Confession is good for the soul...

[caterpillarmech]

Make no mistake! I have messed up a lot of stuff and I am still shy of 40. The third members have blown up in my last three service trucks and the only common denominator seems to be me. Maybe its just that I have been doing this for 15 years and my other hands have 1.5 and .5 years in the truck.

 

[Dualie]

or the statute of limitations hasn't run out yet.

 

[JNB]

Make no mistake! I have messed up a lot of stuff and I am still shy of 40. The third members have blown up in my last three service trucks and the only common denominator seems to be me. Maybe its just that I have been doing this for 15 years and my other hands have 1.5 and .5 years in the truck.

Potholes...blame it on the potholes!

 

[CM1995]

Make no mistake! I have messed up a lot of stuff and I am still shy of 40.

I'm just over the 40 mark and fubar'd too many things to keep track of.

 

[Tiny]

How come the guy's under fourty never confess anything? :beatsme:beatsme

It might be from the older guys being more secure in their jobs and hoping someone can learn with out doing . It's that way for me .

 

[Shimmy1]

Wow, who needs joke of the day with this thread to read. I'm sure if I think about it there'll be plenty more, but this one is first. About 15 yrs ago, I was working with my dad. We had the old 1080B at the time. Rails were shot, every time you turned you had to pick up one side or the other to get the rail back under the rollers. We were hauling rip rap out of farmers fields in the wintertime. So, it's about 9 pm, on a Friday night, been dark for hours, finally old man says good enough for the day. But, he wants to move the hoe to the next pile. So, instead of walking it back about a quarter of a mile to the approach, I decide to just walk along the road, down in the field. So, I'm happily clanking along, on top of the snow, when I realize I'm not on top of the snow anymore. What's worse, there is water in my tracks. And cattails. So, I try to get the tracks pointed towards the road so I can just climb up onto the road. Begin to attempt the jump turn maneuver. Run the idler right out of the rail. So there I sit, in about 3' of snow on top of 18" of water and sunk into the mud. And we have to put a track back on. &#%# my life. Took us about two hours to get the track back on, now the damn thing won't climb the ditch to get onto the road. So, off the old man goes to find the county blade man to bring the blade out to help pull it back onto road. Reason being was biggest machine we had besides this hoe is a little 1150E dozer. THAT'S not going to pull it up the ditch, especially on frozen road. By this time, it's almost midnight, I'm soaked past my knees, covered in mud, and ready to just walk away. Blade shows up, can't get me up the ditch. So, off the old man goes to get rubber-tire. 30 miles away. When he gets there, we had to dig a ramp up the inslope of the road to get the hoe to walk up. Had to have the backhoe with the frost bucket because road was froze too hard for the excavator to get through. For at least the next 5 yrs, any time I ran into a county employee, they asked me if I'd been fishing with an excavator lately.

 

[RonG]

That is funny,now lets see,what is the dumbest thing that I have done...........now lets see,which one??
I was washing one of our loaders one time while working for a ready mix supplier,it was a Trojan 4000 with an 8V53 in it and the muffler on those was mounted horizontally on the side of the engine nacelle with a bologna cut stack from the muffler which was pointed right at me while standing on the wash rack hosing it down.I thought that maybe filling up the muffler with water and watching all the carbon blow out when I started it up might be fun so that is what I did.
Nobody ever knew why that engine locked up and I was so ashamed that I never told anyone,I still feel bad about it.Now that is only one,let me tell you about...............Ron G

 

[.RC.]

I once drove my 922 loader off a small wooden creek bridge... It had the original sheet metal canopy... If it rolled I would not be here today, instead it got stuck, one rear wheel still on the bridge, two front wheels on the ground..

I learned that day having working steering and working brakes is handy...

It scared all the **** out of me...

I was hooning along the road not thinking and the bridge came up.... I hit the brakes, they only worked on one side, so it pulled the loader to one side and I half went over the approach and the bridge... No damage to me other then a cut lip, loader damage was the cabin got bent out of shape just from the sudden stop.. The loader then got installed with a ROPS, steering rebuilt and brakes rebuilt... I have made more money now to pay for those repairs, compared to the amount of money I would have made if I got killed that day...

 

[Dualie]

I two blocked the hell out of my boom truck the other day in the middle of a job. Not terribly but enough to where i had to boom down flat and give the block a good hard yank to get it out of the boom sheave. Not proud but **** happens

 

[Heath1973]

I was loading dirt with a 5130 shovel onto Euclid 190's. I was walking up to the dig face, where there was a root ball hanging over the edge out into thin air. As I got to the dig face, that root ball started moving. I had a truck backing in on my left, so I start swinging to my right to get away from it........it came through the window and laid in the walk way beside the seat. A trip to the ER to make sure I didn't have any glass in my eyes and some super glue to stop a couple of bleeders and all was good. Trees can be unpredictable

 

[Truck Shop]

For a short while I worked for construction outfit as a mechanic/driver. One afternoon I was moving a 953 to a building site on a three axle beaver tail
tag trailer. I unchained dropped the ramps climbed on and fired it up raised the bucket. Along came the property owner to ask questions that I knew
nothing about, I couldn't hear him so I shut the 953 off to talk to him. When he was done I fired it back up and for some reason raised the bucket
some more.

I idled forward and when I got to the tipping point-. Well I stood the tracks damn near vertical, shut it off and was afraid to fart for fear it would go
the rest of the way over. Thankfully it slowly rocked back down straight on the deck. Why I raised that bucket was because my attention was broken
by stopping to talk.

Always finish what your doing-To hell with cell phone calls and worthless discussions. It could mean you or someone else their life.

 

[fixou812]

....i head butted a co worker in the Millwright Shanty no we weren't wearing helmets

 

[Rentalmechanic]

I guess I will spill it ......... About two years ago I was out running service calls ,went to a old brewing company for the last one of the day. Pulled straight in which I never normally do, usually look for obstructions and angle my truck to pull forward and not back out of a job. Well I didnt, fixed the customer up. Cranked the service truck and looked , backed up turned to the right slightly and WHAM !!! Right into a yellow damn pole about 4 ft tall inthe middle of the parking lot. Took the a** chewing and they replaced the door and step on my service truck. Two weeks later on a holiday weekend I borrowed a chop saw ..... The yellow pole is now in my garage!

 

[Willie B]

Thirty years ago the night I bought the Power Wagon, it wasn't registered, so I opted to stiff hitch it twenty miles home rather than drive it. I had no vehicle with adequate hitch, so I borrowed a truck. Soon after starting toward home it began to pull sideways. I blamed the stiff steering in the antique for its refusal to follow. After six miles of 140 from East Wallingford, I was pulling onto Route 7. I felt something let go! I figured out it wasn't connected to safety chains either, and goosed it to get out of the way. The truck rolled across route 7, by some miracle there were no parked cars across the street. It went across 7, over the sidewalk, mowed down a lilac bush, across a lawn, turned back to 7, missed a power pole by inches, and crossed the road again, over the sidewalk again, and came to rest a foot from a stone building.

Turned out the difficulty was about a stuck rear brake on the tow vehicle. Ultimately, I decided driving the unregistered vehicle home was safer than towing.

Willie