What is the worst job you have ever done on a car? By that I mean either the most difficult in itself, or where the most has gone wrong / held you up.

This is prompted by my ENTIRE weekend spent changing the cambelt, fuel pump belt and water pump on the Mondeo. I wasn't expecting this to take an hour, but neither did I expect the 14 that it did take!! Problems encountered:

Seized air-con belt tensioner. Still seized - after unsuccessful use of Plus Gas, had to remove the belt by taking the crank pulley off. Made refitting interesting as well as said crank pulley is a double item also driving the alternator belt. The alternator belt has to go on first. A juggling act like no other, but it's done and it works for now. Replacement tensioner required, but that's a job for another day!
Went to drain the cooling system down only to discover that the aftermarket rad the car is fitted with has no drain plug. Spent over an hour trying to get the bottom hose off (those stupid cheap spring loaded hose clips) removing most of the skin from my knuckles in the process before giving up and using the block drain plug instead.
Over torqued cam pulley made things touch and go with my home made pulley holding tool (cowboy workmanship which is evident all over this car).
No 1 glow plug was not only seized in, but located in such a way in relation to the injection pump and its plumbing that it was an eigth of a turn a time job to both remove and refit it.
Blanking plug for crank timing pin hole fell out of the socket when I removed it and fell down between the air-con pump bracket and the side of the block. Had to remove and carefully support the air-con pump while removing the mounting bracket to get the plug back.
Water pump gasket came off the block only after much careful scraping, and then in hundreds of tiny, well baked pieces.
The lower cover on the cambelt refused to "snap in" to the upper cover. You wouldn't believe how much time I lost here.
The mother of all air-locks was present in the fuel system when re-starting. I have bled the fuel system on this car several times, and this is the one and only time it has decided to soak me and most of the engine bay in diesel when I eased the filter outlet pipe off. At this point I started shouting and swearing at the car believing it to be personal. That's when you know you've really had enough! ;-)

Anyhow the car is now back together, running and all is well, but what an oddyssey! I have no urge to ever tackle this job again, which for someone who normally enjoys working on cars is quite unusual.

That said, it did confirm a couple of things I suspected. The seller of the car (a local-ish dealer) hadn't replaced the tensioners when they did the belt (QH belts, Ford tensioners), the water pump was slightly leaking, and the horrible chattering noise of late on idle was clearly linked to this somewhere 'cos now it's gone.

Good end result, nightmare getting there!

Anyone else had a "never again" job?

Cheers
DP


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