[Closed] What's the most expensive thing you've broken?

Nowhere near it but I know someone who's new pup chewed a rather large corner off a £30,000 Persian rug.

£7ks worth of recently restored, uninsured VW Beetle

A colleague once had a little mishap with £250ks worth of mugs, and I once sent an ad to print with the wrong mortgage rate on. Never did find out what that cost, or who ended up paying...

i've been in the plastics industry for 25 years. I've seen lots of broken mould tools and robot parts.

The biggest was a carbon fibre end of arm robot gripper and the 32 cavity mould tool. The program for the robot was corrupt and was doing odd things, not picking up correctly, putting down in the wrong place. The operator asked the techs to investigate, it then went up the technical ladder until the programmers, tooling engineers, and electrical engineers were all having their 15 minutes of fame.

Long story short, "It's fine now, give it a go".

Me: "Shall I run it through the the first cycle at 10% speed, then ramp it up once we're happy"

"No, it's fine"

Reset, start up, I'm thinking "that doesn't look right to me". Mould opens, robot moves in, mould closes on robot. BANG.

£16k on a new end of arm tool, £80 on moulding tool repairs, £12K on repair and recalibration of the robot arm. Just because someone wanted to save 1 minute not to watch the first cycle run slowly.

The line: "We're not looking to blame anyone, because we don't work in a blame culture. But who's fault was this?" was imortalised in the memory of anyone who worked there. Years later new starters were quoting it.

might have written off a prototype vehicle. 6 figures apparently.

I put a mk1 golf on it's roof after taking all weekend fixing the head gasket - around £3500

My cousin once dropped a full tray of manuka honey, not sure if it was 12 or 18 jars at around £15 each

Mines gotta be my spleen. $47k CAD

I know of someone who might have accidentally and terminally damaged a brand new (€400k) 2kW laser system for an Additive Manufacturing platform...

In the immortal words of Bart Simpson:

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Broke the tray on a scanning electron microscope at uni. Think it was worth a fair few quid.

nothing as expensive as you lot,but i threw my sony psp (2 weeks old) onto my guitar and smashed the screen in a fit of rage/tantrum.

Need it fixing? 😉

Broke the turbo in my Ford TDCi engine by forgetting to get it serviced. £800 for a new turbo initially, but then £5k for a new engine as not all the swarf was removed which killed the engine.

Note - I didn't pay for the engine, Ford did as I proved they'd ballsed up.

£7ks worth of recently restored, uninsured VW Beetle

This brings a tear to my eye. I can't imagine losing mine.

Accidentally demolished part of a barn with a Case W24C wheeled loader. The roof was resting on the bucket after I had finished. Not sure how much it cost to put right, but a few grand I'm sure.

Not me personally but someone at work (I don't think anyone ever admitted it) managed to have a $1.2 million aircraft part written off by quality due to the damage caused by not quite following the correct production process.

A 2 day old 911 Turbo. In my defence I didn't really cause it but I did park it where the large truck full of slabs could roll over it 😯

Used to work in a warehouse in Bracknell driving a fork truck. They asked me to cover at another site in Woodley so went over. The access door want very tall and I was new to it and had a very bad habit of carrying loads a couple of feet off the floor. Unfortunately there wasn't a couple of feet between the fully dropped mast and the door frame. So I took the door frame (which was also acting as a lintel) and a fair bit of wall with me as I went through it. That cost quite a bit in repairs and lost time etc. I wasn't very popular.
Once snapped the crank on my recently back in the road tear away classic mini. This in turn lunched pretty much everything else. About £4k for a replacement. Could have just brought a cheap scrapper engine but where's the fun in that?

I once reversed a 7.5t lorry into my own car.

It's got to be the guy who did the measuring for the new french trains. A £40m cock-up

[url= http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-27497727 ]Linky[/url]

I've probably told this tale before on here, but here goes nothing - I finished off an already broken UPS, which in turn, turned off the IT and Telephone systems of a large bank, over a very large area - Half of Wales to be exact from about 1pm on a Friday to about the same time on the Sunday.
I managed a glance of a report that estimated the total cost as being over £100k "although the true cost may never be known".

Even though people in authority knew I did it, they either liked me too much to say anything, or were worried they'd be found more to blame than I to say anything - so I didn't get a single harsh word in my direction because of it.

Never have so many random events, occurred at exactly the right time, in right place, to the right people, to save the luckiest ****er in the world.

This is where we find out a few bankers lurk on the forum and one of them pops up with 'the global economy', a few $trillion 🙂

scruff - Member
I once reversed a 7.5t lorry into my own car.

Smooth...

My back.

mrs rocket's car practising handbrake turns

"It's coming out your wages!"

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[i]Repairs to the satellite cost $135million.[/i]

[i]A NASA inquiry into the mishap determined that it was caused by a lack of procedural discipline throughout the facility. While the turn-over cart used during the procedure was in storage, a technician removed twenty-four bolts securing an adapter plate to it without documenting the action. The team subsequently using the cart to turn the satellite failed to check the bolts, as specified in the procedure, before attempting to move the satellite[/i]

A colleague of mine started a fire which destroyed a £3 million pound recycling machine. Who'd have thought that welding over an open waste oil tank could possibly go wrong...

Russian T-series (not sure which one) battle tank. Unsure of value.
It wasn't by accident, a local had given one up during operation harvest (arms amnesty) in Bosnia and and friend and I were tasked with killing it. And kill it we most certainly did!

Did you own it with a pair of bombers?

A hayrick and several kilos of PE4 (at least half a slab and then some) if I remember correctly.

[i]a local had given one up during operation harvest (arms amnesty)[/i]

blimey, the police round here are delighted if they get a couple of Stanley knives when they have an amnesty...

😀
We had a whale of a time with the kit which was handed over. I have never seen so much small arms ammunition before or since. Crates and crates and crates of the stuff just chucked onto the back of the DAF for us to dispose of. Big thumbs up and smile from the local commander and a "DOBRO!".

I'm surprised no ones mentioned their marriage 🙂

Teeth. 🙁

VW Passat 2.0 TDI 2007

A friend of mine was running a gun crew on a naval gunnery range and they were tasked with firing rounds over a Wasp helicopter, to see how it stood up to the shock waves when rounds went over it.

You can guess what happened.

The officer in charge laid the gun in wrongly and they blasted a perfectly good Wasp helicopter to pieces

That just goes without saying Molly.

😉

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.

Cost approx 250k. Not a good day.

The officer in charge laid the gun in wrongly and they blasted a perfectly good Wasp helicopter to pieces

14,000 rivets flying in formation, the most scary ride of my life in a Wasp 😀

My first wife's heart...
🙁

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.