Wich mistakes/mishaps you did while working on your car ?
 

I was thinking about a topic to share mistakes we've done while DIY

Here's two mistakes I did - and perhaps advice
1. Never work on the car after it has been driven or parked in the rain. As we remove bolts, they get wet and once put back in place, the threads will rust and get stuck, next time removing them will require a much higher torque and may possibly even shear smaller bolts. Same for the wheel lugs
2. Never work in a rush or stress (for whatever reason, be it an annoying cat). Also, if something happens when working on the car - such as perhaps wife comes and gets annoyed for some reason, stop working, take a break. I was changing my brake fluid, draining and burping the calipers, when someone came in and got me stressed for some reason. For one moment I didn't pay attention and I grabbed the bottle to refill the brake reservoir (master cylinder). By mistake, instead of grabbing the brake fluid bottle, I grabbed the power steering bottle. You get the idea. Fortunately, the power steering Pentosin is fully synthetic, so I was able to flush the master reservoir and didn't had issues with the brakes.

My worst one was changing the front strut on the offside (U.K.) and popped the inner driveshaft CV joint without realising. Result, snapped CV cage when I tried to drive it!
Lesson - always fully remove driveshaft when working on that side.

I’ve changed the car to a P3 now, not found out if that’s the same .... yet!

we used to have a wall of shame in my mates garage and my old 360 rad was on there ..

so the water pump died and I got a replacement, except the fan stud pattern was smaller. so I made a metal adaptor plate which was too thin. I found this out when I got in a little foot down incident on the A13 vs. an old mercedes. sudden steam everywhere.

the fan twisted the bracket, and chewed a massive hole in the rad before shedding its blades everwhere.

lesson learnt, if you make a part always over-engineer it!

or in that particular case, do away with the fan on the belt and put an electric one on instead

It seems to me that every time I work on a car, I will drop some bolt, nut, fastener, socket, anything down in the engine bay, then need to remove the undertray and reach around there somewhere to find it.

I have more than once made the mistake of fixing a car instead of scrapping it.

I cannot agree with this more!
Also leave your self more time than you think you need to complete the job as often it will take much longer than you think.

My worst mistake so far was overtightening one of the bolts that hold down the cover over the ignition coils.
Luckily I was able to remove the damaged bolt and don't have to worry about fixing the thread as it's not essential to have all the bolts in place.

Other than that I managed to bend my front subframe near the radiator buy jacking up the car on that part without adding anything to spread the weight.
Thankfully it hasn't caused any issues other than just being dented.
I now have a dedicated bit of wood to use when jacking up the car there.

blimey yeah there's a point.. ALWAYS watch the quick fit boys / other tyre fitters when they stick that massive jack just anywhere under your car and start pumping

WOAH! find the jack point man wtf

When replacing the dampers on my '02 V70 I failed to transfer over a thick, metal washer from one of the front struts. It was from the side which was leaking. The grimy, smelly, wretched gook was great camouflage and glued said washer in place. It's shiny counterpart on the other side was easy to spot.

TRANSLATION: I wasn't paying close enough attention.

When I was done the strut piston was noticeably higher on the washerless side.
No biggie. I just had to redo that side. Bit I did feel like a dippy-doo.

"Don't get an alignment until you put that back in", advised my friend.