Bozos And Horror Stories

Using a self feeding spade bit in the drill press in a piece of hickory not clamped down. It helicoptered (of course the spade bits had a hex shank so they wouldn't spin in the chuck) and hit my hand. Felt like it was broken in pieces but after a few hours the pain dissipated.

After that accident I literally hid that Craftsman 12 piece set somewhere in the house so I wouldn't use them again. I still have yet to find them..... even after 4-6 years....... I'll find them eventually...
 
in the mid 90's i worked at a lime stone quarry not to far out of Elwood city pa . on the job we had a quite large 60 yard dragline stripping over burden .
one night a couple fellows snuck onto to the property to steal some copper power cable .

the first piece of cable they tried to steal was one of three 7800 volt supply cables to the drag . im not real sure what the guy with the ax was thinking when when he swung it it into the cable
but the big green flash that lit up the night sky and killed him was quite impressive . his partner was found about 50 feet away with burns over about 80% of his body .
 
mcostello said:
7800 volts would tend to have a large arc.
Click to expand...

As a reference, back when I was in charge of our R&D lab at a large sign company we made a Jacobs ladder. We used 1/2 " copper water tubing, 2 pieces 6' long. To power it we connected the tubes to the output of a transformer used to bombard neon tube units for processing. The output of the transformer peaked @ 30,000 volts & nearly 1 amp. The arc was as thick as a man's thumb. The gap at the top of the ladder was 11". We made it a point to stay WAY back from that one !
 
The electricians wiring new and rewiring existing equipment have;

Wired 3 of my 4 lathes correctly, the fourth ran backwards.
Wired my surface grinder backwards, LUCKILY I way wary after the lathe wiring that I jogged the on switch, it ran inreverse unscrewing the lock nut causing the wheel to come off the spindle and bounce off the mag chuck. Luckily I had the table all the way back and it only hit the edge. The wheel was fine
Wired my new punch presses for 480, too bad they were 240. The tech turned them on to go through the installation when the special item fuses blew.
Wired 240 outlets under an air line drip leg.
Didn't read the general notes and missed they were to wire receptacles for our new welders, we bought 3 each MIG and stick/TIG welders, and hardwired the stick/MIG welders making the MIGs unable to be used. Kinda defeated the whole purpose of them having wheels on them all.

Not bad for liscensed electricians, huh?
 
Back in the 90's I had the job of designing the computer room at the new building my place was moving to, and hiring the contractors. I drew up complete floor plans with physical layout, power consumption calculated, number of outlets for each leg from the UPS (it weighed 12K pounds), and the total number of btu's it would all generate so I knew how many tons of cooling to buy. We had a great electrical contractor that we used at the old location, and I hired them for the new one. Turns out that the new location was in a different county, so a different branch of this contractor showed up to do the job. It's difficult to adequately describe how awful this group was, but on top of being so slow that I wanted to buy a whip to move them along, they:
  • Decided that I wanted an unreasonable amount of outlets under the floor (they didn't understand "how we could have so many things to plug in") and put in about half of them instead. I had to resort to power strips on move-in day to get all the 110v items powered up. I left the company a few months later, but I heard that it really became a serious issue later on. This means that since someone is just picking a place to plug in now, they probably have too many items on one circuit which can cause the breaker to trip.
  • Installed the wrong receptacle at a critical location. (luckily I thought ahead and insisted the foreman and his crew be on hand for the move-in, so l got him to fix it right away)
  • Nearly wrecked a 1 ton printer lifting it from the ground thru a 4th story window by rigging it improperly, and even then it would not have got inside because the crane couldn't place it in the room, as the window space it was going thru started 18" up from the floor and it couldn't reach past it far enough. I had the old computer room ramp (had to build a new one for code) still around and re-built it under the printer as it was hanging so we could set it down. They had volunteered to do the lift into the building because they had all sorts of experience...
  • My favorite is when they installed the 6 ton UPS for the room. I can't remember the exact details, but essentially they had a spare power cable inside the cabinet and they didn't know what to do with it. I made a logical sounding suggestion to splice it with another cable. Can't remember why now, but it sounded right, but I was asking them why that wouldn't work. I don't know anything about that kind of electrical work. Next thing I know they're doing exactly that. It worked fine, but why are they listening to me...
 
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