Post your best automotive related prank

Joined
Jan 16, 2009
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88
Location
Midwest
I'll start.

I was maybe 16 or 17 and my parents had an early 80's Buick that was starting to have some issues. So one summer evening, I ran a jumper wire from the high beam headlight bulb to the horn. Then I put the beam switch on high so when the lights were turned on the horn would go off.

I didn't have to wait long as Dad was taking a night class for some certification he needed to renew. As he tells it, class wrapped up and he hopped in the car to head home. Beeeeeeeeep. Said he thought about trying to drive home without lights but it was a 35 minute trip and already dusk. On a whim, he toggled to low beams and the horn stopped. So he drove home with low beams. He was telling us about this the next morning at breakfast. I managed to keep quiet and a straight face. Dad usually did as much work as possible but then he said, "I guess I need to take it somewhere and have it looked at."

After breakfast, I cornered mom and let her in on what I did so she would stop him from taking it to a shop to fix it if he decided not to look at it himself. She agreed and was mostly happy that she wasn't the one to discover the "issue". "I probably wouldn't have thought to switch to low beams" she said.

A couple days pass. I sleep in on Saturday morning and come down to find a coil of wire on the table and a bill for like $50 with a handwritten note, "Son, you owe me for this one." My heart fell to my shoes as $50 was a lot of money for a teenager in the mid-90's.

Well, come to find out, Dad discovered the wire himself and then went to a shop and had them write out a fake invoice. So in the end, I got pranked too.
 
Another one...

A guy at work spray painted a golf ball black to match a coworker's bedliner. Then he put the ball in the truck bed so every time the co-worker accellerated or decelarated the ball would roll and make a noise against the back of the cab or the tailgate. Took him a few days to figure out what was "wrong" with his beloved Ranger.
 
Last one I can think of.

Had a teenage friend who managed to turn the nozzles on his Toyota Celica (?) sideways so he could spray windshield washer fluid (he used water) on people that would walk up to his car. Or the people working the drive-thru at the fast food places.

Which reminds me of a certain group of low-lifes in my class at school who would pile into a car after school to do "drive-bys" using super-soakers on the little kids walking home from school. That came to an end rather abruptly after the local PD got involved.
 
when cars had dual exhaust with no interconnections or catalitic converters, I use a long aquarium line to snake up the one of the 2 pipes, and unload about a cup of transmission fluid, used if I had any. Copious smoke. Then after work, I passed the guy before his exhaust had warmed. He of course took the challenge floored it and in a second there was copious smoke out of one bank. H was sure is $$$$ engine was now junk. About took a beating over that one.

Rod
 
Industrial 1/2" wide zip ties on a truck driveshaft, they're long enough to hit the bed on rotation and make an awful noise.

I've seen someone wire an additional horn to the hood light mercury switch and tweak the bracket so the horn honked on accel and decel.

Also had a horn with a 4 flat trailer plug on it to test trailer lights without a helper. Have seen that put on multiple peoples vehicles after work.
 
Taped up muffler seams, and used a funnel and hose to fIll the muffler with 50wt oil. Quite a smoke screen when it got hot. I think he thought he blew an engine.
 
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When I worked at a research center, we ran a big rubber extruder. When we cleaned it after a run, we always had a big piece of rubber we pulled from the spoked spider at the front. The piece of rubber had eight totally symmetrical segments. We took one, trimmed it really nice with a sharp knife and put it in an envelope and sent it to a guy at work who had just bought a new BMW. Accompanying note aid, "Found this under your car at lunch today." He gets this and we see him run out to his car and open the hood. Of course he can find nothing. So he takes the rubber part and drives right to the BMW dealer before we can tell him it was a joke. They are baffled! Apparently, they had a bunch of mechanics looking at it until they figured out it was a practical joke. Man, that guy was really hot!!
 
While at Camp LeJeune, we would put some Tink’s Doe Estrous in a climate vent of a vehicle driven by an as&$@#. Worked well during the colder months. Just a drop or two was all that was needed. Hunters can vouch for the efficacy.
 
