Once upon a time, when I was a poor college stoodnt, I bought a '67 Dodge Dart for $250. That actually wasn't stupid as it was a hell of a car for the $$ and was entirely rust free but it had a few issues, like it had no brakes, one front fender was mashed due to a drunken car/parked car interface, and the starter solenoid was wired up with zip cord and duct tape. I replaced the solenoid wiring with good 10 gauge wire and it amazingly began to start reliably. Found a good fender (it was green, car was white, oh well) in junkyard for $30. But when I attacked the brakes I found that the reason the rears wouldn't hold fluid was because the rear shoes were so worn that the pistons had actually come out of the wheel cylinders and were rolling around in the drums. Damn! Anyway, in the process of doing this I found that some of the wheel studs on the driver's side had been broken at some point and replaced with right hand thread, which offended my sensibilities (remember, now, on old MoPars the lug nuts are RH thread on the passenger side and LH thread on the driver's... and when you've got both on the same wheel, quick tire changes are not happening, not to mention that I wouldn't trust any tire jockey with it.)
So I called around a few parts places to see if anyone has any LH thread studs in stock and found one about 10 miles away. I go inside and ask my mom if I can borrow a vehicle to run to the parts store, as I didn't really feel like putting the drums back on only to have to take them off again. She says to go ahead and take my dad's truck (he'd taken her car somewhere that day.) I asked her "are you sure he won't mind, I can take the Scout, I'm just running to the parts store" she says go ahead and take the truck.
I feel obligated to mention that this is a '73 Chevy Stepside, which my dad and I had resurrected while I was in HS - it had (well, still has) a 350/4bbl, headers, custom duals, drop spindles, handmade (by yours truly) varnished wood bed floor, beautiful dark green metallic paint, you get the idea. I love this truck. So does my dad. Anyway, the quickest way to get to the parts store from my rents' place was down my absolute favorite driving road. Twisty, hilly, you know. So I'm cookin' pretty good down this road, thoroughly enjoying the ride. I did remember thinking that the handling felt a little non-crisp, but I chalked this up to me being used to driving cars, and this being a pickup truck. Anyway, as I'm coming to the end of this road, there's one last uphill corner - really almost a sweeper - and then a stop sign. I'm entering the corner at about 35 MPH (it's a good 60 MPH corner, but the presence of the stop sign kinda puts a damper on this) when the LF tire blows. I'm spinning, I'm spinning... when the truck finally comes to rest, I've hit an embankment with three of the four corners of the truck, and three of four tires are torn off the rims. D'OH!
I walk over to a nearby country club office and call and tell my mom what happened. She's fairly composed about the whole deal, she calls and gets the truck towed back home. I put car back together (sans new lug bolts) and live in fear of what my dad's going to say when he comes home and sees his nice pretty truck all bashed up in the driveway.
Dad comes home, sees the truck, asks what happened and when I tell him I see his face fall. Here apparently the day before he'd taken his "winter" rims and tires off and put his "summer" set on. Then he came in to eat dinner or something, and didn't bother to check the pressure in any of the tires, figuring he'd get to it later. Of course these were 60 series radials so you can run 'em down to maybe 8 PSI before they actually *look* low... So he wasn't pissed at me at all and when I offered to find him a new front clip and put it on myself he said dont worry about it, he'd have a friend of his at a body shop take care of it. But still, the whole sitch pretty much sucked...
To add insult to injury, I later found that the Dart had been the victim of a badly executed motor swap and it ate the tranny (actually blew the flexplate) shortly thereafter. I found that the alignment dowel pins were pushed out and that a brace was missing between the engine and tranny (got a real education on slant sixes from that car...) but when I got it back together the second (actually third, but that's another story for another time) trans failed while backing the car off the ramps. I ended up selling the car to a girl for $50 and she later told me she loved the car but ended up swapping *both* the engine and the tranny as the crankshaft had massive endplay.
Oh well... now I have a P-car, I have a higher class of automotive headaches
nate