The Poor Worksmanship Thread

[Prowler Orange Challenger]

Okay, so I figure I would start a thread and see what you folks have found done poorly on your cars while you or the shop was doing work on them. I'll post mine in a bit. Just curious to hear from others first.

[ROMI]

ok.... my car runs straight as an arrow down the road, no pull either to the right or to the left, but if I make a right turn I have to make it really wide because some clown (when it was with the previous owner) gave it a front end alignment with the wheel turned 180.  Sometimes it's not funny.

[moparclown]

well i'll start, my challenger had a roof done by some idiot years ago this moran cut the roof off with a torch(looks like they used a rosebud tip)then brazed another roof on.they never even reattached the inner supports.but i will fix this mess the right way.

[MEK-Dangerfield]

How many times have you been towed for the same problem??? 

  Low fuel pressure. New pump. New filter. Still towed home.  New sending unit, new filter sock on the sending unit, still towed home.  Finally when all else failed, I replaced the solid fuel line to find it was spliced together at one time with a rubber hose. Yep, after a few decades, the hose had a nice little crack on top of it to allow air into my fuel system. Replaced solid fuel line, still had fuel pressure problems!!!  The final piece of the puzzle was that the pushrod in my block had worn down 1/4 of an inch, and wasn't pushing hard enough on the fuel pump lever. I won't dare tell you how long it took to figure this out.     

 Part two: Tail lights work. Brake lights work. All good so far.  Turn on the right turn signal, and hit the brake, the right light flashes, and the left light is solid. Still good.  Turn on the left turn signal, and hit the brakes...      left light solid, right light out totally!!!  This baby took me a couple of years to figure out.  I was told to replace the turn signal switch, but that only made me madder when that didn't fix the problem.  I cleaned up all grounds around both the rear and front light assemblys. No change.  I hard wired the rear tail light assemblys to ground, still no change.    What to do???  It was only when I finally decided to replace the wiring harness for the tail lights, that it all came to light. Some genious had hard wired the brake light into the left turn signal wire. I guess the turn signal switch really was bad, and he tried to get creative instead of doing the right thing? 

 Part three: Dash lights on at all times???  Great idea, isn't it?      Needless to say, my battery didn't think so.   


  Mike

[R/T]

 I bought my car partially done by the previous owner but here is the worst problem that he did. I think it would have been easier to just bought new leaf springs.

[bentpshrods]

When the previous owner put headers on the 340 he didnt bother to get the 90* oil filter adapter to clear the headers. Instead he threaded 3/4" copper tubing into the block and ran it up to the front of the engine bay beside the windshield washer bottle and hung a remote filter on the fender well. Where the bend in the tubeing went forward was done by hand and it was kinked almost in half. Dont know how long he drove it like this but luckily the engine wasnt hurt.   

[Carlwalski]

Not me but anything from.......HLPAG 

[Prowler Orange Challenger]

HPLAG   Anyways, good replies so far. Oh yeah I love those coil springs, they're just down right sexy but, not as sexy as the hack job roof. 

[moper]

Well, I do a lot of side work on all types of Mopars. On Ebodies...: all kinds of wiring issues, all directly attributed to previous "skilled professional" repairs. Shoddy body work..Pop rivets, sheet metal screws, brazing, socks (yeah, and underwear too..lol) as "filler spacers", filler thicker than the sole of my shoes, silicone instead of metal to solve windshield/glass leaks, no attachment at all for patches (just laid filler over them) undercoating to hide all KINDS of mess ups, brand new carpet with the correct backing laid over big holes in floors, so the exh catches the carpet on fire (on my own car..I saw the warm glo as I was driving a particularly dark section of country road...) Engines assembled with wrong parts, parts missing, not tuned, not safe, rubber hose used for steel lines, 4sp humps not permanently attached to floors in cheap conversions, no neutral safety switches or back up lights form same deal, no bushings in bellcranks for 4sp (Z bar), battery in trunk..just sitting on the floor, with cables on it. No hold down. fuel pumps(electric) mounted anywhere and everywhere. Suspension parts installed wrong. Brakes not installed the way the factory did. Most is just a variation of the same theme..Either it was "done to sell" or was done with no regard for safety and performance, never mind the "right or wrong" way. Many of these are found on the same cars, and some from a very well known (and liked) local collector/flipper. Gotta love what $$ signs do to some people.

