[Twistr]

Got any horror stories to share?

[DieGuy]

For work hold down?

Yeah I got one, I was working in a place that made tools and fixtures for the defense industry, (don't ask). I had a 10 pieces of 304 stainless that were 10 inches in dia and 3/16 in thick and needed to be flat on the face within 0.0002 in. This required dusting it off in a rotary surface grinder. In order to hold the piece down (304 is non-magnetic) I used coceal a form a plaster of paris. Everything was fine until about the 5th piece, I was impatient and didn't let the plaster setup long enough. THat piece lifted up and blew the 12 in dia X 1in wheel into about a million pieces. The part came out of the grinder like a flying saucer. Scared the heck out of me and I sure am glad no one got hurt.

[Twistr]

Whoa.... it sounds like you very fortunate that no one (including yourself) got hurt. So... did you catch heck for it?

[DieGuy]

Whoa.... it sounds like you very fortunate that no one (including yourself) got hurt. So... did you catch heck for it?

Nah it was a union shop and the foreman was the one really pushing me for the job. In fact he went and got me another wheel for the grinder so I could get back to work on it! In fact after that he stopped pushing on all the work I did for them.

[murphy625]

About 10 years ago, I was using what is called a "track burner".. This is an oxy/acetylene torch that is attached to a motor crawler to make extremely nice cuts. Anyhow, I was using the circle attachment on it while cutting a 36 inch circle from a 4ft x 4ft x3/4 thick steel plate.
The entire rig was set up on an empty steel 55 gallon drum.
Normally , the rig works with very little or no interference from a human once its going.. It takes about 15 minutes to cut a complete circle so I lit the torch, got it going, and left to get a can of pop.. (cutting with a torch tends to make you a little warm under the collar.)
I was only gone for about 5 minutes.. When I came back, the torch had gone out for some reason.. Not a big deal usually.. Ya just turn off the machine, relight the torch and start the machine again..
I re-light the unit, the next thing I remember is picking my self off the ground and the whole shop running toward me...
While I was gone, the flame had burned threw the top of the 55 gallon drum and the gases where accumulating inside it.. When I lit it, kaboom....
I had a nice gash on my arm, and the ceiling had a nice gash in it... The 400 pound plate launched itself 14 feet straight up.. The lucky part was that it didn't land on me when it came down...
After finishing that project, my very next project was a burn table built just for the purpose.

Murphy

[JavaDog]

About 10 years ago...
Murphy

Holy crap!!

[mxtras]

Working as a tool grinder, I was delivering fresh 'meat' to a pretty big Bullard VTL. The job was turning clamping rings using magnetic chucks and clamps as the standard chuck created too much distortion. The rings were 83" OD and about 14" tall. While I was watching the performance of the boring bar the part let go, whipping around the bar taking out the chip shield, coolant lines and an air line. The boring bar then broke and the part then left the table, aided in part to one of the many mag chucks fastened to the 9' diameter table. The ring took out a tool cart and a cabinet before it hit the floor, then proceeded to wobble it's way towards the shop's newest Deckel 6 axis, big bucks machining center about 20 feet away. Good thing they put that Deckel there - it stopped the ring dead in it's tracks.

The operator didn't even miss a beat - he appologized to the maintenance guys as they made repairs to his machine but other than that, he wasn't too alarmed or rattled. Nobody was injured, minimal damage to the equipment. They had to re-shoot the Deckel's pallet changer, but other than that - nothing more than cosmetic damage to the Deckel.

Scott

[skippy]

Not exactly a horror story but............ Years ago I was working up in the north of Australia at a place called Darwin which back in those days was considered to be rather wild, and being in the southern hemisphere, north means HOT and Darwin was hot. In the workshop where I was, we had our electric power points (outlets?) suspended at a height of about 2m (6ft) from the ceilings and so I went to plug in a 9 inch angle grinder. I placed the grinder at my feet and reached up to plug in the lead and all of a sudden the grinder roared to life at my feet. Whoever used it last hadn't switched it off but instead just unplugged it. (It was an old model where you could switch them on and they stay on).

Anyway the grinder took off at my feet and started its way on a big circle whose radius was determined by the reach of the lead. In one move I was able to rip the plug from the socket and jump to safety. I was very lucky I didn't get hurt and it still raises the hair on the back of my neck when I think about it.