Pulled a spark plug wire off and ran an insulated wire from the plug wire socket and into dirt near the drivers door. Poured water on the ground where the wire was buried. Started the engine and called a friend over. When he leaned in and touched the door he got nailed big time. Did this trick more than once. Lucky I didn't get punched out.
 
Back when cars had the black canister ignition coils we would pull out the the cable going from the the coil to the distributor cap and replace it with a piece of vacuum hose with boot ends on it. Took a while for the driver to figure out why the car wouldn't start. This was back in the days when most cars had an outside hood release.
 
My coworker bought an Aurca MDX that was recently turned in from lease. I joked with another coworker that we should take 1/2 quart of oil and pour on the ground under his front bumper. And put some on the bottom of his engine so it looks like it is dripping out. The guy is very observant and the way he parks it would be very obvious when he walks out of the building.

If only it wasn't so environmentally unfriendly...
 
One summer in the late 1970's I worked at an energy research company, and we had some summer college students working there. It was the last day of summer work for one of the summer students and back then we did not have any internet. We were producing an item in quantity for field testing and were having trouble getting all the parts to build the units and the student who was working his last day was a good and trusted worker who was phoning companies in search of parts. It was the end of the day and this student had an old cheap 2 door car that was so old the paint and body was in bad shape so it would not matter if something accidentally added another scrape or two to that car. The company used metal bands to band large wood crates for shipping some of the projects. And there were crimps and a big hand held crimping tool to crimp the metal bands. So this student was busy in a back office on the phone and the end of the day was near and he was still busy. I got some metal band and a crimp and the crimper and ran a band under the students car and over the doors near the handles and over the roof, pulled the band tight and crimped it. The window were up and with the band there was no way he would be able to open the car doors. I got a band cutter and got every one besides the student in on the joke. We told him we were leaving and when he was done to just leave a note showing the suppliers he had found and that he would be the last one leaving the building the door was set to lock when he closed it. The building had metal doors. We all waited on a drop-off of a hill at the far end of the parking lot so we could see his car but he would not easily see us. A little wile later he came out of the building and walked to his car and saw the band around the top, doors, and bottom and could not open the doors and could not get back in the building to get something to cut the metal band. A brief time later we all came up over the hill side and walked towards him, and then cut the band off of his car. We had got him and gave him something to remember us by.
 
At one company I worked at I had a boss who was a really nice person, and his wife also worked there. So the day before April Fools I got another worker and his wife in on a prank we would pull on the boss. The other worker and I got several packs of balloons and filled up big garbage bags with balloons that we blew up the night before and brought them to work the next day (April 1st). In the middle of the day when the boss was busy we had his wife tell him that she wanted to get something out of his car and asked him for his car keys (she had her own car). She opened the car and we completely filled it with inflated balloons (it was a small Honda so it did not take that much).

At the end of the day as usual he was the last one leaving the building and when he went to his car he had a bunch of balloons to deal with.

What really made this joke better was that the company was in an economic down-turn and had laid off several workers, and one of the persons who was laid off was known as a practical joker. And it was unplaned, but just happened that this practical joker who was laid off happened to be in the area and stopped in during the day just to say hi. The boss though he was the one who put the balloons in his car, and he was so busy that when his wife asked him to borrow the keys he forgot about it.
 
I hose clamped some wheel weights to a guys driveshaft. The car shook so much that the Buick emblem was dancing in circles and both rear doors opened by them selves.

So did the wheel weights have any affect on the car’s operation or what??

Oh wait, n/m, I get it now...
 
There was guy in my high school who was always racing through the parking lot in his super beatle. I guess some of the guys got tired of it cause they got 8 or 10 guys from the football team to pick it up and put it down between two steel posts in front of a building enterance, The posts were just wide enough to fit the car between, but the fenders were too wide to drive the car out from between them.
 
My coworker bought an Aurca MDX that was recently turned in from lease. I joked with another coworker that we should take 1/2 quart of oil and pour on the ground under his front bumper. And put some on the bottom of his engine so it looks like it is dripping out. The guy is very observant and the way he parks it would be very obvious when he walks out of the building.

If only it wasn't so environmentally unfriendly...

Molasses or pancake syrup might do the trick!
 
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