[heminut]

Took my Cuda to a body and paint guy that really used to be good, and was considered an expert in candies in the area. He darn near died from peritonitis several years ago, and unbeknownst to me he got lazy and sloppy after that. Long story short, after the first paint job I took it back and made him do it over and still ended up with a 20/20 paint job (looks good from 20 feet away going by at 20 mph). From start to finish it took just over a year!

[360 'CUDA]

I do still have that '74 Yellow 'CUDA that is 3 cars welded together.  Front half is yellow, middle is red and the rear tail is rust colored if you know what I mean.

It's bad but no where near the roof job or coil springs earlier in this thread

Those rock!!!   

[miketyler]

Ok, my turn - Shortly after I bought my car (internet sale, no prebuy inspect) I was surprised to find water leaking in the front floorboards after a rain. Upon further inspection I discovered rust holes along the cowl section mostly on the drivers side. Leeroy - (I want to call him Leeroy I dont know why) had worked on this and had taken "Great Stuff" insulative spray foam and shot that down in the areas where the holes were. You could see it under the dash around the brake pedal support where it met the firewall.

Next, Leeroy apparently had an epiphany; he realized that if enough water was absorbed by the foam that the area might continue to leak. Still having some fiberglass resin from the last boat he worked on (no leftover cloth, just resin) he decided he should pour this over the foam for a high tech "composite" repair. He poured so much down the cowl it ran down the center firewall vent hole, inside the floorboard, behind the power brake booster, and down the door jamb fender baffle. Southern ingenuity at its finest.   

Other tidbits were slots cut in the attach bolts for the dimmer switch that would allow a slot screwdriver to be used for removal and installaton. Very nice.   

EDIT: No story is adequately portrayed without illustration, so in the interest of serving the  crowd, I submit these to you now. If you look closely you can see the trails the fiberglass resin left as it ran down the firewall.

 

[ROMI]

WAIT A MINUTE PROWLER.... where's yours ?

[Oldschool]

Southern ingenuity at its finest.   

Easy Mike......................  Not all of us Southern boys would do such shoddy work.  There are some of us that would have done it right.................and used J-B Weld instead!             

[ShelbyDogg]

1. My Challenger.  Bought in 1980, 4 speed 383 car, someone installed and automatic tranny, with a B/M auto shifter. The torsion bars were swapped side to side, causing very poor adjustment. Had front Drum 11x3" brakes that someone put all hardware from the left side on the right and vice versa.  That meant that everytime I applied the brakes in reverse, the adjusters would "LOOSEN" instead of tighten. Made a very interesting trip driving to Chicago in a snow storm. Guy had a "chronometer" digital clock, that I've seen in later model Mopars, cut into the center of the Chal dash pad.  The car came with a rear wing off of a GTO Judge.

2. My Challenger 440. Bought in '76, Automatic column shift.  Some idiot decided to make it a 4-speed with a front mounted b-body tranny, clutch pedal hanging from a bolt, Z bar had a rectangular plate with the ball mount screwed into it with itself bolted to the frame rail.  No bushings at all in the z-bar. Since the shifter came out under the dash, they cut the handle off of a hurst ball shifter and welded it back on at an angle to point the ball rearward. drove the car 2 weeks, a bearing started howling, 2 minutes later the internal engine mist blows up and fills the interior with smoke.  I had an engine rebuilder get me a JASPER rebuilt engine. Complete rebuild $1000 exchanged. Put it in and had a bad vibration.  The idiots at Jasper gave me 6pack rods with a zero balance balancer and didn't know to tell me that I needed an offset balance flywheel. I spent 5 years thinking that I had a cast crank.  I later put that engine in another CHAL with a 727, It vibrated so much that it broke the tailshaft off at the shaft's rear bearing.
Had the engine rebalanced years later with mallory metal and have it in my basement to this day as a spare.
Rob