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Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

dietcokefiend posted:

Still doesnt beat the stupidity found in this one.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eP28pbcz4tM

The woman who *gets out of her car* at 0:25 (I guess because she thinks it will explode when it slides into another car at ~12mph) is potentially the stupidest person on the entire planet.

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Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

Clank posted:

I worked with a guy that was a thermite welder for cp rail. This is reminding me of all the stories he had from that job.

I got to watch one when I was working for PennDOT, we had to tear out a rail line into a quarry when we were redoing the interchange and so contractors came in to replace the line. I was an inspector at the time, but it's not like PennDOT lays track or has an inspection book for track, so it was basically just watching them and saying "Yep, they showed up today and layed track."

When the molten iron pours out the bottom of the crucible, it's too bright to look directly at and you can feel the heat on your face from a dozen yards away. It is seriously impressive poo poo.

Thermite vs. engine block:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=niCfOnbo2U8

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

14 INCH DICK TURBO posted:



[and a bunch more]

It's funnier if you pretend those are all from the same vehicle.

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

Skyssx posted:

The world would be safer with drum only brakes. By far.

The world would be safer if you got rid of seat belts, air bags, crumple zones, and anti-lock brakes and replaced all these things with a 6" rusty spike sticking straight out from the non-collapsible steering column. We'd just take longer to get to work.

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

MikeyTsi posted:

Not gold-colored, gold plated. It's done because gold is a really good electrical conductor. It's also highly resistant to corrosion, which is probably pretty useful when in an environment like an engine compartment.


Moreso the latter. Silver and copper are both better electrical conductors than gold, but they're both more reactive. A thin layer of plating isn't going to result in significantly better conductance, especially if we're talking about DC; high-frequency AC likes to stick close to the surface of the conductor, but DC doesn't care about that.

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

The Scientist posted:

My dad told me about a guy in Navy Electrician's school who used to take a piece of copper cable and short out a battery until it was glowing red hot and then stick his face right down into it and light his cigarette.

Back in high school, the clutch cable on my friend's Rabbit lets go, so we're in second gear. Pull into a parking lot and we're trying to splice the cable back together with some baling wire he has in the back seat. He drops a scrap of it and it lands between the terminal and the frame.

The wire just...vaporized. Not sudden like a flash gun or anything, you could see the galvanized coating bubble off as the wire went to a white heat. We ran like hell, because we were 16 and figured that battery hydrogen would explode and turn the car into a flaming wreck. A few minutes later with no explosion, we went back to the car and the wire was gone.

DJ Commie posted:

Charging a battery creates hydrogen, not discharging!

Like I said, we were 16, we just knew that hydrogen was probably involved somewhere.

Phanatic fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Sep 8, 2011

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

The Scientist posted:


They were using them to clean certain hydraulic control parts and they clogged up the hydraulic lines, causing that incident. So they don't use 'em for that purpose no mo.

No, they used them to clean transmissions during overhauls, and they didn't clean this one out enough when they were done with it, for whatever reason, and the grit blocked the lubrication channels, leading to failure of a journal bearing for the input pinion. The hydraulic system wasn't involved at all.

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

JD Brickmeister posted:

I think I will market something even better - a stencil you can place over that area and a can of black spray paint.

Set the Wayback Machine for 1990. My friend's Datsun 210 wouldn't pass inspection, because the wheel wells were rusting through.

Enter some sheet aluminum from the hardware store, some rivets, and a can of spray tar. Passed the inspection, car kept going until at least 1992.

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

Rev. Dr. Moses P. Lester posted:

Heard a motorcycle tire explode once from overinflation, I couldn't believe how loud it was. Sounded like a 12 gauge.

I was driving back home one night on I-95, about 2 in the morning, and was passing an 18-wheeler just as it had a blowout. It sounded like someone put a 12-gauge next to my ear and fired it. Scared the poo poo out of me until I looked over at the truck and saw the trail of sparks from the shredded tire, and even then it took probably about 10 minutes for the adrenaline to metabolize.

Tires exploding following a rejected takeoff test of the A340 (basically a worst-case test: maximum TOGW, worn-out brakes, speed at V1):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hRzWp67PIMw

Edit: Here's a 747-8 version of the same test:

http://www.boeing.com/Features/2011/05/bca_747-8_RTO_05_04_11.html

Phanatic fucked around with this message at 18:17 on Nov 19, 2011

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

The Locator posted:

Hopefully the Airbus folks learned a few things about tires from their expensive looking test failure (presumably they did since the airplane was certified).

