|
Sagebrush posted:At my former university, the physics lab had some sort of flywheel device blow up thanks to a hairline crack in the rotor. I don't remember the exact numbers, but the rotor was about the size of a beer keg and it spun well over 100,000 RPM. It let go while they were still spinning it up, so it hadn't reached maximum energy yet. A few years ago at Texas A&M one of the big liquid nitrogen dewars let go because at some point along the line some genius had replaced the relief valve and the rupture disk with pipe plugs.   I like that it stripped the tile off the floor.
|
#
¿
May 22, 2014 15:30
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 08:55 |
|
|
Chinatown posted:That honestly could have gone alot worse. For example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LFLV47VAbI (Actually, it's a horrible mechanical failure that even got the aircraft to that point. It was going to be sacrificed in weapons-effects testing at Aberdeen because previously, on a ferry flight out of Corpus Christi Army Depot, it suffered an uncommanded flight control input and *did a complete roll*. The crew managed to avoid crashing it but the airframe was overstressed and was not going to fly again.)
|
|
#
¿
Jun 2, 2014 21:25
|
|
|
QuarkMartial posted:Can you even buy leaded gas anywhere in the U.S.? Avgas. It ain't cheap.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 2, 2014 03:53
|
|
|
Sagebrush posted:Worth noting that a lot of the airplanes you see out there are old. Like, a lot of the high-wing Cessnas you see around were built in the 1950s and 60s. And there's a conservatism in airplane engine designs for obvious reasons. It might take only a few % of rated output to keep a car cruising on the highway for hours, the same isn't true of something that needs to stay airborne.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 2, 2014 19:42
|
|
|
jamal posted:93 would have done you just as well while costing less and not ruining poo poo. Factory tune is optimized for it. Higher octane does prevent knock and pulled timing in hot/track conditions when things get heat soaked, but it won't give you more power or make a difference driving around town "boosting" or getting on the highway. And it's got a lower energy density so it'll even give you worse mileage. Unless you need higher octane to prevent knock, it's not doing you any good.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 3, 2014 14:07
|
|
|
Jamus posted:If you don't use your parking brake, how do you know when you're done driving? Parking brake's more important with an automatic, not less. Leave your manual parked and in gear with the brake off and you need to turn the engine to get the car to move. Leave your automatic parked with the brake off and the only thing stopping it from rolling's the tiny pawl that locks the output shaft to the transmission casing. People are just dumb. I'm not sure why it's controversial that people adjust their behavior to maintain the same level of perceived risk. Give people seatbelts, they drive faster. Give them ABS, they don't leave as much space between them and the car ahead. It's why traffic calming works.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 10, 2014 16:27
|
|
|
Bluetooth works fine in my car. Ford SYNC, powered by Microsoft, is the buggy piece of poo poo there. They build a system for you to hook your iPhone up to that can't actually handle the number of songs you can put on an iPhone. It's a wonderful fantasyland of awfulness.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 10, 2014 20:24
|
|
|
iwentdoodie posted:Sync in my Escape works flawlessly for hands-free phone use. Yeah. The hands-free phone use is great. Everything else sucks. I plug the phone in via the USB port. Sometimes it refuses to play music that way. It sits there "Initializing..." and then does nothing but drop me back out to the previous menu, and I have to switch to Bluetooth for it to play; this behavior randomly fixes itself. Sometimes after the next time I get into the car, other times it stays broken for weeks. Other times, while listening to music, Sync randomly crashes and I can't do anything except listen to the radio while it reboots. And forget about the voice commands to play a particular artist or album or song or whatnot, I have so many songs that "some voice commands are not available." I'd love for them to push a firmware update when they get around to switching over to QNX for the backend but that's probably not doing to happen.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 10, 2014 20:55
|
|
|
Motronic posted:I'm constantly amazed at how bad built in nav systems are. The one in the Tesla just does Google Maps and it's wonderful. That's on the big 17" display. The little display inset in the gage cluster runs Garmin. It's night and day.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 11, 2014 02:37
|
|
|
Sagebrush posted:What the hell kind of situation makes a piston look like it's been attacked with a ball-peen hammer? More specifically than "catastrophic failure of the everything", I mean. Predetonation?
