The 60 Chevy had a sheet metal guard around the spark plug area. easy to reach but they would slash your hands to ribbons as you changed them.
Sometimes the company will design a special tool for one purpose. The dealers have them. Usually you can buy them.But you have to know they exist to ask.
I KNOW this.
Read what I wrote – I DO use other types of screws. What twists my undies is that other people DON’T – they use a screw DESIGNED to slip out.
Heh, yeah, I remember that; I used to own a '60. The guard was a heat shield to keep the exhaust manifold from baking the heck out of the spark plugs. :dubious:
One time in the 90s I used a hacksaw to fix a Compaq PC. True story.
Sounds similar to the AT&T 6300 WGS that I worked on. Needed to break out the carpentry tools to make wooden parts for that thing. Only desktop PC I’ve ever seen where the leads off the power supply were bolted to the motherboard. It was also back in the dark ages when different manufacturers used different shapes and sizes of rails to slide drives into the chassis rather than simply screwing them in like we do now. I had to fashion rails out of scraps of plywood since AT&T’s drive rails were really weird and really rare.
Flash forward to today… A pox on HP and the design of their newer “single-pass” color laser printers. (as compared to the old “carousel” or “ferris wheel” four-pass designs) The laser optics are built in such a way that dust settles on them, gradually fading out the color. On some models, magenta goes first, and on others, it’s the yellow that goes away. If they built the optics as a sealed box, this wouldn’t happen. So, how do you fix your printer when the color fades away? You have to gut it. On my 2605, the job involves removing nearly 30 screws, one spring and about ten plugs and ribbon cables. That’s just to get at the black box that holds the lenses. Open that up, dust it out carefully, and re-assemble the jigsaw puzzle. Unlike products of IBM or Xerox, there are no nifty green knobs and handles to let you know what to touch, so you need to have a lot of mechanical aptitude to find your way around. Oh yeah, HP doesn’t document this anywhere, and you’ll need to do it once a year.
We worked on a lot of little high pressure 1/2" valves, that were made of carbon steel, and used for… drumroll… steam.
So. Carbon steel + steam = what? Of course, rust.
Well, we need to take the valve bonnet off because its leaking and we have to replace the gasket, or perhaps the seating surfaces need work. Who can say? So you get your wrench on this bolt that hasn’t been turned in around 40 years… Crap… the box end won’t fit! Its too close to the bonnet. Well, ok, lets try a socket, seeing as those are generally a bit thinner. Oops, no luck there either. Oh, and did i mention the nut is sitting inside a little inset, so that you only can get your wrench on about half of it?
*proceed with stripping the nut with the open end wrench because thats all that will fit.
I will find the man who designed that ^(@#)%@ valve. I will find him, and kill him, with the box end of a wrench, so that with his dying breath, he will understand that, yes, there is a better tool for the job, and he should have designed the thing to accomodate it.
Plus, nothing sounds like the 3rd ring of hell like a loose sheet metal heat shield.
What really tears me up are those half-ass Chinese (or something) “universal” screws which have a not-real-deep single slot, AND a half-formed phillips head. Those should be outlawed as you can’t get either type of driver to get a good bite.
I’m a chemical engineer by training. On my last year in college I got a summer job as a lab tech in a small factory. One of the materials used was sulphuric acid, quite a lot of it. One day the Production Manager (Mech Eng) was telling me that they had tried to add a small deposit to the production line so that they’d be able to add the acid by opening a valve instead of having to work with bottles, but they’d had problems with the tanks not lasting.
Me: “oh God, tell me you didn’t use stainless steel and tell me you never tried nickel steel…”
He: 
“yes actually. We shouldn’t have?”
Me: “You should have used plastic. The same plastic the acid comes in. It doesn’t come in that plastic because it’s cheap, but because it can withstand the acid.”
He: “:smack:”
My brother is also a Mech Eng. He once set up to find out whether “paint and print engineers” (chem eng) could do anything better than he could; his conclusion was that he knows how to design the parts for a motor but I know what to make them from and, yes, what to paint them with. He had about one week’s worth of lessons on corrosion, I had a whole 9-month, 5h/wk course.
I once owned a BMW R1200C motorcycle. The battery died on me, as motorcycle batteries are prone to do. No big deal, I think. Nearly every other motorcycle I’ve ridden or messed with you could get to the battery by either simply removing the seat or a single side panel. Easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy.
Wrong. Those German sonsofbitches apparently did not want mere owners doing anything so complicated as jump-starting a battery or replacing it. You had to remove the plastic side panels, remove the seat, remove the bolted on metal side panels, then lift the gas tank so as not to accidentally disconnect it, and finally remove another piece of metal from on top of the battery that was apparently just there as a final ‘fuck you’.
No matter how pretty, how fast, or how reliable, I will never own another BMW motorcycle for the rest of my life after that experience.
I can beat that. A snowball to fix a microwave network link.
Though I’d love to know what you had to hacksaw to fix the computer! 
I feel your pain. Never could afford a BMW but on any bike or lawn mower or ‘other’ that I have to spend more than 30 seconds getting to the battery, when I back my way out I ma pulling two wires that can take a jump or max charge with me and appropriate ends are attached and tucked. I only do that ‘stupid’ engineer s— once if at all possible.
Appropo of nothing, I finally dug out the garage enough to do some stuff to the 89 Corvette I’d been meaning to do for a year or so. It lightly seeps nearly all the fluids it’s got…coolant, oil, tranny fluid…so I’ve got a pile of replacement gaskets on the workbench and I decide to tear into the valve cover gasket swap.
-Whelp, gotta move the AC compressor out of the way. 4 bolts. done.
-Hmm, gotta move this tab out of the way.
-oof, okay, I’ll have to move this hose…hmmm
-Okay, I’ll drain the coolant to move the hose. Done.
-Oh, well, I’ve gotta remove this bracket.
-Ah, I’ve got to unbolt an exhaust pipe that goes OVER the valvecover. The coolant hose that goes over may just have enough slack to get the cover out.
-Humph, a hose goes through a HOLE in that bracket…drain out some more coolant.
-ugh, I’ve gotta crack open the gas lines to move the bracket to get the space to lift of the valvecover.
-dammit, did I just snap a vacuum line?
American engineers in the late 80’s gave NO consideration that anyone would actually work on their cars. 
(I have it on good authority, the replacement LT1 was even worse.)
The valve cover gaskets on my 1966 Cadillac (changes just a week or two ago, so it’s fresh in my mind) took 6 bolts, a rubber mallet, and done.