There is a personal account entry that shows exceptional stupidity by engineers at a chainsaw manufacturer. We’re looking at a oven that was built and ran out of control, melting the sides of the neighboring plant. You have to read this hot story.
That’s a great story, but it isn’t in any way a Darwin Award candidate, is it?
No, but that doesn’t stop them from being entered. It will stay in the slush pile or be moved to personal accounts because it’s to good to toss.
Is the story plausible? Wouldn’t there need to be a fair supply of oxygen to burn large, solid parts made from magnesium? I mean, yes, it we’re all familiar with how magnesium ribbon burns, but then, so does steel wool.
I think the oxygen restriction is the only reason it burned that long.
Still doesn’t sound right though. I know precautions must be taken when casting items from magnesium, but without further citation, I think the story reads as if it’s something that somebody simply made up completely.
Could be.
Slightly related; this is a story a former coworker was telling me about recently. I don’t know all the details, and I’m not sure when it happened, but I do know enough to explain the gist of it.
At a pharmaceutical company, someone initiated a study into either the glassware used for the ampules the drugs came in, or into the filling/manufacturing procedure related to it. So a bunch of ampules were to be handled exactly as they would be with the drug product, through every production step, only they would be filled with pharmaceutical quality purified water, sealed and studied in whatever way they decided was necessary.
There was a bit of a miscommunication.
The instructions came to the operators to “fill 100 ampules with water. Make sure they get autoclaved” (or something along those lines). So they did.
100 ampules were filled with pure water. 100 ampules were sealed. 100 ampules were put into the autoclave. The autoclave was turned on.
100 ampules became bullets, punching into the autoclave walls, breaking the racks holding them in half, destroying some of the controls and generally making loud banging and destruction noises that you don’t particularly want to hear occurring in your very expensive autoclave!
The thing was destroyed. The outer walls were visibly dented. It couldn’t be repaired, and a new one had to be ordered, installed, have validation, maintenance and certification procedures designed, qualified and approved, and have dozens of operators, managers and other staff fully trained on its use prior to being brought online.
My former coworker was the one who requested the testing. She still feels very very badly about it!
At least nobody got shot by one. I’d hate to be involved with that one too.
Maybe there was oxygen available. They don’t exactly describe the oven construction, but it could be open flame one. Cutting gas wouldn’t cut off oxygen.
I googled burn-off ovens and they doesn’t seem to be open flame after all. On the other hand, there are warnings against trying to burn off paint from aluminum and magnesium parts, so maybe this story is plausible.
Yeah, it’s possible. A whole series of DC-3s were built with magnesium frames, and had a nasty habit of catching fire. Rick Nelson died because of this.