My ex called me one day because her car was making some type of noise. IIRC, it was late, I head a headache, we were in the middle of a divorce, she was like an hour away from where I was…and I just didn’t care. The noise was loud enough that I could hear it over the phone. I told her to take it to a dealership and let them figure it out.
Turns out there’s a plastic cover over the u-joint, which must have been hit with a rock or something and got knocked out of place. The noise was the cover hitting the u-joint like a playing card in a bicycle spoke.
I had an older pick up I was hoping to put a plow on, but for the year or so I had it, it was giving me nothing but problems. At one point, the thing lived on a charger for months as I was trying to work out why it wouldn’t start. After pulling my hair out trying everything I could think of, in frustration, I drained a snapple bottle full of gas from the tank with the intention of (safely) setting some of it fire. I was so lost for ideas I was jokingly making sure the gas would actually burn*. So, I tap into the fuel rail, start the fuel pump and filled up my snapple bottle with gas. A few minutes later when I walked back over to where I had set the bottle down, I saw that it had separated. It was probably half water.
I emptied the tank, got all the water out, replaced the gasket on the fuel pump, added new gas and it ran fine (for a while, then I sold it because it was getting to be an expensive hobby).