How’s your day going? Bad? Is it “you lit your engine on fire and now you’re trying to put it out with a lawn sprinkler” bad?
What you’re looking at here is a humble car vlogger’s adventures in automotive maintenance and modification. This YouTuber on The Rusty Toolbox documents some things he’s done to an LS-swapped BMW E36 3 Series (is that a basement vent grate on the hood?) and sets to installing a strut bar.
At four and a half minutes in, shit gets good.
As you may know, installing a strut bar on most cars is pretty straightforward. They’re literally just bars that you bolt to the top of both front shock absorber mounts and boom, instant chassis stiffing. I mean, as to how effective they are at perceptibly improving performance I’m not totally sure, but strut bars are generally cheap and cool-looking and common accessories to see under somebody’s hood.
What’s not too common is having one spontaneously combust.
I’m sure some of our more mechanically inclined readers will chime into the comments on what went down here, but The Rusty Toolbox tells us that the strut bar got inadvertently grounded against the car’s fuel rail, causing the dangerous combination of a spark and a puncture in a something holding highly pressurized gasoline. And the under-hood hibachi was the result.
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I’ll commend our amateur mechanic here for staying calm in the face of disaster, but he might have had better luck extinguishing this thing faster if he hadn’t been so concerned about filming the whole time. Then again, we wouldn’t have been able to post this gem here!
As for the garden sprinkler as a firefighting tool, yeah, I don’t think that’s OSHA approved. Blowing on it… I can’t even.
At least nobody died and nothing exploded. Oh, sorry, spoiler alert.
Let this be a lesson to be careful when you’re messing with machines, even if the potential for fire seems extremely low as I’m sure it did at the beginning of this strut bar brace install.
And for the love of god keep a real extinguisher in your garage.
Hat tip to Keros!
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