|
|
|
Fiesta i had once bust a brake hose while slamming on to avoid a minibus that was all over the road, which ment i only really had preasure in o/s front caliper and n/s rear drum, so car was pulling HARD when it went. Almost took me though the barrier that did Sierra i thought was onfire once, it was just some redex i'd spilt burning off on the exhaust. My mate put a Scorpio 24v engine and auto box into a mk1 Sierra... on first roadtest the throttle stuck wide open when booting it! I wasnt in the car at the time, i was following, i watched it f**k off into the distance FAST still going up through the gears! lol Good job he'd just upgraded to cossie brakes allround at the same time, lets just say they bedded in pretty fast that day i tell thee!
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
sierra is a word that appears in my scary@rse moments too, i was discussing this thread with GF last night, and we came to the conclusion that;
1 sierras and ice don't mix
2the front bumper is the most important part of a sierra, in my case the only damage to the car was removed or smashed bumper in 5 incidents
3 viscous diffs are weak
|
|
Someone just shot the elephant in the room.
|
|
conrad
Posted a lot
Here to fix your cabin.......
Posts: 1,678
|
|
|
sierra is a word that appears in my scary@rse moments too, I was discussing this thread with GF last night, and we came to the conclusion that; 1 sierras and ice don't mix 2the front bumper is the most important part of a sierra, in my case the only damage to the car was removed or smashed bumper in 5 incidents 3 viscous diffs are weak the rear bumpers of sierras are great! My current sierra was hit at 35- 40mph by a small van, spun the car aroundand caused me to hit my head on the b pillar and het knocled out, but the only damage to the sierra was a minor dent below the tail light and a broken bumper. Huge amount of very tough foam stuff inside it. Three of the scariest car breaking and causing an incident are: -A front wheel parting ways with the car due to a rather bad bump and a rotten car -An engine going bang at about 80mph, overtaking on motorway with traffic, causing a very scary few moments of suddenly having no power and having to avoid being killed by two trucks. -Brakes failing while going quite quickly in a ford cargo horse lorry headed down a hill.
|
|
|
|
bortaf
Posted a lot
Posts: 4,549
|
|
|
guess I was clever enough to turn the frikken engine off In my case I was hard on the gas until I needed to brake for the corner so I didn't find out the throttle was jammed until I needed both hands on the wheel to keep the thing on the road. It was a mk4 cortina auto with a small steering wheel and a 2.1 with a lumpy cam in it so not the easiest thing to control, I would have tunred it off or knocked it into neutral had I been able to take a hand off the wheel. Turned out a screw had fallen out of the base plate of the pancake airfilter and fallen into the weber. Most of my car issues have been due to lack of maintenance or dodgy mods, hence my aversion to things like cut springs and bodged exhausts. I borrowed a fwd triumph 1300 off a mate once and was driving round the M25 when it suddenly tipped down with rain, I switched the wipers on only to discover there were none fitted on the car. :S I was thinking more of toyota owners ;D
|
|
R.I.P photobucket
|
|
|
|
|
A wheel bearing disintegrating at 70mph on the M6 just outside Kendal at midnight with no charge left in my mobile.
By rights the wheel should have come off but I had converted the front brakes of my 58 Beetle to wide 5 CSP disk conversion.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
just thought of a couple more from past cars . i used to have my grandads old mk2 escort popular . on getting it off him i fitted a 2.0 pinto and 4 speed box that had sat for an unknown time the engine ran fine and the car went well but after a few day i noticed an intermittent screeching noise from the gearbox that eventually went away so i took no notice of it as you do anyway couple of days later i was driving down the A127 just past the weir at fair old pace and the screech reappeared for about half a second followed by the gearbox seizing solid and the car skidding for what seemed to be forever nothing i could do but be a passenger till its came to a halt luckily i had just got on to a straight bit of road before it did it as the weir is on a pretty big bend. the other one was with the wife's car a few weeks ago when it decided to snap an anti roll bar mount on her way home from work and almost ran over its own front wheel luckily for her she was going slow at the time and was able to nurse the car home
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
All these stories of wheelbearing failure has prompted me to get my backside in gear and fix the grumbly one on the back end of the Equipe.
Me and my bro had a rear tie bar snap on his Mk3 Escort on the approach to a roundabout. That made the wheel ram itself backwards in the wheelarch and pitch the car to the left, forklift truck style. It was about 1am so there wasn't much traffic around. We didn't have breakdown cover, and had no tools with us. We went a walk to see if there was anything around to fix it, and found a load of that nylon stuff that's used to strap round cardboard boxes. We tied it around the hub and the tie rod mount on the chassis so that it would be under tension when moving forwards, and drove the 30-odd miles back home. Very carefully! We even managed to go wrong and do a 3 point turn without it all coming apart... ;D
|
|
|
|
|
chamba
Part of things
Posts: 199
|
|
|
My brown trouser moment was coming back from the Ace Cafe and the dynamo on my VW Splitty truck decided to stop charging. I drove back on the sidelights which was OK through town, but when I got out into the sticks with no street lighting I had to follow other people's tail lights. Down one steep twisty desent of a country road, I just had the one car to follow. I was already 5h1tting myself at this point as the truck was struggling to keep up on the bends... then the fella just boots it and I'm in total pitch darkness. My instinct was to turn the lights on which only served to finish off the last ebb of battery and I had to coast to halt. I couldn't see the verge let alone the road! I bolted out and ran up the verge, fell in a hole and my phone went flying out of my hands and shattered on the road. Somehow I managed to find the breakdown number through the mess of LCD screen. Whilst I was waiting a fella stopped and used his car as an illuminated marker (I managed to stop on a blind bend ). Top fella, he waited with me until the breakdown fella turned up, sharing with me lewd pictures of birds he'd been knobbing. Totally surreal. That night a chav saved my life, so they ain't all bad if truth be known.
