Your biggest DIY screwups

Jeffblue

I have two semi recent ones with my 300zx.

First one wasn't so bad. Did my oil change just after getting back from my road trip (brought the car home from florida) and we had the hurricane hit NY. It was a blackout but i really wanted to get that conventional oil out since i was still breaking in the motor. I did the oil change just fine in the blackout but i kept misplacing tools left and right. The only real screwup here was that i loosened the drain plug and because it was dark, i failed to see that literally NONE of the oil went into the catch pan. I drained out the entire contents of the oil pan onto my garage floor.

The 2nd involved installing these z1 gauge rings into the gauge cluster. It takes about 30 seconds to actually put the gauge rings in, but to get the cluster out is kind of a pain in the *** and theres no DIY anwhere so its really just a matter of removing every screw from the drivers side dash area and pulling on stuff.

I had gotten the cluster out installed the rings and was almost done buttoning things up (after 3 hours) then i dropped a screw into the abyss of the dashboard, so i had to take EVERYTHING out again to find the screw. 2 of the screws on top of the shroud above the gauge cluster are very close to the windshield and i was lazy. I decided to just use a screw gun to take them out again and the screw gun bucked up and hit my windshield and cracked it. i was so furious. Imagine taking 4x as long to do something as it should, and then at the end, instead of that satisfaction of 'oh well at least its done' is replaced by 'fvck, i just broke my windshield' Zero deductible glass coverage FTW. I called insurance and told them something must have hit my windshield. I neglected to inform them that that something was me being an idiot.

Before:


After:


Aftermath: