Ohhh, these are all good...but...

So I was done restoring my coupe, managed to get it through the start-up, needed to do some fine tuning and in this particular case I had to remove the Carter TQ carb from the intake to re-jet.

Seeing as the carb was already off I figured I might as well do a quick cranking compression test...well, of course I didn't want "da beast" to all of a sudden start on me (didn't know if it would, but the intake runners had some fuel in them already, and well, I figured it was best NOT to let a spark near that fuel as I was worried about a run-away engine hitting sky-high RPMs with whatever fuel was in there already!!!). So I pulled the coil wire out of the distributor cap (can you spot the potential problem here yet??? LOL) to prevent the motor from coming to life!

Yeah...well, at that moment I didn't see anything wrong with THAT particular approach...so off I went to crank it a few times, and KAABOOOMMMM, before you know it I have a major BBQ going on in my engine bay...yikes!!!

The car is half-way in the garage (all of engine bay is) so the flames are fairly high and in that split second I'm thinking the whole place will catch on fire!!! I grab a rag thinking I can smother the fire...ha, amateour...the flames are getting bigger not smaller...nothing like feeding the fire more O2 idiot!

I make a mad rush for the water hose, which is on the spool attached to the house, haul my ass back to the car and hose everything down, fire is put out. I literally walk away from the car, grab a cold brew (of which I had NONE prior to this event) and empty the 0.5L bottle in just a few seconds.

The root cause: removing the carb left the fuel line completely open, and the dangling coil wire just hanging there of course still needed to let the electric charge out somewhere...yeah, like towards the fuel that the mechanical fuel pump was dumping out on the intake manifold as I happily cranked the motor over a few extra times to get "a real good compressoin reading"!!!

It took a couple of weeks to re-do some of the wiring (which I completely stripped down and re-taped). No serious damage otherwise, but man, my nerves were tested, I honestly though I was about to see nearly 10 yrs. of work go down in flames (literally).