OK, everyone has heard all the shop safety sermons, I preach them to my guys all the time, but I went and did it wrong anyway!! Saturday we were ready to put the 1935 Ford body on my completed LS-1 powered hot rod but decided to fire it up "one more time" to make sure nothing leaked or smoked. Since it is impossible to set the body on with the Lokar shifter in place it was removed. As you probably can guess by now......when it started we found out it wasn't in "N" as we thought....that thing took off out of the shop in reverse and unfortunately...the completed body in primer was sitting in the drive directly in the path of a now accelerating chassis. It slammed into the body (it was on a body dolly) and the whole thing didn't stop until it ran into a very solid block wall. Needless to say the body is now a full 12" shorter than before, the rear tailpan is demolished. Lesson learned!!! We were lucky no one was injured, there was no other damage. Guys.....please check this sort of thing....make a list if you have to but don't take ANY CHANCES!!

 

Sorry to hear about the damage. However, I am glad that noone got hurt.

I second your call for everyone to be extra careful.

Andrew

 

i am about ready to start my car up pretty soon, and i will be very careful on when i start it! great point

 

I made sure that it was in park when I attempted (yes attempted) to start it, but just to be extra sure I un bolted the driveshaft. The front end is on jackstands with no a-arms or wheels...you can imagine what would happen...

 

Thanks for having the guts to share this, hopefully it'll prevent a recurrence. Not me, personally...I've never ever turned the key on a car w/ no clutch interlock and had the car launch, nope never happened here, uh-uh...

 

Been there done that. I wired up the p/n safety wire so it would crank up , it was facing out of the garage , it was in drive, fired her up with my legs out of the car and looked up to see the nose of my RX7 going up under the front of my expedition , scared the livin **** outa me. Neighbor was standing there chuckling to himself. Put a huge hole in the front bumper of both cars where it caught the frame rail on the ford. I was pissed!