[skippy]

Here’s another one from that same workshop. I was the foreman in charge of about 40 guys and one of those 40 was an apprentice who was 4ft nothing tall and had a high pitched voice. He, like all apprentices in probably all lands, was the victim of all the practical jokes at that time.

One day I had to go out to have a look at a job at an aboriginal reserve about 160km (100 miles) from the base. On the return trip in the company 4x 4, I ran over a 2m (6ft) King Brown snake so I backed up, got out, made sure it was dead with a stick, picked it up with a rag and put it in the back of the 4 x 4. When I arrived back at the workshop I tied its head securely with a rag because King Browns are deadly poisonous.
I then put it in a bag and took it inside to the tool shed where I carefully placed the snake (coiled up again) in the rag drum which was a 44 gallon drum sitting on a pallet. I went out to where the apprentice was working and asked him if he could get me a rag. Next thing you know he was running through the workshop at full speed, terrified look on his face with a high pitched scream coming from his mouth. Poor guy wasn't tall enough to see into the drum and so a handfull of still warm King Brown is what he had grabbed. Before anyone says it, yes it was cruel on my part but, like most apprentices I received more than my share too during my apprenticeship years.

EDIT: Just to expand on that last statement, I once had a tradesman connect up the high tension lead of the spark plug tester to the metal bench it was placed on and used a tooth pick to keep the test button depressed. I (as an apprentice) was then asked to go and get a (metal) tool from the bench and off course when I grabbed it I was thrown back some metres by the high tension electric shock.

Hmmm.... seems like these things don't happen in the US?

[Kookaburra]

Apprentices, ah, don't you love them. I once had an apprentice very frustrated when we were working on a job and I asked him to go to storeman to get me a "skirting board ladder", "a box of short circuits" and a "long stand", needless to say the storeman played along very well and after the storeman made him stand there for 20 minutes and then sent the apprentice back to me empty handed, I was not in the apprentices good books.

[sbrpollock]

I once sent a purchasing clerk out to pick me up a "Spool Of Pipe Thread".

Off she went in the company truck.

I guess the first three places she went perpetuated the prank, and it wasn't untill she got to the fourth place that someone told her that there was no such thing.

She came back as mad as a wet hen.

Moral of this story:
DO NOT p1ss off the person who has to sign purchase orders so that you can get what you want.

I paid for that for a long, long time. (Untill I figured out how to order stuff myself and give the suppliers random numbers when they asked for a PO#)

[mxtras]

You're kidding. That's it? Of all of the machinists and wanna-bees in this place and we get 6 stories and a few comments?

:bs:

Sheeesh. Personally, I liked the story about the exploding drum and I have one for the Darwin awards that relates. I suck at story telling, but what the heck - nobody else is pitching in, so here it goes:

Frequently at my full time job, we have a problem with the operators over tightening the drum faucets into 55 gallon steel drums. When they get stuck, the operators will roll the barrel to the maintenance shop to have the faucet removed by our resident gorilla.

It's not at all uncommon to have the threaded hub in the drum (the bung) break away from the lid and start spinning, making it very difficult to remove the faucet. The maintenance secret was to throw a little liquid steel (weld) on it to keep it from spinning so the faucet could be unthreaded.

One particular drum thrust our eldest maintenance-man into the OSHA hall of fame. Upon receiving a drum with a stuck faucet and a spinning hub, he opted to break out the torch and perform a little fusion. The drum had previously contained an Acetone based paint thinner.

The resulting explosion blew the lid off the drum (thankfully for him) – this is about all anybody knows as he was doing this in the space alone at 5AM. But – we do know that it punched a nice hole in the wall and the roof before it came back down. The fire ball set of a sprinkler which tripped the water flow sensor which resulted in the Chesapeake Fire Department to be dispatched. Being a chemical company, this was quite an incident.

He suffered moderate hearing loss in one ear and his hair got a new lease on life. Other than that, he was fine; especially after his unexpected vacation – courtesy of management. Policy prohibits hot work on drums.

The names have been omitted to protect the guilty. Plus – Don’s a good guy and I wouldn’t want to embarrass him again.

