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Old 15th Mar 2015, 12:54 pm   #81
jonnybear
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Default Re: Your daftest mistakes??

We had this work experience lad for two weeks.

I was working in another part of the workshop and did not notice what he was doing until there was a bright flash and a bang - investigating I found my beautiful long reach Steadfast screwdriver blown to pieces.

What he had done is unscrewed a double socket and shorted my driver across live to earth, he said I can not understand what happened.
I switched the socket off first.

The next day I saw him put a neon screwdriver in an insectocuter to check it was working, it was, he never tried that one again.

When he left school he went and worked for the council on road maintenance; I rest my case.

John
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Old 15th Mar 2015, 8:30 pm   #82
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A few years ago I was repairing a quiet expensive DV deck.I had on the bench a bottle of IPA cleaner ( not beer ! ) which I had been using to clean the tape path etc.I also had a bottle of plastic welding liquid ( very good stuff for repairing cracks in plastic cabinets ) which I had been using to repair a hairline crack in the case.
On completion of the repair there was a slight sticker mark on the case .
I reached for the IPA cleaner to remove it ,applied it to the case with a cloth only to find a huge black smear mark on the case .Yes I had picked up the welding bottle by mistake !
Welding bottle now stays at the back of the bench after each use
Time for IPA ( beer this time ) !
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Old 15th Mar 2015, 11:05 pm   #83
Martin G7MRV
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Quote:
Originally Posted by SiriusHardware View Post
A familiar name - I worked for a company which primarily made and serviced Warden Call equipment - we serviced Tunstall equipment as well, though I did not work for Tunstall.
Seeing where your located - was the company TyneTec?
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Old 16th Mar 2015, 12:20 am   #84
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When I was about 15, I was part of a youth club which owned a big home-brew mixer-amp in an aluminium case with lots of knobs on the front. It had something like an IEC mains lead - except the female part was in the case of the amp, and the male part was on the end of a lead which had the 13A plug on the other end.

One day, when I plugged it in, the other end of the lead was sat in my left hand. Ouch.
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Old 16th Mar 2015, 10:06 am   #85
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Default Re: Your daftest mistakes??

I too smashed a GEC TV back in the early 60's when they came out with a lightweight highly polished cabinet. Think it was a 19" set.
We had been unloading a lorry load of Murphy TV's that were very heavy and my muscles got the better of me when I went to deliver the GEC. WE used Mini vans and had a habit of taking the TV out with both hands and then pushing one end of the set into the air and shoving it sideways at the same time. It could then be caught in your arm and left a free hand to lock the van door. Being lightweight I pushed it up higher and further than normal and completely missed it when I went to catch it. A TV falling from 6 feet onto a hard road was not a pretty sight. The cheap thin cabinet smashed into four pieces and the tube and electronics bounced around and finally settled in several bits. All watched by the amazed customer. Apart from the cabinet the set actually worked when I taped it together with Gaffa tape.
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Old 16th Mar 2015, 11:09 am   #86
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Default Re: Your daftest mistakes??

Quote:
Originally Posted by mark_in_manc View Post
When I was about 15, I was part of a youth club which owned a big home-brew mixer-amp in an aluminium case with lots of knobs on the front. It had something like an IEC mains lead - except the female part was in the case of the amp, and the male part was on the end of a lead which had the 13A plug on the other end.

One day, when I plugged it in, the other end of the lead was sat in my left hand. Ouch.
Unless you designed it yourself, that was hardly your fault.

These days, you would be due a multi-million payout of course
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Old 16th Mar 2015, 3:46 pm   #87
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When I was an apprentice at Thorn Automation, one day my soldering iron stopped working. Bear in mind that in those days a soldering iron was connected straight to the mains, no power supply box. So, I decided to investigate, take it apart. As I was fiddling with the now displayed innards, I suddenly felt as if Superman had sneaked up behind me and applied powerful locks to the pressure points each side of my neck/shoulders. This strange, painful, vibratory feeling seemed to last for a few seconds then mercifully it subsided as my hands moved away from the offending live parts. No, I hadn't disconnected the 'dead' iron from the mains before dismantling it. It was the first shock I got as an electronics engineer, but it was by no means the last. But I never took a live soldering iron apart again!
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Old 16th Mar 2015, 9:40 pm   #88
mark_in_manc
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Unless you designed it yourself, that was hardly your fault.
You're very kind!

