My first D'OH!!
moment working on a car was my first time working on one. I was in 7th grade and my brother was in 5th. My Dad brought home new plug wires for his '75 Pontiac Ventura and my brother and I were going to help him change them. He opened the hood, then went in the house for something. My brother and I decided to get started, so we pulled all the old wires off the distributor, knowing nothing about firing order. My Dad came out and, since he didn't have a manual, you can imagine he was pretty
. I don't recall how it got fixed - if he called someone to come over and help or what. That was a great car - I learned to drive in it, got my first warning in it, got...no, that didn't happen.
Managed to mess up on my first repair project on my own first car, a '75 Civic CVCC. I decided it also needed a tune-up, which in that car involved changing points. Well, I misunderstood the instructions in the Chiltons manual I was using and tried to take the base plate out too - but not without dropping one of the tiny little screws down into the bowels of the distributor, where I couldn't fish it out. Fortunately, we lived at the top of a hill and there was a service station that still had a garage at the bottom, so my brother and I rolled the car down the hill and pushed it into the service station.
This car was also somewhat unique for a four-banger in that the intake and exhaust ports were on the same side of the head, with the intake manifold above the exhaust manifold and the whole shebang bolted together by four long bolts. The exhaust manifold on the '75 CVCC was different from the later models in that it had internal baffling, which had a tendency to collapse over time, particularly if the engine wasn't kept in perfect tune, which mine wasn't. (I was a poor college kid at the time and made the mistake of driving to Vegas on the hottest day of the year, an inch from overheating all the way, which warped that poor aluminum head. I drove it that way for a couple of years because I couldn't afford to fix it.) Anyway, shortly after I bought the car, the manifold baffling fell apart and the manifold needed to be replaced. My dad took me to the dealership and helped pay for it, then showed me the receipt where the new factory manifold cost over $300 - in 1984.
A couple of years later, the manifold baffling fell apart again. As the aforementioned poor college kid, I wasn't ever going to pay that much again to replace a manifold, so I went to the local dismantler and paid $35 for a used manifold. To get to the manifold, I had to remove the carb, then the intake manifold and finally the exhaust manifold. Only...the aforementioned bolts that fastened the manifolds together were frozen - and when I put my socket to it, it stripped the corners. Drenched them in WD-40 - still stuck.
I tried a wrench, vise-grips, channel locks...wouldn't budge.
I rented a drill and tried to drill the bolt head to use an extractor
- no luck. Finally, I called the mechanic I went to for things that were beyond my scope and he said "Did you try a six-point socket?" A what?
Bought some six-point sockets, put the 12 mm on...and away it went.
Car was down for two days. Later, I got so I could do the entire job in six hours, including going to the local pick-a-part to pull one off a wreck. I learned a lot from that car, especially after I got a copy of "How to Keep Your Honda Alive: A Step-by-Step Manual for the Compleat Idiot" as a gift; best manual for the beginning mechanic I've ever seen.
Oh, but this is about E-bodies. Biggest blunder I ever made - taking this one apart, because I don't have the money to pay someone to do it right or the skills to do it myself and can't make myself put it back together wrong.
