I can neither confirm nor deny that I was involved with running a diesel firewater pump without opening the cooling water supply.

Repair costs to date are in the region of half a million quid, and it’s still not back in one piece.

Engineering wise, nothing physical, but probably into the £00k’s if not £000k’s of wasted manhours following up on mistakes.

Once whilst working for a smidgen above minimum wage in a lab I destroyed a sample sell from an instrument by cleaning with the wrong solution (I used acetone, should have used soapy water, it melted the coating), knowing that a similar cell cost £30k in the other machine, and this machine hadn’t been produced since at least the early 90’s, I presented the remains to my boss who looked “I’m not angry, I’m just disapointed ” and sent me off to try and source it’s replacement.

3 phonecalls to suppliers later I’d tracked down the new manufacturers who had the old spares inventory and ordered a whole box of goodies, including two cells at £15 a pop to justify the £20 P&P! Having nursed this bit of kit through the last few months with silicon sealent and ductape trashing it turned out to be a blessing in disguise!

Sank girlfriends speed boat.. also blew up same girlfriends brothers engine in a corvette after doing donuts on her parents lawn. 2 weeks later opened a £500 bottle from her dads wine cellar which we necked to just get drunk.

I was young and drunk at the time. Surprised i didnt get a visit from some local heavies to tell me to stay away from his daughter.

I knew of a guy who’d picked up his newly restored vintage Rolls Royce from a restorers in Cambridge only to manage to flip the trailer it was on near Birtley Co Durham. I think it worth well over 200K.

Cue a trip back to Cambridge with a bent Roller.

Hmmm

Blew up a couple of hundred thousand pounds of plasma arc furnace power supply after I fixed one fault on the feedback control loop but in my smugness at fixing the first fault missed the second one. Cue massive run away event and lots of broken semiconductors. Worse still was the power thyristors then had to be made costing even more money in down time.

Whilst working as a “controller” on the railway I may have “forgotten” to tell anyone about a points failure overnight. Oh that incurred a lot of very expensive delays in the morning I can tell you. I had an extensive strong listening too whilst on the spikey chair for that one.

A brand new and freshly kitted out 3.5 litre V8 Sherpa Police riot van………went through some very deep unseen flood water at considerable speed (wave crested the roof line) and hydra locked the gearbox and engine…..oooops…..I had to piggy back all the occupants out from the van to dry land too.
Wouldn’t be so bad but I had killed my own Volvo in exactly the same spot many years previously doing exactly the same thing!!
It’s fine now they’ve painted white lines in the centre of the road when it’s flooded these days you can clearly see its flooded plus there’s also a depth gauge at the roadside 😆

Suggsey are you a YouTube star?

My brother lost a drill bit at work it was the size of a small car and cost approx £3 million ( I think he isn’t that keen discussing the issue) he narrowed it’s location down to 5 sq km just not sure how far below the sea bed it is.

I threw a 2 day old macbook pro out the window of my apartment during a manic phase.
I had a hard time trying to explain that to the insurance company.

I was thinking the same, crankboy, though it doesn’t seem to be a Sherpa

[video]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2uFm002CuA0[/video]

I broke a car park in central Oxford once.

Negative, no film star here, it was about 1am, pouring with rain, blues light run and showing my age, it was a Sherpa V8 twin wheel monster and weighed twice as much as that toy van in the video…..would have been mid to late 90’s.

Configured an ID plug incorrectly on the nightshift prior testing a GE CF6-80C2D1F aircraft engine, which meant when we ran it up in the test cell the HPT clearance control didn’t function correctly, didn’t cool the HPT, wiped out the shrouds and a load of HPT blades.

can you translate? some of us don’t speak geek.

Stopped A380 production at the FAL because my parts where late.

I once loaded 30 cases of eggs onto a pallet behind my lorry, got my docket signed then jumped into the cab, saw a car parked right in front of me, and reversed back right over the lot of them.

I’ve been reading these stories wondering if i would have something to share ine day and them i remembered….it wasn’t my fault the equipment failed but it was my chemicals inside when it did. The insurance claim was over £1M.

My collarbone.

I used to work for a big Aerospace manufacturer. At the time I was there, the first prototype of the wing for a new aircraft variant had just been completed. It was being equipped with strain gauges for testing and the job had been handed to a local contractor.

