Laughing at the Antics of Idiot Auto Owners

Quote: Face

Go for it. I'd surely share my own, as I have no shortage of asshats to laugh at who do similar stuff ;)

Here it is, because (as they used to say on TV), Face, YOU ASKED FOR IT!

I gave some of the background of how this car was obtained already, as well as how the guy drove. Well, at one point he lost control to the point that he rear-ended a Chevy Chevette with a bunch of black guys in it and this was kind of the de facto end of his car. Note I said de facto and not "the end" because he bought an old Dart just to get the front clip to replace on his car. Given that the black guys were taken right to the hospital his insurance (which mommy and daddy paid for) had to go way up. The Dart he had bought for the clip was probably in better shape than the Demon even before the crash. Remember that.

So he buys an entire car for the front clip because he does not think to call a junkyard to get just the clip. The rest of the car ends up in his backyard for months. Now, in PA you need a safety inspection annually. The mechanics who do it have to be tested by the State Police, but if you have good tires, brakes, lights, and the car is not a pile of junk you will probably pass, unless you take the car to a dealer which is an entire post in itself and I am not going to go into today. So anyways, DID I MENTION THE GUY TOOK AUTO SHOP? Yes, he took auto shop a class where if you passed you were supposed to be able to pass the state police test where you were hired (the test is given in the shop where you work, you quit and go somewhere else you take it again.)

So state inspection is coming up and he has no idea how he will get the car to pass. Let me state it again, it is not a hard inspection to pass. I failed once in about 20 tries for a front control arm, which I could not do. Once the guy passed a car I would have failed for small holes in the exhaust. (this is also another post in itself if anyone cares.) If you are any kind of shade-tree mechanic you can do it. He went to school and tells his mother he can't get it to pass, but "wants to restore the car." You are still reading it right, the guy can't get a car to pass safety inspection but wants to do a frame-off restoration.

This is where the real fun begins.

First, he decided he will use the Dart but it needs a front clip as he just removed the old one. His dad found one on his first call to a junkyard. But the Dart fails inspection miserably. Seems he never looked at anything, just put in a fancy radio and some bumper stickers. His reaction was, "The brakes are fine, it stops!" So mommy and daddy buy him a Lynx. The Dart sits in the backyard for 5 years or more.


Now, for years he had my old 318 in his driveway but never took it apart because he didn't have the money and didn't have an engine stand. Somehow you cannot take an engine apart without money even with tools and no engine stand. But at this same time he has gotten training as a machinist and gets a "real" job. Bringing home about $300 a week net, not bad for 20-21 years old in those days. He has a card for PACE Warehouse, which has some nice-looking if not great tools. Every week is a new trip for items like:


A large air-compressor with 4 hook-ups, two oiled and two dry so "people can all work at the same time." I remind him he is doing a resto and not running a pit stop at the Indy 500, but I get laughed at

A huge torpedo kerosene heater twice as large as needed because it looks cool, has to be turned off half the time because it is too noisy and hot

An engine-crane that will be at best used twice, needed because he didn't want to work with a come-along or some other backyard way

And the room is filled with CDs. But he hates most of them. But they came because he joined the record club for $.01 and they sent a CD each month whether he asked for it or not.

Lots of the tools were nice but anyone can have nice tools if you spend over half your income on just tools.

Meanwhile he is deciding he wants a big-block engine in the car. He looks at the 426-Hemi but they are way too expensive. So he considers a "conversion Hemi" which is more or less a 440 with Hemi heads. Remember, this is not a Charger but a Demon, a compact, oh, but don't tell him it is a compact, he thinks it is a "mid-size" because it was mid-sized in the early 1990s. This eventually turns into lost money for him part because the guy got raided by the cops but part because he probably stiffed the guy on monthly payments. He never did get the engine.

This drags on for I am not kidding 5+ years. When he put it away I told him it would be a 4 year project and he laughed at me saying it would be out the next summer. I think the silly thing sat there 10 years before he gave up.

Oh yeah, meantime he ended up with a Duster some other friends managed to drive a month before spinning a bearing (most likely.) He started cutting it up and was going to put it with the trash week by week. We all said call the junk-car ads and get some money. He or his dad eventually did, but he was sad because he really wanted to say he "put a car out with the trash."

I assure you, this is maybe half the story. Hope it makes your day.

Had a mod break this off because it is just too good to get lost in my thread!

I had tears in my eyes, both out of nostalgia as well as bottled laughter reading that! Once you got to the purchasing of tools, I'd had it XD Good stuff, and I know a ton of guys just like that. If it's not cars, it's guns. If not guns, it's wheelers, snowmobiles, snowboards, or (insert hobby here). It's all about the hardware, forget the skill or ability to use it!

I'll certainly have stuff to add in the future.

Quote: Face

I had tears in my eyes, both out of nostalgia as well as bottled laughter reading that! Once you got to the purchasing of tools, I'd had it XD Good stuff, and I know a ton of guys just like that. If it's not cars, it's guns. If not guns, it's wheelers, snowmobiles, snowboards, or (insert hobby here). It's all about the hardware, forget the skill or ability to use it!

If you want a representation of what life around these guys was like.

My favorite is this new breed of mod guys. I got one just down the road from me. He's got every piece of faux-go-fast-part you could possibly put on a car - the rear spoiler, rear diffuser, side skirts, front bumper ground effects, 18" rims with low, low profile tires, aftermarket hood with fake ram-air intakes, fake chrome trim around the doors and windows, limo grade window tint, a big, 4" fart pipe... all of which sits upon an 8 year old stock Ford Focus.

