Mechanic/electrical/construction stories.

[Demon-Xanth]

While not many of us have done professional electrical, construction, or mechanic work, there's enough horror stories out there to provide nearly endless entertainment.

I'll go ahead and start the thread out with this little ditty:

I'm helping my dad out on a job at this one place. They want to make the electrical in the house safe. They have 15A outlets with 12 gauge wire coming to them. No problem. Those 12 gauge wires lead upto the attic where they ALL go to a single set of 6 gauge wires. Those go to a nice 50 or 60A breaker. The age of the wires? They have fabric insulation. The previous occupants were an illegal immigrant family who moved in and lived there for about 10 years. Before that, it was a meat packing facility from the 40's until the '70s. The fridge is a store room, the rail for the hooks is still in place. We place some GFCI outlets in the kitchen and stuff like that. We do what we can while being reasonable. A couple weeks later, there is a problem with the washer and dryer. (we hadn't messed with the wiring for those) The drain for the washer backed up, and wetted down the wall. While this is a bad thing, the wires for the dryer had developed a break or a short. If the washer HADN'T overflowed, the house would have caught fire. After routing all new wires back to the panel for that room we haven't gone back.

We still haven't figured out how a particular switch has 60VAC going to it.

For the mechanics:
http://128.83.80.200/taco/scarysteering.html

 

[Armitage]

I almost drove a forklift into a wave pool
Was working a temp service job after my sophmore year of college. Got an assignment building a big water slide @ Dorney Park (Allentown, PA) Was a cool job - tons of overtime - later in the job after the park had opened for the summer there were lots of girls in bikinis

Anyway, they were short staffed, so they needed all their guys up on the steel. So my job was read the blueprints and drive the forklift to the back lot, pick up the various prefab steel sections, bring it up to the front, hook it up to the crane so it hung level, and tie a guideline on, etc.. This was one of those big 4WD, overhead telosoping boom forklifts. It had 4 steering modes - front wheels only, rear wheels only, 4 wheel (crab), 4 wheel (opposite). So one morning it was parked right next to the wave pool - I fire it up and head back to get the first piece. Didn't look at the steering mode. Swung the wheel to turn away from the pool, and discoved that some idiot had put it in rear wheel steering mode - so of course, the back end swings out to the opposite direction I was turning. Was walking by there later with the boss - you could see the tracks - about 3/4 the width of the wheel must have hung out over the pool - damn lucky the lip didn't crumble.

Boss: "You cut that pretty close"
Me: "Yep"

End of conversation He was a hardass, but pretty cool. I was the only temp service guy that stayed with the assignment - we were working 70-80 hour weeks, and most only lasted a few days. They asked me to join their crew actually - they built waterslides all over the world. Wonder where my life would be now? But I went back to college.

 

[kranky]

A (now retired) co-worker's son was a contractor for home remodeling and every once in a while my co-worker would help him out. They were both good at it and the son never lacked for jobs.

One summer my co-worker remodeled his own kitchen and took a couple weeks vacation to do it. Brought in pics and it was really nice - all new solid wood cabinets, a faux Corian countertop, etc.

A couple weeks later he called in and told his boss he needed to take a couple days off for an emergency. We found out later what the emergency was.

In the middle of the night, the cabinets broke loose from the wall and came down in a deafening roar. Broke every breakable item inside. Some of the cabinets were damaged and had to be replaced.

He found out that the fasteners he bought to hold the cabinets to the wall were counterfeit! They had been marked with a code that indicated what they were made of and how they had been treated, but in reality they were some cheap pot metal knockoffs.

When it was all over, he was just glad it didn't happen to one of his son's customers or it would have been much messier.

 

[Armitage]

A home repair story...
I was running a new water line - hot & cold to move the washer & dryer out to the garage. So I stubbed out at a convenient point from each of the lines, and put on some valves so I could turn the water back on in the house. I had some trouble sweating one of them - just couldn't seem to get all the water out of the line. It was a long flat section, and well secured so you couldn't really pull it down to get all the water out.

Anyway - went to bed. About 1 a.m. there's this loud BOOM and then this loud roaring noise coming from the forced air heat vents. My first thought is something is FUBAR with the gas furnace, get the hell out of the house! So we did, it's freezing out. But I look into one of the crawlspace vents ... no fire ... no smoke ... but the floor is all wet?!? WTF?

Turned out a joint on the line I couldn't get dry didn't hold. The stub & valve flew off and hit a section of heating duct (BOOM), then the water was blasting against the duct (roaring noise). All of this was right under the bedroom. So I crawl under their, through the mud, in my boxers, to turn off the water. Which means - insult on top of injury - I couldn't take a shower when I got back in.

 

[Steve]

These two plumbers were out working on a sprinkler maintenance job, and the supervisor began work on the sprinkler head with a Langstrom seven inch gangley wrench. Just then his little apprentice leaned over and said "You can't work on a Finley sprinkler head with a Langstrom seven-inch Gangley wrench!"

Well, this infuriated the supervisor, so he went and got volume 14 of the Kinsley manual. He looked it up and said: "It says right here that the Langstrom seven-inch wrench can be used with the Finley sprocket!"

The little apprentice just laughed and said: "It says sprocket, not socket!"

 

[ATLien247]

Originally posted by: sm8000
These two plumbers were out working on a sprinkler maintenance job, and the supervisor began work on the sprinkler head with a Langstrom seven inch gangley wrench. Just then his little apprentice leaned over and said "You can't work on a Finley sprinkler head with a Langstrom seven-inch Gangley wrench!"

Well, this infuriated the supervisor, so he went and got volume 14 of the Kinsley manual. He looked it up and said: "It says right here that the Langstrom seven-inch wrench can be used with the Finley sprocket!"

The little apprentice just laughed and said: "It says sprocket, not socket!"

Ummm... okay...