Admittedly, I am a newbie, shade tree mechanic and tinkerer. Last year, I bought a 2008 Ford F150 5.4 for my son, it was in horrible shape, I did the timing set, I was so proud. I finally poured fresh oil in the engine to complete the job only to have it all leak out onto my driveway because I forgot to plug the oil pan. On my most recent project, 2007 Lincoln Mark LT, I changed out the timing and had to go back in a second time due to being off a link or two on the driver side chain, I cranked her up with crank sensor unplugged to get the oil pressure to register and nothing, nothing nothing. I look under the hood and I forgot to put the oil filter back on and oil had spurted everywhere. One last blunder, I changed out my wife's brake pads on her 2010 Lincoln Navigator and it screeched and squealed horribly, I discovered I had reversed one of the pads, lol, resulted in the a gouged rotor and ruined pads, hung my head in shame as I went back to the auto store to buy new pads. You don't learn nothing from being perfect that's for sure!!!

 

Most of my blunders have been boating related but yes... I too have learned a few lessons the expensive way.

My wife has backed her car into mine before, damaging both.... -_-

 

People who don't make mistakes -don't do anything or tackle anything . But since I made so many mistakes I had to go and make notes and follow them . I made procedures at work before they required them and now they are submitted and approved.
Working in the nuke you have to learn to get around difficult procedures .I hated to be assigned to the nuke for an outage. Plus we had to take a course in self checking. Failure to follower procedure or stop if there was a problem was a fireable offense .
You never trust yourself and you learn to back up and review . Understandable when you are working on safety trains /critical systems .
At my old age I double /triple check as I'm too tired to do a complete redo .We spend a lot of time looking for something we just put down .
Sounds like you are very capable and save your people a lot of money .

 

Don’t give up and! Keep at it!

I have been wrenching on cars, racing,4wheeling and rock crawling for at least 25 years, and I am still super nervous about doing the timing job.

 

One I can remember is putting the water pump back on the 302 in my bronco without the gasket on it. Then when I filled up the radiator I quickly found my mistake as the water was running out all over the ground....
im sure there's others but that one, though 20 years ago was memorable as I learned rushing a job often isn't worth it, better to be methodical and patient.

 

Its still 2020, remember....

 

For critical things I research and check things 10 times. All that being said, I'm known to leave tools around(in the engine bay, etc.)

 

One time I thought a pencil would be a safe thing to stick in the sparkplug hole of a motorcycle while I was checking for TDC. Well I don't know if the angle of the dangle or one of the valves got me but I broke off the eraser end in the hole somehow. That was no bueno.

 

You learn more from your mistakes than you do from your successes.