C'mon, guy. Really? ><

On that list is the fronting baller. You know the type. Almost always its either a Chrysler 300 or Dodge Magnum. Same limo grade window tint. Same absurdly big rims, usually 22"-24". Some ridiculous aftermarket paint that, while sometimes done well, is $10k thrown onto a very generic sedan. The trucks are just as bad. Some dude chops his springs and throws 24"-26" rims on the thing. Does he ever think once to upgrade the control arms, brakes, or any other thing that now has to support a metric ton of additional unsprung weight? Nope. I saw a guy the other day who had a really sharp F-150. Shaved doors, aftermarket paint, shaved bumpers, and of course, it was rolling on 26"s. That poor truck was so out of balance, you could barely look at it. It vibrated which such intensity, you literally could not read the "F-150" on the tailgate. It was just a blur. I passed the guy and saw his hand on the wheel was likewise a blur as the out of balance fronts transmitted their torture up through the steering column and into the steering wheel.

These are $40k worth of truck and car with at least another $10k thrown into them, and they're garbage. I can't help but laugh everytime I roll past one =)

Quote: Face

My favorite is this new breed of mod guys. I got one just down the road from me. He's got every piece of faux-go-fast-part you could possibly put on a car - the rear spoiler, rear diffuser, side skirts, front bumper ground effects, 18" rims with low, low profile tires, aftermarket hood with fake ram-air intakes, fake chrome trim around the doors and windows, limo grade window tint, a big, 4" fart pipe... all of which sits upon an 8 year old stock Ford Focus.

C'mon, guy. Really? ><

How about another story about a guy I ran across. Worked for about two months one summer at a warehouse. It was a weird job, they had several times as many people as they needed and lots of downtime, meaning lots of time to chat. Had this one dude working there thought he knew a lot about cars. Tells me about how they put a bigger engine and tranny in a car, so they had to cut the drive shaft in half and weld it back together.

"Where did you have it balanced?"
"What do you mean?"
"When you do that you need to balance it."
"We just put it together, it works fine."
"If you don't balance it the thing will eventually tear up your U-Joint."
"It works fine" (getting very angry at me by now)
Third guy, "He's right, you need to balance a drive shaft."
"SCREW YOU, YOU KNOW EVERYTHING!"

Now the same guy had a 1980s Camaro that he totally bragged about the paint job on. Let me say this paint job would not be worthy of Earl Scheib. It looked like the car had not been touched and had 10 year old 1980s (ie: bad) factory paint. On top of that the guy painted right over his side marker light which he forgot to mask off.

Later he told us how he got this deal on the paint. $19 or 29 a gallon, but the only colors available were black or white. It looked like he got every penny of his money out of it.

Same guy bought a Trans-Am of late 70s vintage. One week he put an entire week's pay into a carb for it. He was paying almost a week's pay per month to store it. And the thing was we were getting paid very well for unskilled work at the time, and lots of OT. He had zero chance of coming close to making what he was there, and we knew the job was a temp as we were brought in to close the joint.

Quote: AZDuffman

Same guy bought a Trans-Am of late 70s vintage. One week he put an entire week's pay into a carb for it. He was paying almost a week's pay per month to store it. And the thing was we were getting paid very well for unskilled work at the time, and lots of OT. He had zero chance of coming close to making what he was there, and we knew the job was a temp as we were brought in to close the joint.

Hilarious! God forbid you try to help a guy out =)

Some of these people (and I should know, I used to be one) suffer from the same mental condition as system believers. What they have in their mind is so good, so perfect, that to shake them out of it makes them almost vulnerable. They know what they want, they "see" a way to get there, and here you are trying to take it from them.

The quote above reminds me a ton of people I know now - total ignorance of priorities.

It'd be a fair bet to wager 8-1 on every "pimped" luxury car around here. In almost every case, it's a Dodge Magnum or Chrysler 300 or Cadillac Escalade. It has the 22+" rims, low-pro tires, tinted windows, airbrush paint, trim, body kits, etc and so forth. In other words, it's a $40k-$60K car with $10k+ slapped on it. In NY...

Follow that man home. 8-1 you'll see him pull into a dingy trailer park up to a single wide with drooping, stained siding, a tarp on the roof, a dead mower surrounded by 12" tall grass, a staircase set askew with missing or broken risers, skirts with missing panels, and a wad of broken and abandoned childrens toys in some corner of the tiny property. I can almost guarantee it, and I can't help but to shake my head and laugh in anger everytime I see it.

I could fill a coffee table book filled with pics of this very scenario, all taken within a 30 mile radius of my house. Hey.... maybe I should...

Don't know why this made me think of this thread, well I do know :-)


Watching "I Almost Got Away With It" on Netflix, cord-cutter that I am. These kids kill a guy. Two days later his truck is still sitting in the driveway, because they can't get rid of it. Lots of evidence sitting, because.......

Face, you know why................

because...........................

NONE OF THE GROUP CAN DRIVE A STICK-SHIFT!

*#$% KIDS!

Then they try to burn it, they get a person involved to drive it. But when they close the doors the windows go up to put out the fire they lit!

$#%@ dope-head kids!

Checker cab comeback in the works.

I can see making a full-frame cab again what with the Panther now being extinct. There is probably a market for that. But a Checker Marathon El-Camino/Ranchero truck?

The El Camino is coming back. Maybe it's gonna be a "thing".



(2015 is here and still no new Barracuda. Perhaps they've received my letters =p)

GM thought of this 10 years ago. Holden made one, I think it might have sold.



Instead of selling it as a sports truck, sell it as an alternative to a small car.