What Really Dumb Thing Have You Done In The Garage?

For the edification of every one on this forum, what really dumb thing have you done in the garage....Head slapper moments....What was I thinking...Or not... :huh

I'll start.

I'm just back from the garage after changing my fork oil. I've a '91 GS with the 41mm Marrozochis. I set the bike fork oils up last weekend, went for a ride, & decided that the compression side was a little harsh. I decided to drop the new 15w oil & go for a mix of 10w & 15w to get a plusher ride.

Successfully dropped the new oil out

The Spectro oil comes in a rasberry jam colour 15w, & a blue 10w. Together they make a nice bluecurrant colour. Mixed them, & carefully fed the mix into the fork tubes. So good so far.

And after I finished that I dropped the bike off the centrestand.

Unfortunately I didn't put the oil filler cap on before doing this. Bluecurrant juice shot out of the fork tubes & hit the garage ceiling, then dripped back onto me & the bike. A little fork oil goes a long way.

No photos at eleven.

I pulled the rear shock height adjuster strut off the Ducati to give it some attention and for reasons unknown to me I decided to drop it off the center stand and put it on the side stand. I was thinking that the shock would support it. Wrong. It dropped so low that I couldn't use the side stand and it was too heavy to lift that far back up onto the centerstand.

I waited patiently for someone walking by to help but I guess I caught a lull in the foot traffic. By good fortune I was close enough to lean it against the shelving unit with a pad I could reach to put in between. Got my bigass neighbor to help her back up. He was amused at my dumb mistake but he recently parked a Harley in his garage so we're even!

Tried to fix a pos '96 KTM 300MXC

i was working on a squarecase bevel, had thumb in exhaust port when turning motor over. heads were attached. motor turned over on it's own - valve springs took over to zip crank around, and piston jammed thumb against top of exhaust port. expletives ensued until i could jam screwdriver in exhaust port to overcome valve spring tension and extract my mangled thumb.. that sucked for weeks.

that was some dumb shit.

Stainless you F.Up makes mine seem lame by comparison.

I had found a cherry tank for my SR500 and it was mounted . I was doing some last minute stuff before taking the bike out to ride to the lake when somehow I bumped the bike from behind and the sidestand caught on something. And the the bike fell over and the tank hit squarely on a wooden box that caved it in . A dent as big as my dumb head.

This.

I was installing intiminators in my Triumph, and for some reason, it never occurred to me that I ought to take the weight of the bike off the forks before removing the caps...

The first one went fine.

The second one unleashed a fork oil geyser as the front suspension instantly collapsed.

The best part was, with the forks fully compressed, the bike was too low to get the lift underneath.

I ended up having to use a long 4x4 to lever the bike back up.

One of my first motor overhauls back in the 70's. did a top end on an SL125 Honda, Had drained the oil, new rings, gaskets, carb build etc.

got it all back together, gassed up, fired up, set the idle, took it down the road (way down the road maybe 1 mile) and back. Ran great but smelled a little hot.

doooohhhhh. no oil. Filler her up, started it up, ran great and continued to do so for another 15 years.

Tough little bitch. Never did that again.

45 years of doing dumb things in my (various) garage(s)! It would be difficult to pick just one, and I tend to do really complicated dumb things. Heres a simple one: Completely rebuilt a Toyota engine (with only 60,000 miles on it) that wasn't running well. Everything measured fine, but it was apart, so it got new rings, valve job, and bearings. Still ran like shit when I finished, so THEN I spent 10 minutes and 10 bucks on new spark plug wires. Ran fine, and I never opened that motor back up for over 320,000 additional miles.

uh... circlip... forgot one, once. NOt doing that again.

Almost welded a 14mm wrench from the starter to the frame, once. Lots of sparks was my clue something was amiss.

Forks: well, dont forget to put the drain plug back in before adding new fluid. Thats an easy one.

Also, when unscrewing the top cap, the reason it might be so hard to turn is that the front wheel is still on the ground, and that as soon as its near free, its going to collapse and shoot the spring out, and scare the shit out of you


Playing bike dominos in the barn, and denting the girlfriends newly painted /6 tank with the handlebar of her 1150.


oh god. they only allow ten thousand characters per post. THis is gonna be a long thread for me.

Friend of mine borrowed a ladder and had it for awhile then brought it back, well I wasn't used to it being around so at the end of the night I hit the garage door button and the IR beam was going between the rungs since the ladder was laying down, the door hit and the upper section had a nice BIG V bend in it that I had to fix and of course it had just started raining sideways.

