Too many e-bodies "doh" moments to choose from for me to list here right now...so I will instead dig back into my files to a learning experience.
My father had a 56 Mercury 4 door....sweet old car...back in the 80s. He had rebuilt the brake master cylinder and apparently something wasn't back together quite right..... Now, our house sat at the top of a hill...the garage was in the back, facing the hill, which extended down a good 200 yards...straight down, with other houses right at the bottom Behind our house and integral garage was a concrete pad about 1.5 car lengths deep....Just enough to back the car out of the garage and then proceed up the driveway, to the side of the house. The edge of the pad dropped to the hillside downward. Straight down.
Well, we reinstalled the master cylinder and dad proceeded to jump in and back the car up a bit......the master cylinder failed and the heavy car rolled toward the back of the concrete pad and over it....the middle of the car's frame grounded itself on the edge of the pad and the car sat there dangling its rear half over this 30 degree sloped hill.
Me and my brother decided that we would help by running to the back of the car and try to hold it from going down over the hill. Did I mention that I was about 14 and my brother about 12?
As we stood there trying to brace this huge car from rolling over to total disaster, we got a real good view of the undercarriage of the car....LOL
Mom ran out and tried to help too, throwing herself at the rear corner of the car.....yellin at us kids to get out of there....
When we all realized that we had put ourselves in harm's way and that a 14 year old, 12 year old and 40 year old lady aint gonna stop a 2 ton+ car from rolling backwards over a hill, my brother and I ran and got a neighbor who had chains and he used our Plymouth Trailduster to drag the car back onto the pad.
Poor Dad sat in the car the whole time holding what was left of the brakes on....although I really do think that
the only thing that stopped the car was good old fashioned friction, of the frame resting on the pad's edge.....
So, plenty of Homer moments that day.......first, leave master cylinder rebuilds to the pros. second, have some sort of barrier when the concrete pad behind the garage faces a 200 yard, 30 degree downhill, third use chocks placed a few feet behind the wheels when testing brakes on a car parked at the top of a 200 yeard, 30 degree downhill, and finally, realize that a couple of kids are not going to stop a 4,000 lb behemoth from rolling over a hill....