The worst thing about that Airbus test was the bad communication with the fire crew. It's okay for the test aircraft to be damaged, that's why you're doing the test, to see what goes wrong if anything and then correct the design. But that poo poo could have gotten someone killed.

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

CaptBubba posted:

I read that in that test some thermal relief plugs failed to work right. They are supposed to deflate the tires in a controlled manner if the temperature gets near where the tires could burst. Obviously they didn't in that video.

They didn't, but the tires actually performed to spec. The Goodrich-Messier *wheels* were the failure point.





It's the Michelin NZG (Near-Zero-Growth) tire that was designed for the Concorde. It's pretty impressive when the tire can withstand greater pressures than the wheel its mounted on can.

Bonus 777 test:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXpjBxD0Rhg

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

buttcrackmenace posted:

Rotor system failures at speed usually result in snapped necks for all crew.

Huh?

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

rscott posted:

We still make parts for 757s

I should loving well hope so, production didn't end until 7 years ago.

I flew on a goddamned DC-9 today. I hope someone still makes parts for that thing. Christ, Delta, I'm surprised you're still not flying people around with piston engines.

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

Motronic posted:

It worse for the environment,


No, it's fine. It's about 3 times worse a greenhouse gas than CO2 is, which means it's way, way less of a greenhouse gas than pretty much any fluorocarbon (which tend to be thousands of times worse than CO2). It's also thoroughly nontoxic.

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

Motronic posted:

Compared to R134a?

Yes, by far. R134a is 1300 times worse than CO2.

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

trouser chili posted:

More valve failure fun!

quote:

On January 12, 2006, at approximately 3 AM in the morning, an explosion occurred in the Chemistry Building (Building Number 484). The explosion was centered in Laboratory 30lA of the 28 Wing, causing extensive damage to 30 I A from a blast wave of unknown origin...Subsequent investigation revealed a massIve explosion had occurred, blowing out two windows in 301A, the wall leading into the hallway, and that a cylindrical hole approximately 24 inches in diameter had been blown through the ceiling. A nitrogen cylinder was found lying in the penthouse mechanical room, its forward momentum apparently stopped by piping in the mechanical room. Damaged piping had caused significant water damage throughout the wing. Additionally, a support beam under where the tank explosion had occurred had sustained significant structural damage in Room 201A. A hood in 30lA was completely destroyed as was a chemical glove box; the wall adjoining 301 B was also significantly damaged.


Based on observations by OHS and subsequent observations by Keith Gustafson of Chart Industries, Inc., the catastrophic failure of the nitrogen tank in room 30 I A was a direct result of the removal and suhsequent sealing of the internal tank pressure relief devices. Without the devices in place, it was indeed only a matter of time until a catastrophic failure of the internal tank occurred. In short, the tank was improperly modified by an unidentified person or persons resulting in catastrophic failure of the tank.

This, children, is why you don't replace your 230psi relief valve and 400psi rupture disk with pipe plugs:





I love that it stripped the tiles off the floor.

Phanatic fucked around with this message at 21:49 on Dec 7, 2011

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.
Gaseous acetylene won't go boom on its own unless it's under pressure, but in liquid or solid states it can indeed explode even at 1atm if you piss it off.

From Ignition!, I think this is the grand-daddy bull-moose of all cylinder failures:

quote:

Chlorine trifluoride, ClF3, or "CTF" as the engineers insist on calling it, is a colorless gas, a greenish liquid, or a white solid. It boils at 12° (so that a trivial pressure will keep it liquid at room temperature) and freezes at a convenient --76°. It also has a nice fat density, about 1.81 at room temperature. It is also quite probably the most vigorous fluorinating agent in existence-- much more vigorous than fluorine itself. Gaseous fluorine, of course, is much more dilute than the liquid ClF3, and liquid fluorine is so cold that its activity is very much reduced. All this sounds fairly academic and innocuous, but when it is translated into the problem of handling the stuff, the results are horrendous. It is, of course, extremely toxic, but that's the least of the problem. It is hypergolic with every known fuel, and so rapidly hypergolic that no ignition delay has ever been measured. It is also hypergolic with such things as cloth, wood, and test engineers, not to mention asbestos, sand, and water --with which it reacts explosively. It can be kept in some of the ordinary structural metals -- steel, copper, aluminum, etc. --because of the formation of a thin film of insoluble metal fluoride which protects the bulk of the metal, just as the invisible coat of oxide on aluminum keeps it from burning up in the atmosphere. If, however, this coat is melted or scrubbed off, and has no chance to reform, the operator is confronted with the problem of coping with a metal-fluorine fire. For dealing with this situation, I have always recommended a good pair of running shoes. And even if you don't have a fire, the results can be devastating enough when chlorine trifluoride gets loose, as the General Chemical Co. discovered when they had a big spill. Their salesmen were awfully coy about discussing the matter, and it wasn't until I threatened to buy my RFNA from Du Pont that one of them would come across with the details.

