>Johngage@ix.netcom.com wrote:
>
> This is a true story....so don't laugh too hard.
* * *
> Do any of you guys, who have been working on trucks a while, have any
similar stories?
> John Schulz
Gee, John, it's hard to choose which one to tell. When I think about it I'm
amazed I survived to middle age. Here's one that still wakes me up in the
night sometimes.
I started restoring by accident when I inherited my great grandmother's 1955
Buick Roadmaster. My father and I enjoyed working on it, and when we got
through, we decided to get a '55 T-Bird, which we'd talked about before, but
hadn't felt experienced enough to tackle.
At this time, we were basically working out of a portable tool box, so when
it came time to put the Y Block up on an engine stand, instead of using a
cherry picker, I hung a come-along winch from the garage rafters with a
rope.
Click-click-click
Slowly the engine came up from the car, swinging back and forth over the
garage floor. I wheeled the car back and brought up the engine stand. All
the while rope and rafters were creaking madly.
So you know what happens next. One second I'm blithely trying to bolt up
the engine stand, and the next, I'm sitting on the ground with a 500 lb
engine in my lap.
I remember saying "oh."
Not "oh" like "oh, this and that." No, this was a deep, moaning, coyote
death-rattle ooooh, the sound of the Titanic's bulkheads as the iceberg
stretched them. I then lay back breathing short, panicy, rat-in-a-trap
breaths.
I was alone, which was sort of good, and sort of bad. Good, in that no one
saw me dump an engine on my lap. Bad, in that no one was there to take the
engine off my lap.
Actually, the engine was on my leg, not my lap. It just looked like it was
on my lap, and the peculiar character of the pain did not allow me to
immediately discern which portions of my anatomy which were most accutely
afflicted. In fact, most of the weight of the engine was resting on the
ground, but it had tipped over and the sparkplugs were trying to staple my
leg to the exhaust ports.
So gathering my wits, I rocked the engine back and forth until it was up on
the oil pan. This was exhausting and took a long time, since I couldn't use
my legs to push. Finally, it was off and I started to slither away.
But wait. There's more.
As I began to move, the box of glass Christmas ornaments which had been
sitting on the rafters above began to discharge its contents.
Pop - Pop - Pop
All the little glass grenades came down in a barrage, adding the peril of
glass fragments to the humiliation of my belly-crawl retreat.
Anyone who hasn't heard Gerard Hoffnung's classic bricklayer's accident
report should at this point click to: -
http://www.phys.psu.edu/~scalise/misc/bricks.html
This will give you a more concentrated flavor of the whole thing.
Anyway, no bones were broken, and although the bruises were spectacular, it
all healed up in a couple of weeks. Needless to say, I bought a cherry
picker, and the T-Bird was finished without too many more mishaps.
Regards,
Grant S. gls@4link.net
oletrucks is devoted to Chevy and GM trucks built between 1941 and 1959
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