Previous Owner Horror Stories

I just reversed a lot of damage done by the PO of my father-in-law's Focus today. Enormous faux-carbon rear wing (now deleted); a "CAI" held together by gobs of silicon (surprise, it was throwing a CEL -- not anymore); an E-bay Special header that was more warped than a senator's sense of reality; and all kinds of self-applied tint.

On my E30 I pulled out gobs of wiring with nothing at the other end and a stereo that had super-thick aftermarket speaker wire spliced directly into the OE wiring.

Share your horror stories.

I think I've had to pull a non-functioning alarm out of every used car I've bought.

65 Ford truck rewired incorrectly with all red wire! He also painted everything so none of the grounds worked.

Repoed an 88 RX7 that was a fine car when sold. Idiot changed the dual exhaust for a 2" single so he could use a fart can muffler...painted most of the interior trim yellow........replaced all the vacuum lines with yellow hollow plastic stuff that either collapsed, burned or disintegrated.

Then he replaced the spark plugs with a "hotter" set because hotter is better. He knocked an injector wire off in the process and deduced the transmission was dragging.

While checking the tranny he allowed all the fluid to drain out and he failed to replace the oil.

I gave him a talking to about his automotive procedures.

He asked what he should buy first for his new truck... I told him a set of hood locks and locking toolbox for all his tools. Then give both sets of keys to a competant mechanic.

Bruce

I picked up an 86 CJ-7 with a swapped in 360. The freaking thing had headers that ran into dumps in front of the rear wheels, pointing outward. When I'd start it up in my driveway it would rattle the dishes in our cupboards. I got rid of that hiddeous set up. Then I thought I had a vapor lock situation. After moving the fuel line, applying header wrap and cussing alot I realized he never upgraded the fuel lines for the V-8 (258's had 5/16" lines, 304's had 3/8" lines from the factory). Then, I was trying to diagnose a stumbling issue and wipers that stopped working. Well, mr berkly-face never heard of solder, heat-shring tubing or even electrical tape. Yes, EVERY connection under the hood that he made during the swap was twisted together and stuffed back in the loom. I nearly called this dork to edumicate him on how to work on cars. But I think egnorant has the best idea with the hood lock and tool box.

Ho lee crap. I've been messing with Britmobiles for years so the bodging stories are nearly endless, most involve that brown lamp 'zip' cord and masking tape to repair wiring.

One favorite: my dad bought a 1969 Jag E type which had been 'restored'. Beautiful bodywork and interior, silver with royal blue, the thing was fast as stink (4.2 with triple SU's from a 3.8) but it had a few quirks, such as the brake pedal sinking randomly and the clutch having a really weird feel and occasionally needing a few pumps to get it working but no visible leaks. The brake problem was a rust pitted master cylinder bore which a fix was attempted by replacing the rubber seals. Got that fixed so you wouldn't die, then tackled the clutch. The slave cylinder looked good so that pretty much left the M/C. Took it off, there was some fluid in the little boot; aha! Bad cups in the cylinder or another rusty bore. Bore was perfect, the cups looked brand new. So I investigated further by taking the cup off of the piston. The 'pin' on the piston that the cup snaps over was black in the center, wha???. All the ones I have seen were steel color. So I start poking at it, the black has 'give'. Huh? Turned out it was about 20 feet of black cotton thread. The hole in the center of the 'cup' was a loose fit on the piston so our hero wrapped it with black thread till he got the diameter he wanted and then reassembled the thing.

Then there was the Protege with a mysterious occasonal stall; turned out the owner had installed a stereo amp in the trunk, was looking for power and found a wire which had power with the ignition turned on so he spliced into that (twisted and taped, naturally). Turned out he had spliced into the fuel pump power wire; when the amp started sucking juice the pump would slow down to nil. He couldn't understand why that wasn't under warranty.

You should see the wiring hack-jobs left by the Oregon State Police in the P71...

It always seems to be aftermarket radios with the craziest setups. I found the P/O's driver's license behind the one in my old Nissan truck, with 3 different wiring harness adapters plugged and spliced into each other to get it working.