It happened at their Shreveport, Louisiana, installation, while they were preparing to ship out, for the first time, a one-ton steel cylinder of CTF. The cylinder had been cooled with dry ice to make it easier to load the material into it, and the cold had apparently embrittled the steel. For as they were maneuvering the cylinder onto a dolly,it split and dumped one ton of chlorine trifluoride onto the floor. It chewed its way through twelve inches of concrete and dug a three foot hole in the gravel underneath, filled the place with fumes which corroded everything in sight, and, in general, made one hell of a mess.

Civil Defense turned out, and started to evacuate the neighborhood, and to put it mildly, there was quite a brouhaha before things quieted down. Miraculously, nobody was killed, but there was one casualty -- the man who had been steadying the cylinder when it split. He was found some five hundred feet away, where he had reached Mach 2 and was still picking up speed when he was stopped by a heart attack.

Phanatic fucked around with this message at 16:43 on Dec 8, 2011

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

Fucknag posted:

Easy enough to remove the fan belt, I imagine.

It's still really hard to get a solid block of magnesium to ignite. Finely divided, sure, it'll almost ignite on its own, but when it's in big engine-block form, probably not so much.

This guy did it with thermite, but if you've got thermite you've already got something that burns impressively:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkvQ-BJD2rU

I'm not disputing that solid billets of magnesium can catch fire, I'm just saying that it's not easy. The ignition temperature of a big block of magnesium is about 1200 degrees (almost as high as its melting point), and it's hard to heat a small part of that block to that temperature because it's something like three or four times as thermally conductive as cast iron. So you pretty much need to get the whole damned thing really hot, which takes a while. I mean, aluminum will burn as well, but if your cooling fan fails your aluminum engine block doesn't burst into flame. At least, not generally, I'm sure someone's managed it somewhere
vvvvvv

Phanatic fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Feb 2, 2012

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

Sponge! posted:


Yeah, this stuff would need to go through some place like INMetCo to be processed back to usable poo poo... Otherwise we'd have something like this on our hands:

"December 6, 1983 – Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, A local resident salvaged materials from a discarded radiation therapy machine carrying 6,000 pellets of 60Co. The dismantling and transport of the material led to severe contamination of his truck; when the truck was scrapped, it in turn contaminated another 5,000 metric tonnes of steel with an estimated 300 Ci (11 TBq) of activity.


Not really.

Cobalt-60 has a specific activity of 1.1E3 curies/gram. So that was 5,000 metric tons contaminated by a *quarter of a gram* of Cobalt-60, which is a concentration of .05 parts per *billion*. Mercury's bad, but it's nowhere *near* that bad; the EPA's concentration limit for mercury in drinking water is 2 parts per billion.

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

nm posted:

I did that to two different seat tubes -- clean break -- back in the early 2000s. Gary Fisher can kiss my rear end.

My stepuncle was riding in a triathlon and the local cops hosed up and let a truck onto a street that was part of the course. Uncle's coming down a hill, he looks up to see a truck grill.

He broke the frame of the bike with his femurs. Docs told him that if he'd had a stronger frame he'd have had two broken thighs.

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.
So, this buddy of mine works on oil rigs, he posted this:



(There are supposed to be 6 blades on that bit.)

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.
Horrible mechanical failure of the road surface:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nf0l3NO-35U

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

Farking Bastage posted:

I hate hydraulic leaks. As expensive as hydraulic oil is nowadays, when I inevitably pop hoses on my tractor or FEL I just start tossing 20 dollar bills on the ground limping the fucker back to the garage.

I used to work as a garbageman for the summers when I was in high school.