|
|
#
¿
Sep 17, 2014 15:11
|
|
|
CarForumPoster posted:I just learned a fun fact: If a 747 main landing gear tire bursts at its operating pressure of 194psi, it releases energy equal to 0.60 sticks of dynamite. However the maximum burst pressure of a 747 tire is 1170 psi and it bursting at that pressure is an energy release of 4.4 sticks of dynamite! It sure can be, though. Tire debris flying up into the wing and rupturing the fuel tank is what killed the Concorde. And here's a rejected takeoff test of an A340 featuring some spectacularly poor communications between the test director, the aircrew, and the fire crew, in which they're lucky nobody got killed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUMuOyMTQ8Y
|
|
#
¿
Dec 2, 2014 15:29
|
|
|
QuiteEasilyDone posted:In the case of that aircraft the tires actually held up... it was the rims that catastrophically failed if I've been reading correctly Yes, that's correct. And also, yes, the reason the fire crews didn't move in immediately is because the test requirement is that the aircraft has to sit there, after coming to a full stop, for five minutes before they can intervene. If it can't do that safely, it's a failed test. The fuse plugs didn't fail, either. The Goodrich wheels failed before the fuse plugs in the Michelin tires were even supposed to activate. The tires performed to spec, it's the wheels that didn't. Looked like this: 
|
|
#
¿
Dec 3, 2014 16:10
|
|
|
Weiner failure:
|
|
#
¿
Feb 16, 2015 22:28
|
|
|
kastein posted:. Oh, and fuel lines and O-rings that don't dissolve in ethanol. Big problem for motorcycles. Gas stations aren't going to want to have separate pumps for E85 like they do for diesel. But if you have one pump that switches between E15 and E85 (like you do for different octane grades of E15), there's a new issue. Guy in a new multifuel-capable car pulls in and fills up his car with E85. Now there's a bit of E85 sitting in the hose. Next guy in line switches to E15 to fill his car. No big deal, the bit of E85 carryover in the hose isn't going to do much diluted in a full-size fuel tank of E15. But if the next guy in line's on a bike with a 4- or 5-gallon tank, then that's enough E85 in the hose to raise the ethanol concentration in his tank to well above E15. Ethanol in gas is retarded for so many reasons.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 24, 2015 17:41
|
|
|
|
|
#
¿
Apr 7, 2015 03:22
|
|
|
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2OEQ08W8zo
|
|
#
¿
May 5, 2015 20:39
|
|
|
Throatwarbler posted:So what if all the doors unlock instead of just the one you are closest to? What problem is this supposed to solve - in case a zombie carjacker jumps into the passenger seat with you? Or an abusive boyfriend, a violent assailant, etc. Not unlocking doors by default that the operator doesn't want unlocked is a pretty good design decision.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 2, 2015 15:28
|
|
|
Cow orker just arrived in England for a business trip, he ended up calling the corporate rental office for a replacement car because the one he was in kept stalling every time he stopped at a red light. I'm not sure what's worse: that he didn't realize that's a common feature over there and that it's not stalling, it's shutting itself off automatically and that he doesn't need to turn the key again, just apply some gas pedal and it'll start again; or that the rental car agency didn't tell him that either and just drove a new car over to him. When the second car had the same problem that's when he figured it out.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 22, 2015 17:25
|
|
|
Safety Dance posted:I was once towing a ditch digging machine with my 4cyl Wrangler that had a broken parking brake. I tried to park facing downhill in gear. The ditch digger was so heavy, it just pushed the poor jeep down the hill. Out in Arizona the release button on the parking brake to my '82 Supra turned brittle and broke into two pieces. So I could still apply the brake by pulling up on the lever, but there was no way to lock it in place until I got a replacement plastic nubbin. I was living in one of the rare houses in Phoenix that has a driveway on a hill, and I habitually would leave the car in gear when parking in the driveway when the roommate got home first and took the garage spot. So that day I got home and as per usual pulled into the steep driveway, and put the car in first gear, but didn't apply the parking brake because I couldn't. Next day I get up to go to work, walk outside, and the car had verrrrryy slowwwwwly crept backwards down the driveway, and was blocking the sidewalk with the rear wheels on the street.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 7, 2015 20:19
|
|
|
xzzy posted:Feynman had a lot to be happy about, help build an atomic bomb That, he wasn't very happy about. He actually suffered some pretty serious depression about it post-war. He'd see new buildings and bridges going up and just think "Those idiots, don't they know how futile that all is?"
