Most expensive item you've deliberately destroyed

In My Humble Opinion
1

Last night my friend and roommate got pissed at his DVD player. It kept giving him read errors. As an electronics technician, he had tried to clean it out and do everything he could to keep it working, but it kept giving him more problems until he finally lost his patience with the damn thing and smashed the shit out of it. Later on I asked him how much he paid for the unit and told me it was about $160 at the time he bought it. Yes, he has some anger management issues, but then so do I, and that’s not what this thread is about (in case you’re wondering, we never get mad at each other, or he wouldn’t be living with me).

For me, I once destroyed a $200 VCR, which was what I paid second-hand as stereo VCRs were more expensive back then. The problem I had with mine was with tapes getting stuck. I had fought this problem off and on and it was becoming more frequent. One day I got so fed up and frustrated with it that I couldn’t tolerate this annoyance any longer, so I beat it into several pieces. I felt bad about it afterwards, but at the time I didn’t care.

For the rest of you, the item can be just about anything. It doesn’t matter if the item destroyed had depreciated to nothing but had initially cost you a good amount of money. It could be out of anger, reenge or just for fun or for any reason. I know some of you may have to deliberately destroy expensive items as part of your job (i.e. car crash tester), but I am mostly interested in stories about deliberately destroying your own personal property or the personal property of another.

2

I had a $600 Jasmine 80MB SCSI hard drive. This was from back when hard drives were enclosed in boxes about eight inches square and drew a metric shitload of power. It served me well for about ten years. Then I used it for target practice.

3

A friend of mine once acquired a huge plotter from somewhere or other - we dismantled it, mostly just to see what was inside, but we did pull out two massive stepper motors which we intended to use in a robotics project (that in the end never actually got past the discussion stage). The plotter was probably worth several thousand pounds, possibly tens of thousands, at the time.

4

Iowa.

5

A huge XEROX copy machine. Just like that scene in Office Space, only I did it before that movie came out - and I used a sledge hammer. Oh so satisfying.

6

After a really big fight with my bf, I threw a pair of ruby and diamond earrings into the bay. I didn’t feel right about keeping them after we broke up, but I didn’t want him to have them. :rolleyes:
Yes, I was young and stupid.

7

At my 14th birthday party I burned a brand new Polo shirt in protest against the ‘yuppification’ of America. Cost of shirt: $40.00 (paid for by my grandmother, who, despite my clear and obvious disdain for trend-following, would always accompany gifts to me with the phrase “All the kids are (using it, wearing it, etc.)!”

The party guests were less than impressed, and one of them swiped my Motley Crue ‘Too Fast For Love’ Leathur Records LP, which is now worth a few hundred dollars. Altogether I consider my 15th year of life a net loss. :frowning:

8

Does my liver count?

9

Eh. They don’t let you sell 'em on Ebay anymore.

10

Just yesterday I destroyed my X-box! Although I didn’t go in with the intention to destroy it, that just seems to be the after effect of my actions. I am royally pissed off now, because I have had it for a couple months and now I’m pretty sure it’s useless. :mad:

11

A Yamaha accoustic guitar which cost me a couple of hundred quid (20 years ago), a reaction to some GF trouble, the exact cause is lost in the mists, whatever. Basically put my foot through the soundboard and killed it.

In another angry-attack[sup]tm[/sup] I took a chisel to my Telecaster (not much point trying to break a Tele) not destroyed but certainly removed any resale value it might have had.

I once threw a malfunctioning drum machine at a wall and smashed it, that only cost eighty quid or so but at the time that was a lot of money for me.

12

Not me, but my current professor of museum collections conservation and management destroyed a forklift and a 12 foot long flourescent light in a warehouse during a summer job years ago.

13

The statute of limitations has run out by now, so I guess I can share this.

Twenty-five years ago or so, there was an abandoned gravel quarry near my house where my buddies and I used to go shooting. We’d load my pickup truck with every rifle, handgun, and shotgun we owned and about a million rounds of ammo and spend the day down at the quarry plinking.

One fine Saturday we stopped by our favorite gun shop, and they had a big selection of WW2-surplus German Mausers and ammunition. 8mm stuff: tracers, armor-piercing rounds, incendiary rounds, standard military ball ammo, etc. We bought a couple of huge Mauser rifles and a few thousand rounds of assorted ammunition, added it all to the pile, and drove down to the quarry.

And found a car sitting there.

It was a '72 Chevy Impala hardtop, obviously ditched after having been stolen - the driver’s side window had been broken out and the ignition ripped out of the column. It was parked right by the embankment where we used to set up the cans and bottles that were our customary plinking targets.

At first, we behaved ourselves. We set up our targets off to one side and did our usual plinking. But it wasn’t too long before we were putting rows of bottles and cans on the hood, roof, and deck lid and shooting them off the car. Then someone missed a bottle and put a hole in the fender. . .

In minutes, it was like a scene from Bonnie and Clyde. We started with the special stuff for the 8mm. The tracer rounds were particularly impressive as they streaked downrange to impact, and the incendiary rounds were very cool as well, blowing up into little fireballs as they punched into the sheetmetal. By the time we finished, the car was pretty tattered.

Also, I once dropped a movie camera from the top of a six-storey parking garage, lens down, while filming, so I could process the film and see the ground approach from a jumper’s-eye view. Unfortunately, the camera burst into its component parts when it hit and spoiled the film. I’m considering repeating the experiment with a garage-sale video camera.

14

A large section of Panama City, Panama. It was not a good day.

15

Awesome post.

16

I SO need to hear the back story from this. :eek:

17

I still can’t believe I did this…

I was angry at my husband (back when we were dating) and he was really pissing me off. I went into a blind rage – yes, I learned that very day what a blind rage is – and winged ALL MY VINYL ALBUMS into a creek. Like frisbees. And they were MY FUCKING ALBUMS!!!

It started at Meet the Beatles and ended somewhere in 1979.

I am such a dweeb. I can’t believe I destroyed my albums. I suck. :o

18

Two words, dude. Bungie. Cord.

Heck of a lot cheaper than replacement movie cameras.

19

I popped the movie camera in 1979. I don’t think anyone had thought of bungee jumping back then. I know I hadn’t.

Part of the coolness of doing something like that is the destruction. There’s something just so. Damn. Awesome. About watching an expensive piece of electronics recede from your vantage point, only to suddenly stop and scatter into smithereens like roaches running from a light bulb.

Besides, you can get obsolete-but-still-working VHS camcorders at garage sales now for fifteen bucks.

20

That sounds like a lot of fun. I’d love to do that to a particular copy machine about 10 feet away from me right now.

I can’t think of anything expensive that I’ve destroyed. I’m probably bottling it all up and just waiting for the right moment to let it all out…