I was trying to remove a Teraflex tire with a mixed set of levers. Was getting dark and hard to see so I put down my glasses to wipe off some sweat. Didn't put them back on and like a dummy I am prying and looking at the bead with my head about 6" away.

THUMP! One of the levers flips out and cracks me right in the eye. Could only see brown out of it during the ER trip but luckily it bounced off the eye and all the blood was from a split eyelid. 7 stitches from that. I bought a tire stand, new levers, better lighting, and a vow to always use eye protection in the garage no matter what I am doing.

Yes.

Well.

Ahem.

There is a story behind this picture....







For details, see this page....



:huh

Not as good (bad?) as some, but....released the last hold down strap without remembering that is was also acting as a hold UP strap at that moment. nothing like watching your bike free fall to the ground, not to mention the horrible sound it makes.

I was helping my brother put the transmission back in his truck on Friday. We had the transmission bolted back up to the transfer case, and were strapping it to a jack to get it up into place. I connected my sides of the strap and he connected his. He started jacking it up, and it was getting harder and harder and BAM! One of the ratchet straps exploded right in front of my face. My brother hooked his end of the straps to the base of the jack instead of the arm of the jack. It was working against itself. :huh

One time I was pulling my R75 into the shed for whatever reason. I wasn't even thinking (I guess I thought I was in neutral) and dumped the clutch. The bike lurched forward and slammed the left side cylinder into the trailer and died. Only damage was a 0.25"x0.25" chunk out of one of the cooling fins on the valve cover.

One time I was wearing a ratty pair of shoes and put my R90 up on the centerstand and went to walk away and part of my shoe was stuck under it.

One time I was taking one of the commercial mowers off the trailer and I went to stop it from rolling too far back with my steel toe boot. Well, it rolled over the steel toe and smashed the top of my foot.

The list could go on and on..

I could bore you with a litany of "oh shyte" moments - stripped threads, stripped heads, spewing oil and things falling over.

But the two I recall most vividly are leaving the oil drain plug of an MT250 loose and not discovering it until the bike started doing tank slappers at 100kph down the road, the engine oil having thoroughly soaked the rear tyre.

And then the most painful of all time. I was putting the head back on an Austin A55, one in a long succession of truly horrible English cars which was all I could afford back then. It was sitting a few inches proud of the block on the pushrods, and when I got the last pushrod lined up with the hole the cast iron block, which weighed just slightly less than the moon, fell onto my thumb.

My thumb hurt so much I could not sleep for two nights. I had to sit at work with my thumb stuck in a glass of water. A trip to hospital found there was nothing broken but my poor thumb has never been the same.

Spending three days testing every single connection and wire on my bike as it would not fire up. In the end realised I had the wrong key in the ignition. Stuck the right one in, turn two clicks and fired up right away! Impressed - not a bit!

I did the same thing kinda bought a bike got it home ran when I picked it up went through all the wireing dielectric greese everywhere. I was pissed ass hell cussing and the hole lot. Sat on the bike for insperation looked down and the kill switch it was in the off position fired right up after i fixed that.:huh

1. freshly painted gas tank on steps into house. come out of house in a hurry. tank has new paint chip on right side. doh!

2. put drill case on garage steps into house. come out for work next morning. clip the edge of case, roll ankle(sprain) and go down in a heap. doh!


steps remain clear to this day...

OK...we gotta go all the way back to 1972. I bought a 175 Yamaha Enduro with my High School Graduation money.....put a ton of miles on it, both in the dirt and on the road. One afternoon it started acting like it was starving for gas. In my infinite wisdom, I deduced that the screen in the petcock was clogged. OK....I'll just blow the crud back into the tank and It will be good for awhile. I was at home in the driveway, standing, on the opposite side from the petcock. I took the hose off of the carb, leaned over the bike & turned on the tap as i blew into the hose. It cleared the screen really well because, since the gas cap was on & I pressurized the tank, when I took the hose out of my mouth I was rewarded with a nice healthy stream of gas right into my mouth, nose & eyes.


It gets better!....I ran into the kitchen to get something to rinse out my mouth. Water wouldn't do so I went right to the fridge. THERE'S NO MILK!!! I frantically tried to find something to drink...I grabbed a green glass screwtop soda bottle (thinking it was ginger ale or something) and took a healthy swig and swallowed some. It was pickle juice!!! My Mom always saved the juice from pickles and would use it to pickle other vegetables.

............turned around and hurled a load of gas/pickle juice right into the sink. Right about that time Mom walked into the kitchen...as I tried to explain what had happen we were laughing so hard that couldnt catch my breath and kept heaving up more juice, which made us laugh harder!!!!