Audra's Turbo Coupe was the worst. They (a professional shop) installed a massive battery and capacitor to get the ABS accumulator working after berkeleying up the harness on a non-brakes-related job. It took me the better part of a month to get that engine bay back to factory and working correctly. It also had an INOP alarm that someone tried to splice into the ignition to disable the car.

worst I have seen was in my first fiat spider.

I pulled the centre console to replace fix the hazard lights... and found EVERY wire in there had been replaced with the same hue purple wire... people that know the 124 know that the hazard light switch controls EVERYTHING lighting in the car.

I never did get the hazards to work on that car.

After an accident where I took a glancing blow off of a guy who tried to Uturn in front of me (I somehow managed not to t bone him) I discovered the front fender had been repaired before.. with aluminum foil holding bondo in place.

Not the first time I've mentioned this here, but I bought a VW Beetle with a rusted front beam that had been stuffed with newspaper, smoothed with bondo and then painted with undercoating. When confronted, the PO claimed no knowledge.

Then there was the Spitfire with plywood floors... oh wait, I did that.

a guy I met in pa showed me his 2 year old prelude SH... the latino guy who owned it before him had apparently had a fog light burn out so he took an extension cord and a home light bulb and hard wired it in there and crammed it all back in behind the factory lens.

on a 2 year old, $23,000 car....????

and bulbs are like.. HOW much?

My Rabbit GTI had feet of speaker wire that went nowhere. There were 2 little speakers mounted on the windshield with double sided tape. There was a kicker box in the trunk that wouldn't allow you to put anything in it. There was a set of aftermarket driving lights that were mounted but not wired in to anything. There was also a backlight mounted in the trunk.

My 1952 Beetle had the semaphores filled with lead after the slot for them was destroyed. They also cut holes in the pre 55 only rear apron that is impossible to find.

Every car I have ever pulled out of a barn has had a minor dent fixed with 2" of bondo instead of taping it out..

The dreaded cavalier had lived a hard life before we got it. I'm glad it lives with someone else now.

The day we bought it (for a killer, can't pass this deal price) I removed: chrome tape covering most of the dash, bolt on exhaust tip with stock tip sticking about 2" through it, unpainted stick on hood scoops, various Chevrolet emblems that were stuck to everything.

The "blown" speakers ended up being incorrectly sized aftermarket speakers installed with cable ties and drywall screws with wires just twisted together and hanging in the trunk. Someone had taken the entire dash out and glued it back in (swear to god). Most of the dash vents weren't hooked up but there wasn't really a non-destructive way to get back in there.

My Celi once sported a landau top, long long before I bought her. At some point the roof rusted from the water pooling at the lip of the landau seam and one of the previous owners decided the thing to do was to remove the landau top, hammer the edges of the roof down to make a well, use aluminum tape to cover the hole from the inside and then bondo the berkeley out of the hole in the roof. There must be 8 pounds of bondo on there, I E36 M3 you not.

It wasn't my vehicle, but I saw a guy who had recently bought a used van drive it up to my father's car wash and start pounding the crap out of the sides of it with a rubber mallet.

Turns out the "customized" vehicle had actually been a window-side 10 passenger model at birth. The PO had bondoed over all the side glass to make it a panel van.

1980 LUV:

Not a straight panel on the truck. “Pavement inspection port” in the passenger floorboard, big enough to put both fists through, covered with a roofing shingle,

No fuse panel. Removed. Gone. No fuses, either. Mashed together wire splices, some with masking tape, some with no insulation. Alternator positive lead wire stuffed in place. No lug, no nothing.

Exhaust was through a blown-out glasspack. I could identify the truck a LONG ways off.

The odd thing was that that little thing always started. Quickly. Touch the key, and that little sorta-hemi was on.

1977 Mercury Monarch:

The PO’s referred to it as a lemon. My first look at it showed that it had just enough dark, thick, crunchy oil to barely touch the dipstick. There was no air cleaner element in the housing. Bear in mind, this is West Texas. Dust happens – a lot. Surprise, surprise: It knocked and smoked.