Steve - your vibratory shock experience reminds me of what a girl I once shared a house with did, when the lead fell out of the back of the kettle and into the sink in which she was doing the washing up.

She never did much washing up before that - and even less after.

The landlord avoided the multi-million payout, despite the mains outlet being directly over the sink. To my shame it's still there, 15 years after I bought the place off him!
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Old 17th Mar 2015, 12:30 am   #89
SiriusHardware
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Seeing where you're located - was the company TyneTec?
Briefly, No, I worked for another company whose main base was in the north west, but there was a little local depot here that I worked out of.
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Old 17th Mar 2015, 5:12 am   #90
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Default Re: Your daftest mistakes??

Grab a brew and pull up a sandbag, lads!

The Lightning Mk6 radar hand controller was a masterpiece of ergonomic design. It had around 9 switches, a couple of pots and two synchro transmitters IIRC, and controlled every aspect of the AI23B radar from one handy little unit which lived by the pilot's left thigh, just behind the throttle boxes.

All analogue, of course, it talked to the radar via two Plessey plugs protruding from the rear; the smaller plug was around 6 ways and carried the power supplies to the controller; the larger plug was a 25-way beast which carried a multitude of control signals.

It was fairly rare to have problems with these plugs, thankfully - they were pretty much buried between the port skin of the aircraft and the ejection seat and were a pig to get at and, if it was one of the pins in the centre of the plug which was giving a problem, you had to desolder all the outer pins to get to it. It didn't help that the pin ident letters were tiny, and that all the wires going to it were the same colour, a tasteful shade of orange, and that each pin/wire connection was covered by a small Hellerman sleeve. The cable used was Nyvin , which was resistant to water, fire, fuel, contaminants.... and wire strippers! Not easy stuff to work with.

The plug itself was pretty reliable, but as the aircraft got older the Nyvin wires became prone to cracking where they flexed as they left the plug outlet, giving intermittent snags. When that happened the only way to recover it was to cut the whole cable loom back a couple of inches (the manufacturers had thoughtfully left plenty of spare cable) having first carefully idented each wire by writing on masking tape labels before removing the plug completely. You would then clean out all the little solder buckets on the 25 pins, trim and re-strip and re-tin each cable, slide on a fresh Hellerman sleeve and then resolder the tightly-packed 25 pins.

It was not too bad a job if the ejection seat had been removed: if not, it was a real advantage to have a double-jointed dwarf who was handy with a soldering iron on your team!

To cut a long story short, it was the thick end of a morning's work to re-do the plug, and the young corporal heaved a sigh of relief as he finished the tedious, awkward task, connected up the newly resoldered plug, fired up the radar - everything worked perfectly. It was only when he was buttoning things up and tidying up his tools that he found, lying there on the servicing platform, the right-angled aluminium outlet which protected the rear of the 25-way plug and which should, of course, have been slid onto the cable loom before he started soldering the blasted plug on...

Well, it took me a fair while to live that one down, but I'll bet there weren't many guys who hadn't done it themselves at some stage!

Cheers,

Frank
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Last edited by frankmcvey; 17th Mar 2015 at 5:35 am.
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Old 17th Mar 2015, 10:05 am   #91
mark pirate
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Default Re: Your daftest mistakes??

I have done the same thing many times
Mainly with octal and din plugs, but over the years I have seen so many rubber 13a plugs that have been cut because the cable was not slid through the top before wiring. So it's not just me!

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Old 17th Mar 2015, 3:42 pm   #92
kalee20
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Quote:
Originally Posted by mark_in_manc View Post
...reminds me of what a girl I once shared a house with did...

She never did much washing up before that - and even less after.

The landlord avoided the multi-million payout, despite the mains outlet being directly over the sink. To my shame it's still there...
Guess she's long gone though?
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Old 17th Mar 2015, 4:30 pm   #93
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Default Re: Your daftest mistakes??

