Definitely the worst thing I’ve done, definitely the most inconvenience caused over the longest time – I shaved my door handles. Buckle up.
This 1984 Audi 4000S Quattro was my second car, just as I was figuring out that I was a car person. I’ve always been naturally predisposed to taking things apart and making things my own, and I got my feet wet early on with car stereos and lighting, all the easy stuff. During my tenure with this poor Audi though, my ambitions and confidence grew and I struck out for bigger things. I had a vision, however juvenile, and a big bucket of bondo.
Largely, I think I did a great job. I stripped the doors down, mounted solenoids and created linkages, wired everything to a receiver for a fancy key fob, and put an emergency mechanical rear door release in the trunk. I may have done slightly less great a job on the bodywork, I simply pulled the door handles off and filled the handle recesses with lots and lots of filler. But I did a decent job shaping and sanding and I think it would have looked decent enough if I ever got around to painting it beyond a few masked off rectangles of primer.
Style aside (it looked SO rad), this is where the wins sort of tapered off. Everything worked well for a while, but soon enough the click-to-pop feature ceased to function. Decades later I honestly can’t remember what failed, but my method of entry ended up being the manual trunk release more often than not. The convoluted route of the release cable made it challenging to pull and the knob on the end eventually broke leaving only a steel end with a few bends. That’s when I started carrying the crowbar, which would hook onto the cable end and give me enough purchase to yank it hard enough to operate. In the spring and summer I’d just leave the window down enough to reach in and open the door, but in the cold, snow, and rain, it was the whole process. I’d have to use the physical key to unlock and pop the trunk, grab the crowbar and use it to pull the release cable, open the driver side rear door and reach up to the front door to pull the handle from the inside. I did this for YEARS. I also cannot for my life remember why I didn’t just fix the door poppers.
I’ve done a lot of questionable or just plain terrible things to my cars over the years, both driving and with a wrench, but this was the one that probably caused me the most collective aggravation. And I have no regrets.