I'm sitting on the back of the truck going down the street one day when one of the hydraulic cylinders for the compactor decides to let go. All over me. The hose didn't come loose, the cylinder actually split open.

It *felt* expensive. And warm. And not all that pleasant.

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

Nathan Explosion posted:

This is the exact logic Ford used with the Pinto and its magical exploding fuel tank. People still remember the Pinto for that to this day.


People still remember all sorts of bullshit that didn't happen.

http://www.pointoflaw.com/articles/The_Myth_of_the_Ford_Pinto_Case.pdf

quote:

The case of the Ford Pinto, and its alleged tendency to explode in rear-end collisions, provided the occasion for what is universally hailed as our product liability system's finest triumph. Everyone knows that Ford engineers realized the car was defective but decided (in a smoking-gun memo unearthed by trial lawyers) that it would be cheaper to pay off death claims than to change the design. There's just one problem: what "everyone knows" turns out to be false.

Specifically, the calculus in that Ford memo everyone remembers actually dealt with recalling the cars to modify them to comply with hypothetical NHTSA requirements to mitigate fuel fires in the event of *rollover* collisions, not with recalling the car to mitigate rear-end impacts. Even more specifically, the document was addressed to the NHTSA: it was a plea to the government "don't make us do this, it will cost too much" not an internal document saying "We're not going to do this because it costs too much," and the scope of it wasn't limited to Pintos or even to Ford, the costs it tallied were what it expected the entire auto industry would end up having to bear in the event of such a regulation being enacted.

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.
So. Hurricane Sandy sent a storm surge through a storage lot in Port Newark, in which lived 16 Fisker Karmas.


They caught fire and blew the gently caress up.


Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

thebigcow posted:

Every car I've owned required a safari to find the transmission dipstick and fill point :confused:

My favorites are the ones where you need to do that to find the battery terminals, and then the battery's actually hidden away where you can't get at it and there's some random remote terminal sticking up out of some odd place under the hood.

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

General_Failure posted:

I'm certain modern cars have better safety, but nothing really holds up well against an oversized hunk of metal designed to make inattentive people feel safer.


This always makes me wonder about the Smart car. No crumple zones, just a really rigid cage, under the design philosophy that well the other car you're in a collision with will have crumple zones and those will dissipate the energy of the crash so we just need to put you in a stiff cage and you'll be fine.

But putting aside what happens if you crash into a bridge abutment, this is Amurrica, dammit, and we have a huge number of big body-on-frame vehicles that *have* no crumple zones. It's easier to make a small structure stiff than a large one, and so compact cars frequently do better in crash tests then SUVs do, but in a crash *between* a small car and an SUV I'd rather be in the one that has twice as much mass.

PainterofCrap posted:

Why I carry paperclips, golf tees and at least one wire coathanger along with the usual tools.

Your girlfriends must love you.

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

BrokenKnucklez posted:

They are cars made for idiots.

What the gently caress *happened* to Toyota? My first real car was an '82 Supra, and I had an '88 Supra, and they were both fantastic, great-handling, reliable cars. Then Toyota hit a point where they just decided "No fun cars. Only beige." No more Supra, then no more MR2, and then even no more Celica. Just beige. The hell?

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

MrYenko posted:

I had an APU come back from overhaul, and get installed with a 1st stage that looked like that.

That's kind of terrifying. This is what our APUs fail like:

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

Collateral Damage posted:

At least it went out and not in.

I'm guessing there's some sort of shielding on the inwards facing side so you don't shower the passengers or cargo with shrapnel in case it blows?

Aside from the body of the APU itself, no, not really.



That's why they tell you not to be standing there when it starts up.

We're over in India trying to sell Chinooks to the air force over there, they come back from a demo flight, and the plan's that they're not going to shut down, they're going to give me a couple of minutes to run on, download data from the flight, and then they'll do a hot refuel and go back out. I climb on board, do my thing with my laptop, and then turn around to see the entire cabin full of women and kids. Every Indian ground crew's dependents just climbed right the hell onto the helicopter, without mentioning anything to the pilots, with the APU going, with a fuel truck right next to the helicopter, and with no goddamned ear protection at all. Kids have their hands clamped down over their ears because that thing is painfully loud and moms just give no shits.

This is why when I see some news report of a disaster over in that part of the world with ridiculous numbers attached to it, like oh, a train derailed and killed 4200 people, it makes perfect sense to me.

