3 Decades of survival (What has your car survived)

Or now that we are in the 4th decade of our 3geez I was curious what your cars have survived.

-In the 90s my sister was driving the car and someone T boned her in a parking lot, had to get the lower door skins replaced on the drivers side doors
-Someone jumped on the hood as a joke when my sister was driving it (still has a little dent to this day)
-120Mph in those 13" tires rated for 98Mph
-My sister backed out of the garage and slammed into my dads 80s toyota pickup truck parked behind her in the driveway. The honda had one broken taillight but the toyota needed a new bumper, grill, lights, and more.
-Many many opossums (opossums are soft as I always say)
-Racoons are tough, especially when you run over a family of 6-8 of them at the same time
-countless birds, one hit the A pillar while i had the window down, it was a close call to being smacked in the face with a bird at 70mph
-one of every other small animal
-driving down rail road tracks
-Rear ended while stopped at a light 5 or 6 times, never any damage
-Best accident was, i was parked on the road in a neighborhood and a group of teenage girls driving a 2000 Mazda 3 clipped the corner of my rear bumper. I got a small dent in the metal between the bumper and the tail light (door ding size) and their car was destroyed, the bumper fell off, headlight totally smashed in, fender all bent, hood bent. Wish i had a picture but it was before we all had phones with cameras.
-Driving behind a tanker truck of milk that let loose. Milk does not wipe away with your windshield wipers, it smears by the way.
-Off roading on a very steep downhill and when we got to the bottom, the car was basically on both the front and rear bumper with the wheels barely touching.
-Avoided a driver going the wrong way in my lane on a highway.
-driving through Chicago with 11 people in the car
-driving through water that went up to the hood (weber installed at that time)
-Every kind of weather you can think of, hail, downpour, tornado/funnel cloud
-A trip from Indiana to Arizona including pikes peak with the radiator hooked up backwards.
-probably many many more battle scars i cant think of right now.

Recently last week what made me think of this is that we often joke of how indestructible it is and below is what happened in the last week.
-I was on the highway and a bunch of roofing shingles fell of a truck and smacked my windshield so hard i don't know how it didn't break, i felt the hit in my seat.
-Then I was at the lake and parked my car at the neighbors stone driveway because I didn't want to get oil on the driveway. While i was there they came to mow the lawn and as i was walking out to move the car he was driving his big 61" Grasshopper Zero turn mower between my car and a telephone pole, he clipped the pole, the mowers back end jumped up and slammed sideways into the back side of my car. The car got pushed over a few inches from the hit. Again no real damage, he happened to hit the side of the rear bumper and yes there is a little mark but it could have been worse, unfortunately it didn't break the mower but it did survive.

Dunno about my car, I'm not a living fossil like it is. I do know the second owner drove it around my home town til he died, he owned it for the majority of it's 34 years. He took good care of it but smoked like a chimney, I guess that's typical, did a good job repainting it once then a really shitty job repairing the rust and painting that. I thought I'd find a lot of strange repairs, but only thing I can think of was the choke was held open with a wire. It looked like he hit a freaking moose though, with the original front end on it the driver side headlight must have been 2" lower than the right.

I am wondering how the hell you plumb the radiator backwards though.

It takes a very skilled repair shop to get the hoses switched up. They had trouble getting the hoses to fit and it rubbed against everything including the battery. Worst of all it started sucking in air from the top of the radiator and the car did overheat a dozen times without ever hurting the engine.

Thats a great read conozo....seems like alotta fender benders in your life.

Your car has been quite an adventurer LOL. Mine has lived a boring life by comparison. I ran into the back of a Ford pickup, with a tow hitch, of course, that made a mess of the front grill. It fixed pretty easily and no major damage was done. That's about it over here.

I forgot to add that it was almost smashed by a burger king sign. I was at the drive through during a storm and the big burger king sign blew over the building and landed next to the car only a few feet away. Those signs are huge, way bigger when you see them up close. Something like 9ft x 9ft about.

My car survived me. I learned 90% of what I know on it. My first oil change, tune up, stereo, accident repair, HID swap, interior swap, head gasket, carburetor theory, at rebuild, Mt rebuild, Mt swap, suspension, air conditioning, engine rebuild, 3 accidents, 2 360s, countless speeding tickets, a loud music ticket, tinting, alarm installation, cross-country trips, roaches, ants, hurricanes, floods, hail, snow, on and on and on. I've lost a lot of money and made a lot of money from what I learned on that car. It's sitting in a field somewhere after getting rear-ended by a truck with 300k+ miles and it'll still start and blow cold air if you throw a battery and fuel at it. I miss that car but it would be stupid to go and get it.

Good point POS Carb, i forgot about the learning to wrench on cars. This was the car I started working on. I remember being very afraid to do my first oil change. I knew so little that when I jacked up the car i made sure the wheels were all in the same orientation (center cap logo was straight) so that it wouldn't be messed up. hah, a little embarrassing to admit I was that stupid.