Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums Branches New England Ah, the good old days. Share your story!!!!!

Was thinking back to my most horrible car related story for some reason. Here it is... please share yours as well.

I had a 1974 Plymouth Duster as my first car and I had a leak in my radiator. I bought some stop leak and poured it in as per the directions. The leak went away and everything seemed cool...... Well, a couple of weeks later I drop it down into second gear (3 speed auto) to pass a car and coolant starts running into the car!!!!! The heater core sprung a leak!!!! The floorboards would turn green everytime I floored the thing. hahahaha

That is not the end. After replacing the heater core and finding out that it was plugged from the stop leak my car overheated and left me stranded. I replaced the radiator and found out it was plugged due to the stop leak. hahaha... Not the end... here's the kicker.....

The car overheating caused one of my valves to go bad and I lost compression in the cylinder. I had to have a valve job done.

So, total cost..... $2.50 for the stop leak and it resulted in a new heater core, a new radiator and a valve job!!!!!!!

Ouch

This isn't that old, but our worst car story has to be Steve and I getting rear-ended twice in the old SVT (not long after I got into my accident in the 626!). Oh man...what headaches! What a bad year!

i had a similar thing happen to me with my Monte Carlo. I was just driving along, minding my business, when the car got all steamy inside. I was like, WOAH! i looked at teh floor and it was like the car was peeing itself.

needed a new heater core. of course, this happened after i had to wait 45 minutes for a jump start because the 3rd alternator went bad. all in the same week i got a flat tire heading back from school too. that was a bad week.

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but the worst was when i was dating Courtney in high school and i had JUST started driving the Monte like 2 weeks prior. We were driving along 128, coming back from the mall and i got pulled over in a SEA of traffic. I was like, WTF! i couldn't have been going more than 20 MPH in the traffic.

turns out my parents forgot to put the new reg sticker on the rear plate. so, according to Mister "I'm Gonna Teach You A Lesson" State Trooper, i was driving an unregistered car. so, we had to wait for the tow truck, get the car towed, wait for my dad to pick us up, put the sticker on the car, pay $150 for towing and $100 for a fine. it SUCKED! and that incident remained on my driving record for 5 years. and i wasn't even doing anything wrong!

that Monte was just a cop magnet too....with a governed top speed of 90 MPH. sheesh!

one i recall

i was 16....driving my chevy corsica


which had stickers all over it, tints, and at the time A LOUD SYSTEM......well anyways there was a car show in torrington at walmart parkinglot


when you leave there is a wall, at the time muscle cars were doing burnouts and such as they drove by, so i go by, mind you w/4 subs pumpin out music, i pull an ebrake, problem was THERE WAS OIL ALL OVER THE ROAD!!! someone put oil down, so instead of a nice controlled ebrake, i go sliding sideways towards a curb, almost hitting it

i managed to control it and just miss the curb, but i could hear the people (prolly about 100 of them) yelling and screaming OVER my system....how embarassing

i STILL have ppl that come up to me and go, HEY you were that kid who almost hit that curb in walmart that time

ahhh the good ol 16 yr old days

My worst was when I failed inspection in the 'tour. Tie rods were bad - replacement at the stealership was $222. A whole TWO DAYS LATER my front brake rotors went pop and we drove the entire way back to the dealer (two towns away on highway) 20 mph with hazards on. That's the worst week so far; hopefully it will stay the worst!

Just before Christmas last year the motor blew in my 1994 Talon 1.8 litre. Had it replaces to the tune of $1100. About 3 weeks later I was driving home from test-driving the SVT which was in Townsend, MA (about 2 hours away). About an hour into the drive home the car started making a clanking noise and i knew i was screwed so i took the first exit off the highway (in Shrewsbury). This was at about 9:00 and everything in that small town was closing. I managed to convince a guy in a pizza shop to let me make a collect call home to my parents. The car was on the side of the road so a cop (really a nice guy) had it towed. I was stuck out in below freezing weather for an hour and 15 minutes because my parents drive so damn slow. Well, the motor was shot again so it was replaced under waranty. Had to pay $375 for labor though. It gets better...Townsend Ford REALLY wanted to close the deal with me cause I had been dragging my feet for about 2 months trying to get a better deal on a loan without them. The sales man drove the 2 hours and met me in the Holyoke Mall parking lot to make the switch (I was trading mine in). He calls me not even 5 min after I get home and sais the motor blew AGAIN! So...I made a deal with the Ford dealer to give them $800 extra instead of the trade (2 grand) and I kept both cars. I made another deal with the mechanic who fixed the car. He would give me $870 (the cost of the towing plus the extra $800 for the SVT) and he would fix and sell the talon for whatever he could get. Well, I have a check that he bounced sitting in front of me and I am in the process of speaking to my (mother's) lawyer. Hopefully there will be no need for a lawsuit but only time will tell.