|
|
#
¿
Nov 16, 2015 17:23
|
|
|
F-150 takes two rounds of armor-piercing .50BMG to the block and keeps running (albeit barely). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zd-hMXeMoA
|
|
#
¿
Jan 4, 2016 22:10
|
|
|
MadScientistWorking posted:This is the scariest mechanical thing Ive come across in a while. The tracks look like cooked spaghetti. See you and raise you a Tu-95 taking off. Or rather, trying to take off. It's more exciting than I was expecting. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtqYAv5xyTg
|
|
#
¿
Jan 19, 2016 20:36
|
|
|
some texas redneck posted:It burns hot enough that when water hits it, it breaks the water down to oxygen and hydrogen, which just adds to the fireworks. Nah, that's not the issue. Think about it: any thermal disassociation of water into H2 and O would just result in the near-immediate reaction of H2 and O to produce water, just as soon as the reaction products cooled below the decomposition temperature; there's no net release of energy there. The problem is that water just plain reacts with magnesium to produce magnesium hydroxide and free hydrogen: you are literally spraying the burning magnesium with an oxidizer.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 3, 2016 04:17
|
|
|
|
|
#
¿
Feb 5, 2016 16:19
|
|
|
Uthor posted:Forward = go, backwards = reverse is opposite of what most people are used to and would be super confusing! Having to move the lever three times to go from drive to reverse makes parallel parking a joy! My Ford has 1st gear and Reverse in the same position on the tree, except to shift into reverse you push down on the shifter as you shift. It's pretty damned easy to shift into 1st when you want reverse and vice versa, and it's loving stupid. Stick reverse on the other side of the tree like it's sane to do. 
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2016 18:16
|
|
|
xzzy posted:Pfft if you have to shift more than twice to parallel park, the failure isn't the transmission. Agreed, but with this one that means you need to move the shift lever six times, that's loving retarded.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 12, 2016 18:22
|
|
|
My old Supra had the radio antenna embedded in the windshield glass. Helped make it damned good-looking car, but I'd hate to think of the replacement cost. especially today.
|
|
#
¿
Feb 29, 2016 20:48
|
|
|
I'm sad that the story behind this is almost certainly nowhere near as exciting as it should be:
|
|
#
¿
May 24, 2016 21:42
|
|
|
Memento posted:It's not. The entirety of the story is "photoshop". drat. I figured it was a sculpture.
|
|
#
¿
May 27, 2016 17:24
|
|
|
spog posted:I heard second hand that a RAF maintenance guy got killed when working on a plane because he didn't bother to fit the mechanical lock-outs that prevented the ejector seat mechanism from going 'bang' while he was working in the cockpit. In 1980 a 7-year-old kid died during an airshow at Willow Grove. He was touring the cockpit of an S-3 and they were letting him fiddle with the controls, figuring there was no way he'd be able to do anything dangerous like both arm and fire the ejection seat. They were wrong.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 20, 2016 15:49
|
|
|
Saukkis posted:What's the reason for safety wiring no more than three bolts at a time? I don't think there is one. I work on aircraft, I see more than three bolts being wired regularly.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 24, 2016 18:01
|
|
|
Sagebrush posted:Fine, but that still doesn't mean anything. What is the fuel? It does mean something, and the fuel in that example would be monel. quote:I really have a hate-on for useless gee-whiz superlatives like that, which sound impressive to the layman but mean nothing Apollo 1 suggests it does mean something.
