Smashing Steel As Stress Relief: Here’s a Great Use for Old Car Parts

Working on an old car can be rewarding, but it invariably also inspires frustration. Come to think of it, that applies to almost every enterprise in life. I stole an old TV show’s idea for diffusing temper tantrums, and what do you know, it’s become pretty popular around my house. Behold, my “stress panel.” Or, at least, what’s left of it.

A decade or two ago, I was watching a show called Junkyard Wars (also known as Scrap Heap Challenge in other markets). Folks, if you never got to see this, you missed out big time. In Junkyard Wars, competing teams were set loose in a junkyard with the task of building something (usually some kind of car or buggy-type thing) with the rubbish they found lying around. At the end of the allotted time, the vehicles would race each other or something. To this day, I think this concept is more interesting than any other reality show, but the point of my referencing it is this:

While I can’t find a clip of this, in my memory, there’s an episode in which somebody strung up an old hood or car door with chains, like a perverse gong on some kind of Hellraiser-style torture rack, with the words “STRESS PANEL” spray-painted on it.

The idea was that if a teammate got mad and wanted to rage out, they could mercilessly smash the stress panel to exhaust their tantrum before pivoting back to problem-solving.

I loved this idea and adopted it when I started doing car projects and making junkyard runs myself around age 16. I had a metal sunroof from a second-gen RX-7 that I’d harvested for interior trim pieces, and I’ll tell ya, that little steel rectangle lived an exceptionally miserable existence as my anger outlet through most of high school.

As teenage angst subsided and I started living in places where hammering on metal would freak people out, I outgrew the need for a stress panel, and ultimately forgot about them. Until this week.

Having fixed up the front end of an old Honda recently, I found myself with a few slightly damaged body panels lying around the shop. I was about to drag a starting-to-rust-therefore-worthless front fender to the dump when I remembered the stress panel. The fender had the perfect combination of size and flimsiness that, I could just tell, would be deeply satisfying to smash.

Days later, as though the universe had planned it, my wife was having a hell of a time with a frustrating situation I’ll spare you the details of. Something along the lines of “I just want to smash something” came out of her mouth, and I knew exactly what to fetch for her.

I propped up the fender, handed her some protective gear, and finally, my favorite engineer’s hammer, then took our dog and hid upstairs. As the house shook with her hammer swings, I found myself worrying that she’d get excited and start smashing my actual collectibles, but mercifully, she stopped short of turning the whole garage into a rage room.

After absolutely brutalizing that once-almost-usable piece of bodywork into what looked like a discarded candy bar wrapper, she told me she felt a lot better. The stress panel had been a success.

If you ever feel like you just want to wreck something, and punching your pillow just doesn’t cut it, find yourself a thin metal fender and hang onto it until you need to go ape.

Take a little care in your stress panel selection, though. Plastic’s not usually that satisfying to hit, and it’s annoying to clean up. Glass is obviously going to be a nightmare to clean. Fiberglass, you definitely don’t want smashed up on your floors—same for lightbulbs. And super thick metal will just hurt your hands. But a thin, floppy old fender that’s not nice enough to put on a car? Heck yeah. Happy smashing.

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