Im starting this thread to share some of my bonehead mistakes.(sorry if there already is one)
Please feel free to share some of yours
Even if there embarrassing.......



So ive owned maxima's for quite sometime.

I do all my own work. I cant even remeber the last time one of my cars has been in a shop.

But yesterday was a day from hell......

A couple of days ago my brake and battery light came up on me while i was driving down the freeway. I figured that my alty went out since my VTC is leaking oil and some is getting in there. So i finally put a gasket on the VTC.

So i went to my parts car to pull off my alty. Well this car has been sitting in Minnesota weather for the past year so alot of the bolts on there are rusty and corroded and hard to get off.

I maybe have done the alty 3 times in the maxima. So im pretty familar with them. But i only had hand tools and i swear it took me a hour just to get the damn thing out.(and the A/C was pretty much unhooked already)

So i get back to my car back home(parts car is at my parents house) And i start unbolting the eletrical to the alternator. Then i went and go loosen the idler pulley to release the tension from the belt and the idler pulley was loose already.

Low and behold There is no motherfing belt there!!!!

So i go up to o'reillys and grab a new belt. Put it on and all was well.

Then i lowered the car down(little faster then i usually do)
Took it out for a test drive. And all of a sudden there was this loud clunking sound. So i took a look at my driver's side suspension. And sure enough the Sway bar end link ball popped out of the fitting.

So back to o'reilly's i go. I have never replaced the sway bar end link. And seeing that there is salt on the roads at least half the year you can just imagine what those bolts look like. I stuggled with hand tools to get it off. So i wound up just taking the sawzall to it(that i had to go back to my parents house to get)

After its all said and done all i can do is nod my head and laugh at myself for the bone headed mistake i man yesterday.

Sorry for the long rant. But ive done much more complicated things on my max with ease.

Well thats my story and my rant. I had to let out some of my anger........

Maybe later on ill share how my dipstick is still in the upper pan

 

Haha I have one story to share as well! And what I was doing was even simpler than your alternator replacement haha!

But I was taking out my battery one day to clean the terminals and the pan it was sitting on, and after all was done I put everything back and started bolting things back together except I put on the negative first (Which was not supposed to happen) and when I got to the positive terminal my wrench slipped out of my hands as I was tightening the clamp and the other end of the wrench landed exactly on top of the negative terminal while still hooked on the positive! It was freaking FINAL DESTINATION S*** the ground was wet and the car was slightly wet from a drizzle a few hours ago and so things could have been worse if I didn't let go of the wrench. But as for the wrench, there was a nice firework show in my engine bay for like 3 seconds and I didn't know what else to do so I just slapped my wrench away and for some reason it wouldn't come off the positive clamp bolt so the end on the negative terminal just flew straight up then back down on the terminal but I grabbed it before it landed on the terminal again.

And to this day there is a little melted spot on my negative terminal kind of like when you light a candle and a side of melts away leaving the other side higher.

 

6 years ago I was helping a friend (97TurboMax)with his Max at my place. We had just finished boosting his car (PFI kit), and we were checking everything out before the first test run.

I got the task of changing the spark plugs. Ok, simple task. But after working on the car for over 24 straight hours I mustve been really tired.

I removerd the coil packs and dropped in the new plugs. Went to tighten them in. Cylinder 1, tighten.....CRACK. Oh crap, I had forgotten to remove the old plugs.

Well the ceramic had broken off the old plug. So I removed the plug and then proceeded to Mickey Mouse a vacuum cleaner to get the pieces out.

2 drink straws duct taped to the vacuum cleaner hose and 20 minutes later I got it.

Put the new plug in tightened it down, all was good. Cylinder 3, tighten...CRACK. DAMMIT!

Yeah, not so bad that time. Just cracked it, nothing to clean out.

So we called it quits for the night, got some sleep and went at again the next day.

I have a video of it somewhere. Thomas (SX7R) did the recording.

 

Two words: E-manage Ultimate.







And I still haven't figured out my problem yet. Thanks to Product of Korea I'm getting help though

 

Nothing's better than forgetting to put the oil pan drain plug back in after draining out the oil.

There isn't a greater feeling in the world than the kind you get watching $20.00 worth of fresh oil flow in...and back out of car. Especially when in your frustration, you forget about and step in the puddle, and fall on your ***...

 

 

First part of OP's story is what got me stuck in Brooksville. Goddamned belts. The only bonehead mistake I ever made with my Maxima was putting 87 octane in it.

 

With the price of gas, and the fact that most of your average drivers use regular regardless of what the vehicle mfg says, this "mistake" caused what to happen?

 

When i was stock id always use 87.

The 4th gen's timing maps are so sh!tty anyways i dont see 87 harming anything.



When i did the 3.5 swap i used the 3.0 upper oil pan. And when i put the 3.0 pan on i still had the dipstick in the block so i pinched the dipstick inbetween the block and the oil pan.

It didnt interfere with anything so we just cut off the both ends of the dipstick and left the one part of the dipstick pinched(if it were to leak it would be internal no biggie) Only reason why i didnt redo it is cause right before we started it up i wanted to check the oil. Well i couldnt pull out the dipstick. Wound up dropping the lower pan and saw the dipstick pinched in the upper pan

to this day my car has two dipsticks in it

I still have the handle sitting in my car to remind be of my boneheadiness

 

I used to put 87 in it and maybe it was something that was going on strictly in my brain, but I found it ran slower, a little sluggish if you will. Once I joined the org and I found that most members put 93 octane, I started using it and bam. Car runs like a champ and except for my IACV, she has no problems at all running. 93 octane at 2.73+ is a ***** at times, however I suck it up. If I could afford 100 octane, i'd put it in

 

You think 2.73 is bad........

i remeber when i was paying like 4.50 for a gallon of 92

I will gladly pay 2.60~ for 92......

