Worst Previous Owner Hack Job?

[AHowe88]

As I get to working on my Blazer I find more and more crap done by the PO that was poorly done or just incorrect. Nothing earth shattering, but I imagine some members here have good stories about the shortcuts and hack jobs previous owners of their trucks have taken. What have you seen?

[mtully79]

My personal favorite was using crushed beer cans to fill in the holes in the windshield frame and then covering them up with a terrible bondo job.

[RANDAL]

Originally Posted by mtully79

My personal favorite was using crushed beer cans to fill in the holes in the windshield frame and then covering them up with a terrible bondo job.

HAHAHA

[BOHICA]

This guy.

For those who don't want to read the whole thread, a member here was posting up about the '70 C10 longbed he turned into a drag truck, which didn't look bad in pictures. A friend traded his good Nova drag car for this POS, and it wasn't until I started working on it for him (he's a bad diabetic and unable to work on his own stuff) that we found out how shoddy a job Garagedude did. Here's what I wrote:

An update:

I've recently begun working on this truck to get it back on the road. It's been sitting since Ron 586 traded his Nova for it.

Where to start... Garagedude did a decent job welding, when he actually bothered trying. The roll cage is NOT fully welded. He left significant gaps where the back bars tie into the main hoop. He was also lazy and didn't even try to weld all the way around the cross-bracing on the back bars. There are also spots where he didn't burn through, but he deeply dug into the tubing. The hoop and front supports are not tied into the frame. They're just welded to the floor, but at least he used plates. When he ran the battery cable from the back to the front, he secured it to the frame the whole way until he got to the cab. For some unknown reason, despite having ample holes in the frame, Garagedude elected to drill bolts into the cab floor, from the underside, to secure the battery cable. He then left two or three sharp, inch-long bolts sticking up on the passenger side of the tranny hump. I meant to take pics, but the friend helping my disassemble the truck yesterday pulled them out before I could take any. The racing seats he put in just had regular nuts holding them on over washers. No lock washers or nylon nuts. Instead of correctly affixing the passenger racing harness to the roll cage like he did the driver's, he ran the shoulder straps down to the floor and bolted them to the seat. There's lots more, but I think that's enough examples.

I wasn't going to post anything, but I thought about it, and since he was just plain too lazy to weld the back braces, I don't really have any sympathy. I'll get some pics posted later. I've never been to Orangeburg Dragstrip in South Carolina, but I don't know how in the world he got it to pass their tech inspection.

I also left out the part where, instead of modifying the existing crossmember or building a correct one, he flipped the trans crossmember and shimmed each of the four corners with two inches of washers and over-sized nuts sitting over the bolts. The front part of the "roll cage" was welded to the cab floor with no tie-ins to the frame, but the dumb@$$ cut out the floor of what looked to have been a nice bed to tie the rear bars of the cage into the truck frame.

I ripped him a new one in the second to last post in that thread. Unfortunately, I never got around to posting the pictures I promised. Pity the guy has never logged back in to see what I wrote.

If nothing else, let this serve as a warning to others looking to buy a vehicle how shoddy work can be disguised to look good on the internet.