Suspension bushings were worn out or MIA, air shocks leaked, and it had a tread separation as I rolled it into my garage. Pads and rotors were way past shot.

With a longblock, full front end rebuild, and a lot of assorted work, it became a fairly good car for what it was. When the PO saw it tooling around town and asked if that was the same car, I told them, “Yeah, it was the most amazing thing. I just scraped off that “Union Made in the USA” bumper sticker you had on it, and it just started fixing itself. Kind of like Christine, without the killing.”

My friend picked up a $250 82 camaro to use to build up a fun car for strip/auto-x

7 coats of paint, baseball sized bondo nugget at the back of the T-top bar, finger tight motor mounts, hacked together trans cross member held together with bits of rubber...

you know how on drum brakes there is a larger shoe and a smaller shoe.. one side was 2 large the other 2 small..

I have blocked out much of the rest...

car was stripped to bare shell and had through the floor subframes and a cage welded in. He would have been MUCH better off to have junked that one and spent more on another that was in better shape.

Man, we need more of the British car guys here.

When I bought my old Land Rover, the PO had been encountering some clutch difficulties. At the time, there were no internets for him to use to buy a new clutch slave, so he cut a hole in the floor and welded a long extension on the clevis where the slave should be. In theory, you could push down on this to release the clutch.

I say "in theory" because, well, you'd have to have Andre the Giant sit on the thing in order to get it to move. Maybe.

The Samurai's wiring is a total mess of twist-and-forget connections. I thought it was lazy when I twisted two wires together snugly and covered the connection in electrical tape...some people don't go through anywhere near that much trouble. Luckily the only electrical device you really need on that thing is the ignition system.

It also had the wrong timing belt tensioner installed.

The paint is about 1 atom thick, and body paint was used on the chassis, underbody, and any screw threads that were left exposed. They totally missed some nasty fanged rust under one of the door sills.

1st CRX HF parts car: Painted Kabota tractor orange. Completely. This extended into the interior although this sported some white accents including some white "CH" symbol of some sort put in upside down because it looked like a swoopy "H" for Honda and some white skulls. I was just happy this was a parts car...

DILYSI Dave wrote: I think I've had to pull a non-functioning alarm out of every used car I've bought.

+1. Must be an A-T-izzLe thing. See also: Non-functioning aftermarket foglights, brand new spark plugs, wires, and oil filter, never installed, of course. Seriously. I swear to god pretty much every Challenge car we've ever run has had a brand new Fram oil filter under the seat.

The Boss Hong just needed correct ignition timing to run splendidly. Crazy.

I bought a '91 Passat once that had the cooling fan wiring cut off, and one of those crappy brown extension cords twisted on and taped to it. The brown extension cord was routed up the fender and in the door, going into the fuse box. I pulled all that crap off, repaired the hacked up wires and started checking the circuit, and found a blown fuse. Replaced the fuse and the cooling fan never gave me a bit of trouble.

Ok, I had this one old mini that had EVERY SINGLE electronic component was designed by some Joseph Lucas dude. Man, the thing would turn on the left turn signal when you honked the horn, if you hit the brakes the radio would switch from AM to FM or vice versa. If you wanted to start the car you had to turn the key 2/3 of the way while jiggling the steering wheel while at the same time tapping your left foot on the underside of the brake pedal. The electrical problems were endless. I confronted the previous owner and he said the electrics were all stock and in fact, restored to working order!!!!

if any of the stories I've heard about the quality of vintage British car wiring, that might just be proper working order I, sadly, don't have any stories of neglect on the part of previous owners of my cars, because the only car I've had ('02 Ford Escort ZX-2 automatic trans) was owned by my grandma who put around 9K on the clock in the 7 years she owned it. the '98 Dakota we recently sold was owned by my dad (RIP), and had around 78K on the clock, and other than a rusting front bumper, rusting aftermarket side steps, oil in desperate need of changing, there was nothing wrong with it

Ummm, I am scared to post anything.