Scott

[Twistr]

I have been holding off on this story...it just isn't as stupendous as the rest....But with the encouragement of mxtras... here goes:

I'm out on a sales call, visiting with a machine shop to hawk my wares... you know the drill. While there I get the opportunity to take a shop tour just to see what they're doing and perhaps to suggest some areas for our stuff. The 1st part they show me is a long, skinny, aluminum part. I don't remember what it was or anything, but I remember suggesting that they could hold it better with our stuff. "No" he said. "Our setup works really good." SO, I left it at that. We continue to move around the shop, going from machine to machine until we finally end up back in his office. OK - so, I'm wrapping up my visit in the office area and what do I hear but a crash so loud you can hear it in the office! The guy I'm with is really interested in what just happened, so hurredly goes out to the shop to find out what all the commotion is. When he comes back he's got a real sheepish look and guess what? Sure enough, that long, skinny part had been thrown out of the jig it was being held in. Scrap! The next thing that happened I still shudder at - not because it was bad, it was just stupid on my part. So, What do I say? Gee, I'm sorry that happened? NOPE! I say something like "If you were using our stuff, that wouldn't have happened." I still feel like an idiot today for having said that. Needless to say that comment was ill-timed
He wasn't real thrilled with my take on the situation which he met with stony silence. This is not good for a salesman, if you know what I mean. Anyways, I mumbled something about "got to go" and hit the road. As I get into my car in the parking lot I am shaking my head and thinking, "you just HAD to say that, didn't you?" (chair) I figured we'd never get a sale from them, what with my big mouth in full operation.... but surpisingly about 3 weeks he gave me a call..... and started using our stuff!

[skippy]

Yeh, come on guys, surely some more of you have had something funny or horrible happen.

[DLMACHINE]

About 9 years ago I was loading a horizontal machining center with a bridge crane and oops. While I had a 4ft tombstone on the host trying to line it up with the pallet another operator using another crane was flying some parts through the factory and Bang slams it right into my crane.The tombstone slams in the machine right next to the spindle, crushing lots of sheetmetal,brackets,hoses and wires.After initial impact the tombstone then swings around the side of the machine and WHAM right into the monitor and control panel.This fixture was 2'X2'x4' high so you can picture the weight and force.
Nobody was injured and yes I was nice and helped him load his toolbox right after that.The machine was eventually repaired but nobody would speak about the actual cost of repair.

As for apprentices I worked in a screw machine shop and we had one that no one liked.So we had thermoset ink for marking things then once heat was applied it instantly dried.We coated the back of his machine's levers with red ink.Once he got it all over his hands we laughed with him and said "you have to use hot water and soap to take it off" After 20 minutes of washing he wasn't laughing with us anymore, he was pinkish red from the elbows to his fingertips.It took over a week for his arms to return to there natural color.

[buscht]

Pre OSHA we had a guy get his finger cut off in a spinning wire strander. This is a machine that takes coils of wire and spins them, making cables. It spins so fast that parts of it turn invisible if the light is just right.

Anyway, after he healed up for a bit management took him out to the machine and told him to show them how it happened so they could guard the area to prevent future accidents. He said, "I just stuck my finger over here!!!!!", and he cut off another finger just like the first with everyone watching.

[Twistr]

You took the "horror" part quite literally! ack!

[take a cut]