They sent some poor kid who had just completed his apprenticeship. This had apparently mostly involved fitting gauges to bridge steel-work rather than to aluminium panels on a new wing which had just gone through an extensive lightening re-design, leaving many of the panels not much thicker than tin-foil.

Kid had been on-site about 2 weeks when someone noticed that, every now and then, he’d get a gauge a bit squint. So he’d just grab his trusty big flat-head screwdriver, put the end against the gauge and bang his hand on the end to get the gauge off, then glue a new one on.

He was escorted to his car while his boss was called.

25k photo mask was in a pellicle room saw some dust under a Yamarder light flicked it over with the pick and caught a Stainless steel clean room table.
Smash!
I was being trained at the time put all the bits back in the box and the guy training me took the box to the supervisor saying Andy’s found a slight problem with the mask oh how we laughed when he opened the box.

You were allowed one **** up and that was mine 🙂
Another guy wrote of 100k’s worth by putting them in a acid bath for a clean with the pells still on. No one laughed with that one 😯

Er, is that post available in English?

How does one value a human heart?

Well played btw molgrips.

Er, is that post available in English?

Well, I recognise most of the words, but the sequence they’re in makes little sense.

25k photo mask was in a pellicle room saw some dust under a Yamarder light…

Best I can think of that I would like to admit too is the toll barrier on the Isle of Skye bridge.

*makes mental name of whos bike fettling advice to ignore in future*

Unscrewed 4 mystery wing nuts in a bedroom on the first day in our new house.

Elsewhere a toilet fell off the wall.

simialr to above. First day in new house I unplugugged the orange fly cable in the bedroom and flooded the bathroom (macerator) I also unplugged a scary electrical tape and half plug contraption in the basement and spent the next 2 hours taking the electric gates off their hinge to get my car out!

There was a similar post a while ago where I confessed to driving over a £25k (rrp) defib in an ambulance.

Im moving in a month, thanks for the reminders to check stuff before removing / unplugging!

My Yeti SB66c frame, I’m guessing I’m not alone on that though?

Not mine but I did chuckle when BAE welded all the plates on the one of the Astute boats upsidedown.

A sugar factory.

Unscrewed 4 mystery wing nuts in a bedroom on the first day in our new house.

Elsewhere a toilet fell off the wall

Althought not funny at all. I just laughed alittle 😀

Not broken,

But was working for BAE when they took over some business from Boeing about ten year ago. Went in to check on the stock valuations and instantly closed four Boeing Service Centres down for a week. NO repairs to Boeing instruments for a week at the four largest sites due to stock discrepencies.

Managed to save BAE over £6m off the purchase price due to the stock being wrong!

a condom 😡

Part true, part myth:
My uncle works at Rolls Royce, testing jet turbines. They would run all sorts of tests, vibration, extreme weather, and bird strikes. Bird strikes were done by revving up the jets, and tossing chickens in the rotors (this is true).

After a few months he gets a call from an engineer at Boeing. He says “Listen, we have a problem with the bird strike tests, every time we toss in the chicken, the engine implodes. I don’t know how you guys are doing it”
My uncles response: “Guys, seriously, you have to defrost the chicken first!”

My Yeti SB66c frame, I’m guessing I’m not alone on that though?

A mate’s been through 2 ASR5’s. His wife backed over the first & smashed the second into the carport.

My late father was in the Royal Engineers in the early 70’s and stationed in Hong Kong, anyway, he made the papers over here after driving his grader through a grave yard and being chased off by a woman with a meat cleaver apparently. A different kind of expensive i guess.

Wrote off two new CBR600’s in the space of a few months.

Just reading about a guy who dropped a $1.5m piece of NASA hardware.

A job I was on was delayed because a similarly priced fuel cell was dropped as it was unloaded at the docks.

Not same price bracket but once saw two car transporters travelling in convoy from the factory loaded with new mondeos – that was until the first transporter out braked the second.

In 2008, someone stacked a B2 bomber, successfully ejecting. They’re about $2bn a pop.

Put a book down on a computer keyboard hiding on top of a cabinet well above my eyeline, turning out half the lights during a Liberal Democrat/charles kennedys keynote, live TV broadcast. He took up drinking about that time. Could have been me.

Got a phone call from BBC. Awesome. Now paranoid about computer keyboards in control rooms.