I am probably the source of most of these stories. I had no gearhead mentors growing up, my parents would not open the hood of a car. So I had to figure out a lot of easy things the very stupid way. I'm no better now, but the stuff I have to rely on goes to a real mechanic.

I had a Porcshe 924 in Germany, and the main harness was developing a short. First the headlights went, the the motors to raise them, then the ignition. Being mostly volkswagen, the fuel pump relay had already gone. Then they really bitchin steering hwwel I pulled out of a junkyard car that didn't clear the turn signal switch, so I notched the stalk, which was great until it broke, the next day.

My solution to each of these problems was stereo wire and a $.50 rocker switch. By the time I passed it on to the next guy, starting the car required the activation of three seperate swtiches along with the key, as well as another 2 to operate the lights, and another 2 you had to turn on and off to make the signals flash. There was no ryhme or reason to where they went, I just cut a hole in the dash, or the console and mounted them without a label.

81 Scirocco, water pump went bad. Cut the timing belt cover off with a dremel tool, cut the timing belt off. Realized I couldn't pull the water pump without pulling the crank pulley, took it to a mechanic. He tried to tell me in broken english (It was also in Germany) as politely as he could something along the lines of the hood lock lesson mentioned earlier.

Same car, caliper freezes up, I sucess fully remove and rebuild the caliper, put back on, back out of driveway when I realized why I would need to bleed the brakes. Luckily hit nothing. Resolve that with the car in the street, pull forward car locks up, forgot to put in the top caliper bolt. The caliper has tilted forward and jammed against the inside of the wheel. reverse back into the garage, fix that. Back out for a test drive, find the largest hill I have, scream down it at 90, jam the brakes as hard as I can to "test" them....

..luckily I had actually fixed it.

1991 GTI, I was given a set of steelies with snow tires. They didn't fit over the center hubs, so I "forced" them on with an impact gun. Whel I pulled them off with a hammer in the spring, it was a month before I realized what the whumping sound was and why the wheel steering shook when I let off the throttle. I had stripped every lug hole on the car.

Same GTI, given a "Cold Air" intake. Looking to mount it, I disconnect the "emmisions crap" box between the airbox and intake. When the car wouldn't start I then diassembled my air flow meter still thinking it was emissions to make it fit on the filter. That was a pricey replacement.

Blew a rotar in my 2nd Gen RX7, became conviced the problem was the catalitic converter, hacked it off, hit it with a BFscrewdriver and mallet util I cleared it all out, welded back in place. Still no power....

Guilty of a lot of stereo and fog light installs all using the same speaker wire, as well as the "twist, tape, zip tie" method of wiring

i had a probe Gt for a bit, the PO had some trouble with the ignition switch, it wouldn't kick on the starter for one reason or another, so the guy wired a chrome toggle switch to the starter solenoid. turn key on, then reach down and flip the switch till it fires, turn off switch before it chews up the starter. the guy also i guess for sound deadening, stuffed every crevice in the car with that synthetic cotton stuffing you use for making pillows or whatever. now that i think of it, there was a fram filter still in the box in the back of the car when i bought it

My father is working on a '62 Sprite that was restored by the PO when he was in high school. His father was an A&P, which led to all sorts of materials making their way from the hangar onto the car. It was painted with Imron (THAT made friends with the guys at the stripping place). There were also many very high quality, but true to their name, incredibly difficult to remove locking aircraft fasteners.

When I bought my G20, the PO was glowing about the new CD player her cousin had installed for her. Except in order to do so, he removed the Alpine unit the original owner had put in, and replaced it with a Wal-Mart special. Oh, and he forgot to reconnect the power antenna, and the connections to the rear speakers would best be described as "intermittent". But yeah, the display sure does have a lot more animation than the "crappy" old one did.

My wife bought a CPO Matrix a few years back. About 3 days after we got it, it just wouldn't start one night. We discovered that when the dealership installed the shiny new Toyota battery, they had not tightened the leads. At all. The positive lead worked its way off, and was sitting next to the terminal, not quite making contact. Thought long and hard about calling the dealership and demanding they come get the car to "figure out what's wrong with it."