It was 5 degrees when I started my car at 5:45 am this morning. That’s really cold, but not as cold as the weather we had last weekend. Traffic was moderate on I-294, so I was sailing along at over 80 when suddenly, “Boom!..oom.oom!”
I immediately stiffened expecting a blast of frigid air from a blown out window or vehicle problems from some significant damage. After 5 seconds I realized there was nothing. The car felt and responded normally, and there was no frigid air from a blown out window.
When I arrived at work, I opened the back door to retrieve my work bag and found a complete mess. I had bought the only soda I drink, Canada Dry Zero Ginger Ale. It was buy 2 and get 1 free. I had brought up 2 of them with the idea I would bring the remaining one up the next day. I forgot, of course, and it froze solid on the floor of the back seat area. I guess the movement of my car created a little more pressure so one blew, and I’m assuming the force of that took out 3 more adjacent to it.
Why didn’t it happen when it was 14 degrees colder a few days ago? At any rate, I won’t leave anything back there anymore. I’ll just make an extra trip back to the car to empty it out!
Glad to hear it wasn’t anything more serious than that! I’d guess 99% of the time if you hear something in your car go ‘boom!’ it turns out to be a very not good thing.
I’m not suggesting this story is anything but completely real, but I have to say, your story reminds me a lot of the old ‘Biscuit Bullet’ urban legend
Not a car, but recently a friend of mine was using his new snowblower and it backfired. Startled the hell out of him and he asked me what happened. Turned out he had never seen a car backfire and didn’t know what it was.
That’s actually not foolish - with modern computer controlled fuel injection, I can’t remember the last time I saw a car backfire. So young-ish folks may never have encountered it. But I’m old enough to know, so I briefly explained about cylinders, carburetors and fuel detonating prematurely.
I’m thinking it happened because soda cans are so flimsy these days.
I’m wondering if the biscuit thing could be engineered. Let’s say it is a super sunny, hot day in Phoenix, and I put a can of biscuit doe by my back window and leave it there for hours with the windows up. Would that make it hot enough I wonder?
Whomp biscuits are of course pressurized. That’s what makes them go “whomp” when you whack them on the counter edge; you damage the package enough that it splits along the designed-in weak spiral seam.
Maybe a package in perfect condition can’t self-whomp sitting in the sun. But for sure there’s some amount of package damage (or sabotage ) that can weaken the package enough it’ll sit just fine in the fridge case at the store but burst when put into the hot sun for awhile.
ISTR at some time years ago as a kid or maybe young adult I had a package of whomp biscuits burst its spiral seam in the store just from picking it up. Must’ve had just not quite enough damage (or packaging defect) before I handled it.
Ref @solost who slipped in just above while I was typing …
ISTM the harder part is engineering some part of the package to break free and hit the driver, rather than have the seam burst just noisily & harmlessly decompress the package.
My boom story resembles @Jasmine’s. Except the boom was too muffled to hear; more of a foof.
About 6 months ago GF & went out to dinner. Had cocktails then a bottle of champagne. Which we did not finish. The restaurant helpfully stuffed a supposedly suitable cork in it, and put it in the locally-required tamper-proof but not liquid-tight bag, and gave it to me. I put it in the trunk & drove home. All nice and legal.
Yep. Somewhere along the way the champagne had pressurized the inadequate cork out and there was a stinky mess in my trunk. What a great way to end a romantic evening.
I left the trunk open in the garage, we went upstairs, and I dealt with the mess the next day. It pretty well soaked into the carpet of the removable trunk floor panel, but didn’t migrate any farther into the guts of the car. So once I took that panel out, soapy-scrubbed & hosed it, and left it in the sun for a couple days the stink was gone.
My car went “boom” in a shopping center parking lot when I first started it, and it ran spectacularly badly, so I investigated. I found the business end of a spark plug projecting out of a plastic duct for the engine air intake. It had blown out of its cylinder head.
Mechanic said the spark plug had not been screwed all the way in, and the engaged part of the threads in the head stripped. He said he was able to screw the plug back in and engage enough threads to hold. This is hard to imagine, but it held.
Ms. Napier, before we met, lived in a mobile home that burned to the ground when the furnace failed. They got the baby and the dog and escaped just in time.
A couple years ago we turned our furnace on when the weather warranted. It wasn’t producing heat properly, and when I went outside I could smell natural gas. I called the gas leak line and was told our furnace, which should have had several years of life left, was failing, and venting partially unconsumed gas.
Our furnace guy said that the heat exchanger was failing early due to using “cheap Chinese steel” when it was manufactured. He assured us that we had been in no immediate danger of dying from asphyxiation, since heat exchangers were designed to prevent any leaking in the house since the 60s when people did die from failing heat exchangers.
But once he had taken out and replaced our old furnace, he showed us the PVC pipe that had vented the exhaust from the heat exchanger to the outside-- the failing heat exchanger had been generating so much heat, it had burned completely through the bottom of this thick, heavy-duty PVC pipe. We had probably been mere hours from disaster
This reminds me of a few years ago when, off work and lying in bed sick, the power started to fluctuate severely and I smelled rubber. I sat up and saw a power strip beginning to melt. I set a land speed record running from my 2nd floor bedroom down to the basement, and I flipped off the main breaker.
After I called ComEd and they came out, the guy said someone working on the line forgot to fasten down something he called “neutralizers” which, he said, control the voltage flow into my house.
) that can weaken the package enough it’ll sit just fine in the fridge case at the store but burst when put into the hot sun for awhile.
… Doe – a deer – a female deer … 