|
|
|
|
Violet Vivid
Part of things
Reports of my demise were somewhat exaggerated
Posts: 734
|
|
|
That night a chav saved my life, so they ain't all bad if truth be known. thats true.
when i bounced my mini off a traffic island in Bangor, north wales, at 1am (after avoiding two teenagers who stepped off the curb without looking!) and burst the front tyre, and discovered the nuts were too tight for the wrench i had, and that the jack didn't work, three chav boys stopped to help, tried to get the nuts undone, and waited till the aa arrived to do it for me
xXx
|
|
Violet, purple-loving Landy obsessed Purple-haired CyberPunk Almost model & occasional word wrangler regarding Landies xXxIf she can't decide on what kind of genitalia she likes to play with you're better off without her. Move on... play with Land-Rovers.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Never, ever had an accident, no injuries, and no moments where I can say I had poo-ed my pants.
Best one was I was once driving down the M53 and saw a tyre go bouncing 30 foot in the air at about 70mph past me and continue down the motorway, bouncing quite happily, before disappearing into the horizon as the road bent away. It didn't seem to want to stop and wondered where the hell it had come from.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
On the way to my cars first MOT under my ownership, the brake pedal went to the floor while pulling into a petrol station... The petrol station just happened to have a Honda dealership in it, with a row of brand new S2000s outside... Furious pumping of the pedal, handbrake and steering managed to stop me in time... Afterwards, the brakes were completely fine... And it passed the MOT... Odd.
|
|
|
|
djefk
Part of things
Posts: 844
|
|
|
When I was 17 in 1999 I bought a REALLY ratty turd brown Mk 1 Escort 1300 XL for £100 with 6 months MOT (Try doing that now!) - As I was a student I was actually proud of it's frilly arches, ripped seats and windows that you pushed up and down by hand - The winders did naff all! Not to metion rusty front inner wings that allowed the struts to try and pop up through the bonnet on corners... I forgave it for all of this however because it was ridiculously tail-happy and would powerslide on demand when it rained!
Anyway, one day I was on my way to school in pouring rain - I got to the police station roundabout in Maidenhead with traffic all around me in the middle of rush hour when suddenly the back end stepped right out without warning, so that the nose was pointing straight at the middle of the roundabout and I was looking through the passenger door glass to see where I was going! I'll never know how but I managed to catch the slide (just), indicate and come off at the exit (again with some slide on the opposite lock) - Wish someone could have been videoing it as I'd have happily paid for a copy of the tape!
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Towing a customer's car across town the other day, from our garage to another. The office girl was in the car I was towing and we were using a rope. As we approached a roundabout she decided to slam her foot on the break for some reason, all I saw behind me was the front of the customer's car fly across the road and watched as water poured out of the bottom of it. I was more terrified as to what our boss was going to do us, we had to call him out to patch up the front of the car and continue the journey. He's never spoken of it since then...
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
[/IMG] lowriders are particularly good at pant staining maneuvers.of the three that i have built the scariest thing was in my 735i when a strut top mount pushed threw the wheel arch top and the bonnet.we where on the a64 doing about 60 at the time.man it was scary.once my heart rate recovered i popped her in to the three wheel stance and drove 30miles home with traffic flashing and beeping like mad in case i hadn't noticed my car driving a little different.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
My current car is quite well behaved. Previous cars have done their utmost to kill me. The single worst was a Holden Ute. The steering column fell in my lap. Whilst driving. At 70km/h. Through a corner. Bad ute. The exhaust fell off from the manifold and the whole thing did a hugely scary pole vaulting thing before it bent around the rear axle in a shower of sparks. The engine shot the number 5 cylinder through the head one morning when starting it. Horrible mess that was. The rear suspension bushes collapsed on a semi regular basis giving you that feeling of never quite knowing when the back end might spear off into the unknown. It was an awful, awful piece of engineering. Also the stereo, all of its own, with no warning at all, silently slid backwards into the dash before the sound stopped. I traded it in the very next day.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I love the fact that, after all of it's various attempts to kill you, it was the death of the music that made you get rid of it...
The Imp has only made a couple of attempts to kill me: the headlight switch fell apart at 60mph on an unlit rural A road (thankfully empty at the time); and the front brake wheel cylinders failed leaking lubricating brake fluid onto the brake linings.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
I love the fact that, after all of it's various attempts to kill you, it was the death of the music that made you get rid of it The mech problems lent it a certain character. The stereo thing was just silent, brooding, menace. A sort of otherworldly statement of intent that just scared the curse word out of me.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Never, ever had an accident, no injuries, and no moments where I can say I had poo-ed my pants. Famous last words? ;D
|
|
"A Pierburg carb? It would be more economical to replace it with a funnel..."
|
|
RobinJI
Posted a lot
"Driven by the irony that only being shackled to the road could ever I be free"
Posts: 2,995
|
|
|
My Scirocco's front right brake calliper fell off at 70 on the A38 a while ago. Luckily the brakes only just fit in 15's, so it wedged against the inside of the wheel and made a nasty grinding noise rather than falling right off.
|
|
|
|
|