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

KodiakRS posted:



Here's a video of an A340 rejected takeoff certification attempt. The first 5 minutes are kind of slow, but it provides a nice build up to the epic cluster gently caress of an ending. As you're watching keep in mind that this thing is carrying 50,000 gallons of jet fuel.

I've seen that before and the communication during that test was very bad. The relief plugs on the tires failed, and then as the pressure kept climbing due to the fire, the wheels failed before the tires did.



They're lucky nobody got hurt or killed, the communication with the firecrew in particular was awful, it doesn't seem like there was even any brief or plan.

Here's an overweight landing test in the A380. Just on the test rig, not a real A/C, but it's still impressive. This is about 6800 horsepower.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1dv_y_3EK0


Jonny Nox posted:


I wonder if they design engine mounts to sheer gracefully if someone has installed them with a forklift.

Well...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_191#Engine_separation

Phanatic fucked around with this message at 18:44 on Aug 2, 2013

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

xp67 posted:

So if the Lincoln driver is found at fault, how are they going to work out the insurance payout for a car model that hasn't been released yet?

GM almost certainly is self-insured on that car and doesn't even care who's at fault.

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

bandman posted:

I was working at a bulk storage terminal (where the tankers get gas) and when I was up by the road, a passing tanker blew out a tire. I hit the deck and expected to be blown to bits in the next nanosecond. When you hear an explosion and you are surrounded by 500k-1mil gallon gasoline tanks, your life does indeed flash before your eyes.


I'm driving from Durham to Philly, it's about 3:00am, I'm passing an 18-wheeler on I-95. He has a blowout just as I'm passing that particular tire.

I swore someone just fired a gun at me. When I looked over and saw the sparks I started to calm down but it still took about 30 minutes for the adrenaline to wear off.

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.
Not sure if this is a failure or one hell of a success:

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

Seat Safety Switch posted:

A family friend stopped for a deer on his way back from a hunting trip. The deer stopped, stared at the truck, then got scared and ran off the road onto the shoulder, then immediately popped a high speed 180, smashed into the passenger side door, jamming it against the frame and broke its neck by wedging its nose in the crook of the mirror arm.


Deer are completely loving retarded animals. Unless you have a rifle in your hands, then they turn into Einstein with antlers.

I had a coyote commit suicide the other night. Friggin' thing jumped over the Jersey barrier and hurled itself right at my wheel.

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

Chinatown posted:

I was a service valet at a Lexus dealership for a few months (worst job ever).

People with money are often tremendous idiots.

Like buying a Lexus.

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.
Not sure if getting shot down counts as a mechanical failure, but here's a big chunk of Messerschmitt:

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.
Patton Oswalt and Jerry Seinfeld go for a ride in a DeLorean, which shits itself. Looks like all the coolant starts pouring from the exhaust:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eh0S0PBUgDs

(3 minutes in)

Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

poo poo, we had that happen to a chunk of CH-47 drive shaft. Had the thing strain-gaged to measure torque and it was in the calibration fixture and basically the fixture broke in the process of applying a load and we couldn't get the shaft out while it was still being loaded. Simplest thing to do turned out to be to get a bunch of heat guns and heat the shaft section up until the aluminum lost strength and twisted around like taffy.

I should have gotten a picture of that while it was still around, no idea where it wound up.

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Phanatic
Mar 13, 2007

Please don't forget that I am an extremely racist idiot who also has terrible opinions about the Culture series.

Exit Strategy posted:

That's a mechanical SUCCESS, though - The spark's suboptimal but not out of tolerance for the equipment.

The failure's in one of the two smaller switches to the right of the big air switch. There are two of them in series to split the voltage stress of opening, and they're inside bottles of sodium hexafluoride to quench any arcs. The idea is that those switches open *rapidly* to break the circuit (which runs to a bank of power factor regulators off to the right), and then the big air switch opens, and then the little switches close again.

The rightmost switch fails to open, so when its partner does open, it can't stop the arc and the current just flashes across, so the circuit's still live when the air switch opens (you can stop the video and see the arc across that switch prior to the air switch opens and starts the big arc). What kills the arc is that the utility guys were there specifically to track down what was going on, and one of them manually pulled an upstream breaker. If they hadn't been there, that arc would probably have kept going until it arced to ground or another phase.

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