I hope I explained that well enough for you all to get it. And that might be the worst car related horror story around. But it (almost) all worked...I do have my SVT now, and I love it as much as one can love a machine.

I guess the most scariest thing I ever had happen to me was when I was 18. I was working for a landscaper in town and I was driving one of his older trucks. It was myself and another person in the viehicle, we had a trailer on the back with about 4,000 pounds of equipment on it. This truck wasn't in the best of shape either, it was 11 years old and all it did its whole life was pull a trailer or plow snow.

I was just rolling along at about 35 comming up on a red light. I easily hit the brakes to stop, I was in no hurry to stop so I wasn't on them very hard. All of a sudden I hear a faint pop sound and the brake pedal goes right to the floor and I stop stopping. So now I'm getting nervous, I'm still going about 30 and I had a truck with a 2 ton trailer on it and I'm comming up on an intersection with the cars going the opposite way having a green light. I didn't know what to do, I turned on the hazard falshers and the yellow strobe light on the roof. I tried pumping the brakes and it was working pretty good, I got it slowed down to about 20 by the time I ran out of brake fluid. So I thought, emergency brake, since this was an emergency I pressed the pedal and it worked then I hear another loud pop the e-brake pedal goes to the floor and the brakes turned off.

So now, out of brake fluid and have a broken E-brake cable, still going 20, approaching crossing traffic I'm almost panicing and I'm thinking I might try to dodge my way through the intersection, but then I realized I wasn't just a pick-up truck, I was a pick-up truck with a 20 foot long trailer, not much chance of dodging traffic. Then I thought of throwing the tranny in park since I saw it once in a movie and the back wheels of the car locked up and it came to a stop. So I put the lever in P and the only thing that happened was there was the aweful grinding sound and I wasn't slowing down. Then I thought some more, with about 100 feet left to the traffic, I tried reverse, and to my suprise I started slowing down, so I pressed harder on the gas and I slowed down faster, I pressed the gas more and the back tires started to skid. So I just used the gas pedal to regulate the stopping power.

After all the trauma I did manage to stop just as the rear wheels of the truck crossed the line, and as I came to a stop the light turned green. so I just idled back to the shop at about 5 mph, throwing it in reverse when I needed to slow down.

I know this is a long description, and when it was happening it seemed like the whole ordeal took about 10 minutes, when it was actually more like 10 seconds.

Originally posted by Ed98.5SVT:

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Was thinking back to my most horrible car related story for some reason. Here it is... please share yours as well.

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I had to drive Grand Am's for 6 months on a long business assignment.

Ok, here's mine.

From January to March of '98 I was in Grand Rapids, MI for a co-op with a company called Diesel Technology Co. Anyway I had my '90 Ford Ranger and on the trip home (in a blizzard mind you) the head gasket went right as I was pulling up to the toll booth at the Ma/Ny boarder on I-90. I noticed the truck stumbled when I pressed in the clutch as I was slowing down for the toll. Then I looked at the temp gauge and it was pinned!!! Needless to say I pulled right over and shut it down. There was nothing in the radiator so I when the the toll house there and filled up the radiator with water. The lady said there was a service station at the next exit (Austerlitz, NY we stopped here for gas on the way back from SZ). I decided to try and make it there. I was blowing white steam out the tailpipe like mad!!! It was a literal smoke screen!! hehe. Anyway I was watching the temp slowly creep up as the water was consumed. I make it about 8 miles to the service station before it overheated again! The verdict was 2 broken spark-plugs and sludge in the crank-case. I believe that it would've seized if I hadn't used Mobil 1!! Anyway, I replace the motor with a 302!! hehehehe

Thanksgiving Day, 1979

Picking up my sister from her job as an RN at St Luke's Hospital in Harlem, New York, to join our family at my aunt's house in Jersey.

Driving my Fiat 128SL through the intersection of 125th Street and Amsterdam Ave, reaching for third gear, the clutch cable popped.

As a Fiat owner, I had learned to buy two of EVERYTHING at the dealership (Yes, there were actual Fiat dealerships!) so I had a spare. I had never done it myself before, a mechanic did it the first time, and my dad who was driving it, the next.

So there I was in my blue three piece suit and my sister in her whites, changing this stupid thing, in the freezing cold, with minimal tools, on the wrong side of the tracks.

Long story short, about two and a half hours later, I got the job done, and we made it about fours late for dinner!

Or then there was the time I drove from Boston to New York in my Cherokee during the Blizzard of '96. Took 13.5 hours....