Well i could share a couple. About 10 yrs ago i was working for my father in now my machine and fab shop and we had just bought our first hydraulic press brake from a local business going out and when it arrived my father decided that rather than contract to a machine mover to place this 15 000 pound 14' x 12' x 6' machine with a very high center of gravity and very close to the front of the machine we would move it in with a 6000 lb forklift w/o good brakes and a crapload of pipes. With 6 or 7 guys all hollering their own versions of push lift tilt whoa and many others as a operated the lift as we came in the door the machine teetered very slowly over ontu its face and slammed into the floor sinking the 10" concrete floor in about 1 1/2" in which we now have water laying when it gets there. So i was not a popular son for a long time. About 6 weeks and thousands of dollars later we had the machine running. What a hell of a job getting everything straight though.
To top that off about a year or two later the fabricator forgot to take off the fast approach and pinched the end off three of his fingers when trying to bend a piece that was small thinking the machine was advancing slow he put his fingers in the no no zone. Ouch eh
Ok Well we were building a mezzanine in our shop on the weekend one time and i was runnning the air nailer putting 3 1/2" nails through 2 layers of ply into beams and while nailing on the cap board one of my machinists was helping hold the board and the nail deflected and went shooting into the fleshy area between his thumb and forefinger and headed right up torwards his wrist on the inside. I didnt see this and when he said my name and i looked and seen it my gut reaction caused me to grab ontu the inch left sticking out and pull it the hell out. I guess he hadnt really experienced the full pain at that point and really didnt notice the extra from coming out. He taped it up and worked out the soreness for about 15 minutes and we went back at er. Whew what luck
Well for a crazy job story we have our shop on the eastern coast of canada Nova Scotia to be exact and there arent many monster size machines around here. A local fab shop called us wanting to machine the drum of a paving roller they just resurfaced with 1" plate they rolled and installed in sections. The only conventional machine capable of doing this was in Montreal and 12 weeks turnaround. Well this just wouldnt do as our roads needed the machine. We mounted the drum in the fabricators shop in front of their metal rolls using the machines own bearings welded a ring on one end 12" wide about 4' in dia. (Oh by the way the Physical dimensions were 7' dia and 14' long.) we ran a flat rubber belt in through the pinch rolls and around the ring to turn the drum after securing the bearing mounts to the machine of course. We mounted a heavy h beam in front and trued it up with the center line and stole the crossslide compound off our biggest lathe and jigged up a edge to run on the beam then bolted this to the beam and machined along the beam in about 10" sections. About 2 days after we had it running and had our tool grinds down to max cut 1" hss square bit i got terribly bored of turning the crank 1/8 of a turn every revolution so i geared up a ratchet with a square tube welded to the drive and ran a pc of square stock up to the handle I mounted the ratchet out at the end of the beam on a pipe and welded tabs equally around the drum and as the drum turned the tabs would strike and advance the ratchet and a spring would return it to an adjustable stop mechanism so i could control the number of advances per rev by adding or decreasing tabs and adjust the feed per strike by how much the ratchet would return to the stop. This worked awesome and the day i did this was a saturday at the fabricators shop and no one around. The owner had opened up for me and left for the day. When he returned i had the whole shop swept and the plate rack reorganized and the finish i was getting was excellent. Next week i sharpened about 10 tools and showed one of his welders how to run it it was too boriing for me. They finished out the job in about two weeks as it required a few passes at about 1/2" to 5/8" chip width per cut when it was cutting intermittantly. I was about 18 when i designed and ran this setup and it still is one of the greater accomplishments in really wacky setups. well thats all 4 now hope u enjoy

[Redline]

A womam that I worked with was running an automated pressing machine.Well when the upper ram goes down it hits a switch and dwells for 10 seconds.It has to hit the dwell switch before it will complete the cycle and return to the home position.There is a stop ring on top of the ram that stops when it hits the body of the macine to set the depth.Well this is how it went down, she got her thumb cought under the stop ring and it never hit the dwell switch.It just sat there on her thumb,so she freaked out and tried to pull her thumb out.She was only half successfull,the other half of her thumb was still in the machine.The real p1sser was that it was five minutes till quitting time.

[snakebit95]

I have seem quite a few accidents in a shop I worked in on 2nd shift during my high-school days.

1st: A guy was fly-cutting some brass castings on a Bridgeport mill, and holding them in a conventional vise; clamped on the draft surface I might add. One night a block came out of the vise and broke two of his ribs.

2nd: A lady was drilling some deep holes in some steel blocks on a Bridgeport mill, and she reached in to clear the shavings that had wound around the drill while it was still running. They grabbed her glove and twisted her arm around the spindle. She actually stalled the machine. She suffered a broken wrist and elbow.

3rd: A guy was sanding/deburring the end of of a 1" threaded rod sticking-out of the back of a lathe, and was wearing gloves. A burr on the end of a rod must of grabbed the glove and broke his wrist.

Lesson learned........never wear gloves around rotating objects!! Glad I did not have to learn this the hard way.

Oh yeah, same place.........different person drove a fork-lift off the back dock. Luckily he didn't get hurt seriously, but it was a sight to see. Every day seemed like an adventure there.