 

didn't eat before going to the bar and got a dui, still can't drive 2 years later (due to money issues)

 

I paid 4.11 for 87 back when I had a Sentra I feel ya.

 

Alright I have one that's pretty boneheaded. I was bored a couple months ago and decided to put a cone filter on the Maxi...so I went over to the zone bought a Spectre Filter and MAF adapter and headed home. Well I got into a hurry so I put everything on and all was good. Took the car to St. Louis (60 miles north) everything was fine...well I went through the drive through at a Culvers and while the cars setting there idling the SES light comes on so my first reaction is something because of the intake. So I turn the car off and turn it back on to see if maybe the code would just magically dissapear..., well I looked at my temp gauge and it was all the way at the top . So I shut the car off and push it over to a parking spot and let it cool down for a little bit. So I start it back up and pull over to a gas station and check it out and my fans aren't working so I knew that if I drove it home on the highway it would be fine since it was just the fans so I drove it home. Well when I got home I looked all over under the hood for the problem and I found it The main plug that goes into the fuse box right by where the filter sets was unplugged!!!! I must have accidentally unplugged it when I put the filter on...Plugged it in and bam...fans started working. And when I checked the SES code it wasn't anything revelant either, I guess it was a sign from god because I wouldn't have even noticed my car was overheating unless it had went off

 

Day was stressful.. alot of family issues were coming up and I didn't really give a S#$T to pop my hood. However that whole day I was roll starting my car. I was receiving no pwer what so ever at ALL. After that day I decided to pop my hood and realized my battery terminal was loose as crap.
Whoops.

 

well i did another one and this one might cost me a engine

Had my son push on the gas to see if i could see a oil leak coming out of the cam bracket on the timing chain cover.well he reved her all the way.(i dont have a rev limiter so he could of went to 8.5k) And this is what happened after i "had fun with a integra"



Plus the spark plug for cylinder #6 was smashed...........

 

that sounds pretty bad there. I ran my old maxima without oil for a couple of seconds, till I realized that I never put oil in it after I went through all the other procedures of an oil change. Luckily it was just for some seconds and no damage was caused to the engine.

I also somehow moved the gears from D to R while going about 5-10mph when I was 16, on the street(the levers gear lock or whatever it is called was broken). The car turned off on me, but again no damage. Never again...

 

Haha. I did the same thing when I was 17 on my '92 Ranger. Automatic, column shifter...I tried manually shifting the gears and kicked it up too high into reverse. Like you, no damage, the truck just shut off.

 

just the otehr day i was replacing a coupler on my pop charger intake, and in a hurry i forgot to reconnect the MAF wire harness. i started the car, it ran rough for a couple seconds then died. i remembered the harness and reconnected it only to find that i had a code for a faulty MAF...luckily there was a good tutorial for resetting the ECU codes on here, so i got it all fixed up.

 

Lol that one always gets me

 

A few months ago, my headlights burned out and I had to replace the bulbs and so I went to my local auto store, brought the bulbs that burned out along and tried matching up the bulbs according to how the connectors look like and after 5 minutes I found a 9007 bulb with a connector that was exactly like my old ones and so I bought it and took it home.

When putting it into my headlights I noticed something odd, my old bulb and new bulb both look EXACTLY the same but my new one won't go into the headlight housing. And so I decided to just try to gently force it in. And after a loooooonng time a tab on my housing broke off and the bulb fitted right in. Assuming that there was some sort of defect with the that ONE bulb I went to the other side only to have the same problem. And so I decided to just grab some pliers and break off a tab. And at this point I thought they updated the tabs on the bulbs or something and I didn't give it a second thought.

When I turned on the lights they were really bright and I was thinking (Yes! These new bulbs were two times as bright as my old ones, WIN! It was well worth the tab breaking) But when I looked into the dash my high beam dummy light was on and when I checked the light stalk it wasn't set on high beam but on low beam... And so I tried putting the high beams on and the light immediate dimmed and dimmed a lot! And so I tried to get used to the new light configuration for a day but I hated how dim it was, and so I took out the bulbs and compared it to my old bulbs again. And right on the side of the bulbs were two different numbers 9007 on my new one and 9004 on my old one.

So I went back to the store knowing that their return policy only works if there is a defect with the item, not the owner buying the wrong thing. And so I tried to say that the bulbs didn't fit and that a tab was not lining up with my housing. And so that guy said, "well, why don't you show me" and I knew the attempt was over as the bulb went right in because of the tab I broke off. And I asked if I could just exchange it and he said sorry that it was against policy.

So I went home pondered it some more and went back one more time and explained the whole story and he took pity on me and allowed me to exchange the bulb for a 9004 But to this day I have some crumbs of the tab inside my headlights

 

I was cleaning the throttle body and decided to be lazy and not take it completely off. Like an idiot I put the plastic tube on the front of the can and didn't hold it so when I sprayed it launched into the intake. Luckily with some patience and sweat I was able to grab it back out. Learned my lesson real quick.