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Mainly with octal and din plugs, but over the years I have seen so many rubber 13a plugs that have been cut because the cable was not slid through the top before wiring. So it's not just me!
I had to do something similar when fitting a Pye Whitehall to an armoured van: the plastic shell on the 'umbilical' between the radio and the control-box was too big to fit through the grommeted hole in the bulkhead between the van's cab and the rear box. I figured out that if I slitted the plug's cable-shell I could take it off the cable, then feed the shell-less plug through the hole and re-fit the shell on the other side.

Self-amalgamating tape and a cable-tie concealed my sins!
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Old 17th Mar 2015, 8:00 pm   #94
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Quote:
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Mainly with octal and din plugs, but over the years I have seen so many rubber 13a plugs that have been cut because the cable was not slid through the top before wiring. So it's not just me!
I think we've all done that at some point, my worst being a 105 pin Harting style plug on a 32 pair (+ individual screens) audio multicore.

That's one bit of vintage tech I don't miss, all that goes down a single piece of ethernet these days.
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Old 18th Mar 2015, 12:35 am   #95
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Had shocks etc myself but the real story was a tragic one told by my Nan in her 50's. She had a friend of the same age who bought an early pop up mains toaster in the early 60's. Of course it was not very reliable and every now and then the toast would stick inside it. This lady used to use a knife to detach and fish out the toast WITHOUT unplugging the toaster - luckily she had mostly only bone handled ones. However one day her luck ran out and she picked up a steel handled knife - combine mains with a weak heart and well you can guess the result - Nan then said thoughtfully 'But she had a lovely funeral'. Poor old soul never knew what hit her AND missed out on her morning toast!
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Old 18th Mar 2015, 3:02 am   #96
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My most embarrassing mistake occurred many moons ago during the 1970s at the height of the "Cold War".

I was at the time employed on maintenance duties at a communications facility in SE England. A telephone call from a Control Station requested that a check be made on the data signal on one of the channels carried by the equipment I was tasked to maintain. Unfortunately I mistakenly disconnected the wrong channel, made the test measurements and phoned the results through to the Control Station. A short time later I was summoned to the governor's office. He was not amused as he informed me that the consequence of my disconnecting the incorrect link had caused the RAF to scramble many fighter aircraft into the sky over the UK. Apparently I had disconnected an important data link related to the UK's early warning system.

Chris
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Old 19th Mar 2015, 12:53 am   #97
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My background is embedded software development but there is one silly episode which can be explained without a turgid thesis on the background to it all.

But first a domestic blunder: I was once brave enough to remove my blocked U bend from my kitchen sink. It was horrible and a slug of something unspeakable ended up in the bin. But it was still messy so I thought 'I'll give this a good rinse in the sink'. Luckily I don't keep much under the sink.

I once had cause to reverse the order of values in a data array. 'Simple!' I thought 'a pointer at the start, a pointer at the end, and a counter to tell when it's finished'. It didn't work. The microprocessor was spending time doing something, but when I looked a the data array afterwards it was completely unchanged. 'Where is it spending all its time' I wondered.

An hour later it dawned on me. I had set the counter to the length of the array. That meant that one pointer moved down from the top of the array, the other pointer moved up from the bottom, swapping array elements as they stepped along. Trouble was, they met half way, crossed over, and then began to swap the elements again, putting everything back as it started
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Old 19th Mar 2015, 10:24 am   #98
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Does reassembling a switchmode PSU, and carefully soldering it back in place on the motherboard ( 14 pins to be soldered ) only to realise (1) that I'd left the bottom screening cover off it's metal case, and (2) that I'd put the plastic inner box into which the PSU PCB fits, inside the metal case upside down! count? My excuse is that the VCR in question had been put on one side, dismantled, for a couple of months, and, before anyone asks, no, I didn't make notes or take photos, although I often do!!
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Old 19th Mar 2015, 12:30 pm   #99
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Selling two working 19 sets with all bits for £100.
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Old 19th Mar 2015, 1:54 pm   #100
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One Saturday morning while watching kids TV (must have been 10 or so) it got a bit un
interesting .The single bar electric fire was on , i wondered if the end connections got hot , so little fingers went through the “protective” grill. One big scream later , mum comes rushing in to find me in tears , not sure if it was “HOT” but it was “LIVE”

Took apart a 19 set , as at the time couldn`t get any info on the “Russian“ looking set , pre internet
days. BIG OOPS.
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