|
|
#
¿
Jun 27, 2016 00:24
|
|
|
The Door Frame posted:His car is practically fresh off of the factory floor and is only the second time on the track ever. 15 continuous minutes of hard driving ignites his fuel lines and he's not immediately saying "lawsuit". He's not even wondering why a new car, advertised on speed and power, catastrophically fails when using that power. Nope, he's buying a newer one, presumably to also drive at the track Doesn't sound like he's *buying* a newer one, it sounds like the dealership has in mind exactly what you're saying and is throwing a newer one at him.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 2, 2016 18:17
|
|
|
cheese-cube posted:Cross-post, might not be a mechanical failure but close to one: "crew members realized that honey bees are at risk of extinction" Jesus Christ, CNN, you're not even trying to limit yourself to factual information anymore.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 13, 2016 00:59
|
|
|
literally a fish posted:Except that's not (hugely) wrong? It's *hugely* wrong. Honeybees are in no danger of extinction. None whatsoever. That individual colonies might collapse at a greater rate doesn't mean a danger of extinction. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/07/23/call-off-the-bee-pocalypse-u-s-honeybee-colonies-hit-a-20-year-high/ Even if there weren't more *domestic* honeybee colonies right now than there have been for decades, that still wouldn't mean honeybees were in danger of extinction. The only thing that could be more wrong than claiming that is claiming that they're actually extinct. "Crewmen realized these were the last honeybees in the known universe so they called for a beekeeper."
|
|
#
¿
Aug 13, 2016 01:18
|
|
|
Sagebrush posted:I have to imagine that by the 6th pair of cylinders you'd have to call it an air-heated engine, not air-cooled. 6th pair? A mere 12 cylinders? 
|
|
#
¿
Sep 1, 2016 03:36
|
|
|
TotalLossBrain posted:I came here to post this ^^ . I've seen one disassembled in the Boeing Museum of Flight (I think - may have been that private museum in Northern Oregon instead). The size and complexity are incredible. They also belong in the horrible mechanical failures thread. They were used to power the B-36, but were problematic in that application because they were installed as pusher props, which they weren't designed for. In a conventional tractor configuration, the cylinders are out in front of the carbs, so cold, high-altitude air passes over the cylinders, and warms up, and then gets sucked into the carb. In the pusher configuration, the carb's ingesting that cold air, the air speeds up, the pressure drops, moisture condenses out of the air and freezes, and the carbs start to ice over. So the mixture gets richer and richer until finally the exhaust has enough unburned fuel in it to burst into flame, and now you've got an engine fire. Which you don't want. Even on an airplane that has 10 engines.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 2, 2016 00:10
|
|
|
Not failures as such, but a bunch of poo poo gets broken in awesome ways: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfm4gvxNW_o
|
|
#
¿
Sep 12, 2016 23:52
|
|
|
DocCynical posted:I wouldn't call 700 PPM a large quantity though. poo poo, even 100 PPM will start to gently caress you up. The best part is that it anaesthetizes the olfactory nerve, so you can smell it at concentrations that won't really hurt you, but much over that you lose your ability to smell it. Bonus is that it can be used to put mice into a state of suspended animation, from which they can be revived with no ill effects. Doesn't seem to work in larger mammals, though.
|
|
#
¿
Oct 10, 2016 22:52
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 08:55 |
|
|
Cojawfee posted:It didn't matter where the steering column went because all the passengers would be safely thrown clear of the car. Good song, too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tizwFMo85Ms
|
|
#
¿
Dec 19, 2016 20:02
|
|