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Old 03-25-2004, 06:43 PM   #50 (permalink)
440sixpack
Lord of All Fevers and Plagues
 
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Location: Brockton, MA
Sure, I've had a few.

One a car wreck of course. Sitting in the front passenger seat, got near t-boned while taking a left turn. The Jeep Wrangler that hit us impacted about 2 feet behind my right shoulder. Fortunately we essentially walked away, despite the fact that I think I blacked out for a minute or two after the crash. After we were checked and dismissed from the hospital and I returned to the scene to find out where my car was, I got an idea of how bad it was from a gas station attendant at the intersection where it happened. When I identified who I was, he looked at me stunned and said incredulously "You were in that and you're okay?".

Another one was a pure dumbass move on my part. Preparing a drill press/lathe for shipping to it's new home as the Army base I worked at at the time was closing, I was told I would have to just cut the power wire (240 V) to the thing since it was hardwired. No problem - except it didn't occur to me to shut the power off before I used uninsulated, metal wire cutters to chop the line. Bang and a big spark, and I was holding a tool where the cutting blades had partially melted from the electricity, yet I never felt a thing. I saved that as a memento.

Same army base (hmm seeing a pattern here), the exhaust pipe on one of our test machines exploded during a test. It used high-pressure nitrogen gas to rapidly actuate the mechanism of the machine, and the old exhaust pipe just let go. A 2 foot chunk of heavy steel pipe flew across the room and missed my head by about 3 inches, bashing into the door behind me. I got a long lunch break out of that one.

Yet another test we were running involved high temperature, high strain rate tension testing of 93% tungsten to simulate anti-armor penetration properties. Using the same test machine, we'd flood enough electricity through the sample to make a 1/4 inch thick tungsten specimen glow like a light bulb filament in less than a second. Well once the cables were not properlay attached and the resulting short circuit melted through 1/8 inch steel plate on another piece of test equipment. So the trend here is the government was trying to kill me.

There have been a couple more long shot situations that probably weren't quite as dangerous, but the possibility of death is always there.
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