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What is the cruelest death of a piece of equipment you've ever witnessed?

E

Elledan

Banned
Mine was of a PSU which blew during a thunderstorm. It sparked nicely for a second, then I smelled something burning... 🙂
 
A major mis-hit in a several hundred ton stamping press.

A punch press cycling whilst a robot's arm was still loading a part.

I could go on forever with this kind of stuff ...
 
How about a slow, lingering death due to a wasting disease? Had an old floppy disk controller do that during the Great Flood of 1993.

Our local area power substation was flooded out sometime in July. After a long initial area-wide blackout and a couple of days of rolling blackouts, the power company decided to put a diesel generator in to replace the capacity until the flood waters receded and they could repair the original facility. They got the generator, plugged it into the local electric grid, set up a supply line for fuel and assigned National Guard troops to keep it running.

As far as I know, it only ran out of fuel once over the next two months, so the Guard certainly did their part in this. But you can imagine what kind of power we were getting through our wall outlets - "dirty" doesn't begin to describe it.

I would be typing away on my monochrome monitor (using WP 5 under DOS), and suddenly all of the characters on my screen would begin to dance (think HampsterDance in black and white...). This would continue for a couple of minutes and then things would settle down again for a few hours or so.

This went on for a couple of weeks, and then I noticed that my floppy drive was acting weird. I could still write things to disk, and I could read some of my disks, but some of them would fail, usually with "Bad Sector" messages. Eventually all reads began to fail, and that ended my write capability as well.

Husband pronounced it Dead (it was an ancient machine) and we finally got an updated system shortly after the floods receded and the power grid problems were resolved. It was then that I realized that every disk that I had written to during that period was unreadable and unuseable; they all were "Unknown" to DOS and couldn't even be reformatted.

It seems that the dirty power caused something to happen in the controller which made the boot sector read/write process "move" by some small amount. Every time I wrote something to the disk, it shifted the track0 info just enough to put it out of sync with a normal drive; eventually, it moved far enough to cause the drive to quit reading anything, even its own "reformatted" disks.

On a related note, the following two summers saw massive failures of central air conditioning units in the neighborhood, all involving units that were less than 5 years old (under warranty). When our neighbor's system failed, she contacted her HVAC people; to her surprise, they told her, "We've been expecting a call from you. We'll be out later today to replace the dead part." Seems that after the fourth or fifth call, all requiring the same fix, these people got smart and contacted their supplier to get an immediate shipment of components to keep on hand. They had to wait for a failure to meet warranty requirements, but they were very quick with the replacements.

The failing part? The little computer module that controls the energy-efficiency sensors that all modern systems use to cut down on electric usage. Yup, it didn't like dirty power any more than my computer did.

It took about two years to get all of the systems cleaned up. We were told at one point that the supplier had filed a lawsuit against the power company in an effort to recover what they could in costs for the replacement units, but I don't know if they ever got anything for it.

The flood was an "act of God", but the power substation failure was preventable; if you build a major substation in a flood plain and don't protect it from flooding, at some point it's gonna drown. (They built a 500-year levee around it once they got back out there, so I suspect that they had more than a few lawsuits filed against them.)

Makes me wonder what might happen on the left coast this summer after all of the rolling blackouts and brownouts they've had. If you have a fairly modern AC/heating system, you might want to get it checked.

Lady Niniane
 
I drained all of the oil out of a 5hp engine, removed the "governor" then stuck a screwdriver under the throttle holding it wide open and started it.

Then I ran and hid around the corner of the house and waited....BOOM
 
bigbootydaddy.
hhahaahhaaha

i was at Knott's Berry Farm while in high school, and i saw the power transformer BLOW UP.

It was like a miniature mushroom cloud.

OOOHhhhhhhhhhhh...

the crappy part was the people who were stuck on rides -- especially the parachute drop ride...imagine being stuck in a flimsy cage about 5 stories in the air for half an houR!!

 
I think that would be when a storm blew in suddenly and, as I was moving to shutdown/unplug, a streak of lightning snaked out of the outlet. Luckily, the only things that fried were my modem and the phone jack/line. Whenever I tried to plug a phone (any phone) into the line after that, all I got was static.
 
Freshman year I was part of a cleaning crew removing old furniture, etc. from dorms that were being remodeled. One 8 story dorm was a lot of fun to work on. It had balconies with sliding glass windows. Many an object was launched off said balcony into a dumpster below. Coolest thing to go was a full sized couch. After impact, nothing bigger than a match stick could be found. The thing literally shattered. That's one job I would have done for free because nothing is as much fun as that kind of destruction.





 
Was putting extra fans in my system and then when it was turned on two wires from the psu touched the case. Lights when out, blue sparks came from the wires for some time, and then everything dead. Only the PSU got destroyed
 
<< Holy Cow Lady Niniane! Are you a writer? I think that is one of the longest posts I've ever seen! >>

I guess this was just the most interesting thread... 🙂

flippinfleck: you mean you tossed it out of the window? 😉
 
MrAnderson exclaimed, &quot;Holy Cow Lady Niniane! Are you a writer? I think that is one of the longest posts I've ever seen! &quot;

😱

Sorry 'bout that. I tend to get verbose.

I'm a writer of sorts - one of my primary work tasks is providing clients with written documentation and presentations about the systems I work on(aka technical writing). My target audience is adults, but often includes those without any background in whatever the subject matter is. One gets used to putting together lots of background and explanation material, just to forestall the &quot;newbie&quot; questions.

Lady Niniane
 
If a TV is considered equipment:

When my Siameese cat woke up from sleeping on top of my brand new color TV and threw up down the back and killed it dead.

or:

When I went to adjust the rabbit ears on another TV (quite a few years ago) and got a huge static spark killing the tuner.

Both costly problems I could ill afford at the time.
 
A couple of months ago our furnace starting sizzling and caught on fire while I was online, the flames were a nice touch.
 
I took a Casio fax machine (major POS) to the muzzle loader range and put a .50 calibre slug through it. I've also executed Packard Bell computers, cordless phones, etc.
 
I have video to prove it. After my friends graduated end of last year, we went out to a lonely road and tried to break the peice of Sh*t monitor with alcohol bottles. Its so funny.. we even chucked it and it still didnt break. It was a packerd bell monitor.
It figures that they make the monitor so strong knowing that people would hit the monitor when the computer fails.
 
A place a little ways from me on RT 25 in Elgin IL has junk shoot on wednesday nites. as long as it doesn't have metal in it they will throw it out of a trap for ya. ( they charge $1 per 20 Gauge round that note though ) Flying Packard Bell 486 DX2-66 Board. PULL!!
 
i used to work at Radio Shack and would take the old fluorescent lights out to the dumpster and smash then by the dozen...i suppose breathing all that wasn't a good idea...but it 'sho was cool !
 
Our neighborhood squirels usually fry one to two transformers per summer in the substation next to our house. Kinda cool especially at night.
 
back in the days where you can put the power in the MB incorrectly, someone did and melted the CPU and memory and parts of the MB. yeah, and it stunk like silicon too. :|
 
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