and a spare tire that was for a full size pickup. She's still sitting in my garage full of the engine that I tore apart. I ended up spending my rebuild money on my current 71 (the good bus) and now I have to hear it from my wife everytime she goes into the garage....

Fri Jul 24, 2009 1:57 pm

Senk wrote: Stupidest thing I did was buy my first bus, paid WAY too much money for a piece of sh!t that had a seized piston, inches of bondo, a screwed up poptop and a spare tire that was for a full size pickup. She's still sitting in my garage full of the engine that I tore apart. I ended up spending my rebuild money on my current 71 (the good bus) and now I have to hear it from my wife everytime she goes into the garage....

loose the wife the bus will br cheaper in the long run!! lol, i think i did the same thign, i could have bought my bus for 750 and i paid like 1200 for it ....story of life...if we only knew then what we know now!

Fri Jul 24, 2009 4:04 pm

Strangely, I find myself looking forward to doing something stupid so I can contribute to this thread. :?

Sat Jul 25, 2009 1:23 pm

striping a perfectly good westfalia at a junk yard to make a westfakia, I probably could have spent less buying it.

Sat Jul 25, 2009 1:41 pm

Driving on mis-matched tires.

I had two 195/75R14s and two 185R14s. I put the 185s on the back because they were larger in diameter, but what I failed to notice is that they were also more flexible than the front tires. Every time I would make a steering correction on the highway the rear tires would flex and the bus would overshoot straight ahead and head a couple of degrees the other way. This made a 400 mile road trip rather exhausting!

Once I figured out what was going on I switched the stiffer tires to the rear axle and things were much more stable!

Sat Jul 25, 2009 7:49 pm

Got three tickets in my Bus within a week of owning it:

1) No taillights (dur...still seemed like a good idea to drive it at night for SOME reason)

2) Blocking traffic (I was trying to push it out of 6 inches of snow back into the road after getting it stuck in a parking lot driveway...and I didn't have reverse so I couldn't back it out :lol: )

Those two were actually the same night...by the same cop! He got so pissed to see that I was still out driving it after escorting me home and telling me to park it for not having lights. He's like "you just don't get it, dewwww yewwww?" :roll:

3) Not displaying plates (I parked it in the street because again, no reverse, and somewhere along my ticket-infested adventure from the night before, along with the wintry weather, my temp tag had blown off. So my Bus was sitting in the street with no plate. Got towed...which I discovered after returning from work, and had to go pay an impound fee and tow bill to get it back.

HOLY SHIT! STILL paying on those tickets! Didn't have the best of luck with ol' Percy at first, but things are definitely looking up these days. Getting him ready to take our first road trip, hopefully before fall hits. :D

Sat Jul 25, 2009 8:00 pm

thegoodfight7211 wrote: Got three tickets in my Bus within a week of owning it:

1) No taillights (dur...still seemed like a good idea to drive it at night for SOME reason)

2) Blocking traffic (I was trying to push it out of 6 inches of snow back into the road after getting it stuck in a parking lot driveway...and I didn't have reverse so I couldn't back it out :lol: )

Those two were actually the same night...by the same cop! He got so pissed to see that I was still out driving it after escorting me home and telling me to park it for not having lights. He's like "you just don't get it, dewwww yewwww?" :roll:

that made me laughed very hard.

Sun Jul 26, 2009 4:43 pm

I once paid a guy $150 to adust the rear torsion bars on my bus to raise it a couple of inches, because I thought it was sagging. It turns out that it is supposed to look like that. I paid the same guy $175 to put it back like it was because the rear end jumped if I ran over a thin dime.

Sun Jul 26, 2009 6:31 pm

grapedaddy wrote: I once paid a guy $150 to adust the rear torsion bars on my bus to raise it a couple of inches, because I thought it was sagging. It turns out that it is supposed to look like that. I paid the same guy $175 to put it back like it was because the rear end jumped if I ran over a thin dime.
hmm its the fat dimes you gotta look out for

Sun Jul 26, 2009 11:16 pm

nathansnathan wrote: Maybe my best ever was not tightening the bolts for one of my cv joints on the tranny side and then driving on the thruway until it fell off, flopping around like mad at 70mph.

I had the exact same thing happen to me.

Mon Jul 27, 2009 5:08 am

Letting my sister borrow it while I replaced her cars waterpump :x
She used it to help someone move while she had it without asking me, didn't ask me why the sliding door was sticking(the bearing is broke)and popped it off the track, letting it hit the ground denting the corner of it. It's also got some nice gouges in the paint on the roof and tears in the headliner from all the crap she loaded in/on it. Been waiting three years for her to pay me the $300 I quoted her so I can get it fixed(she didn't tell me about the damage upfront/wasn't honest with me)+ the $40 worth of gas I had to put back in it :x :x :x :roll:

She did more damage to it in a couple days then I've done to it in thirteen years! Oh yeah, except that first time I washed it when I was 18, tried to slink my way onto the roof to wash it, whoops, lol...friggin' tin can, lol.

Oh yeah, and there was that time me and my friend were on the freeway and the motor started knocking, thought it was just a valve lifter out of spec, but turned out to be a con-rod nut coming loose. The rod punched a hole in my 10,000 mile motor I rebuilt from scratch in my parents garage. Friends make you do dumb shit, lol. All I had to do was tighten that nut!

Mon Jul 27, 2009 9:56 am

I once paid some shadetree mechanic $300 to do a patch-up weld job on my Swiss cheese-looking axle beam...turns out a couple weeks later a dude offered me a rust-free beam for $250. Awesome.