SON OF A...

[tst]

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@for(imstuck) wrote:

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@tst wrote:

Although, I should probably point out that the button itself wasn't on the pants at the time. And it didn't work.

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Was it a plastic button? That would definitely cause problems 

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It was the type of metal which isn't very impressed by a soldering iron.

[JW-JnJ]

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@tst wrote:

It was the type of metal which isn't very impressed by a soldering iron

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Magnesium? Bad idea for a button

[SnowMule]

At a place I worked many years ago...

Used to get material for the machine shop from scrap yards.  One day out there we found a rod of material that was the right size for some parts we needed.  "9000 series aluminum?  Never heard of it.  Oh well, get it anyways."

Back to the shop, machinist got it in the lathe and started cutting on it... that's when we learned there's no such thing as 9000-series aluminum, but there is a 9000-series magnesium alloy.

Toasted all the cables for the DRO on the lathe, fired the dry-chem system... made quite a mess.  Vacuumed that crap out of equipment for weeks after that.  That's when we started buying stock material instead of scavenging it from scrapyards.

Sonofa...  

It's funny now; wasn't so funny at the time. 

[GregFreeman]

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@SnowMule wrote:

At a place I worked many years ago...

Used to get material for the machine shop from scrap yards.  One day out there we found a rod of material that was the right size for some parts we needed.  "9000 series aluminum?  Never heard of it.  Oh well, get it anyways."

Back to the shop, machinist got it in the lathe and started cutting on it... that's when we learned there's no such thing as 9000-series aluminum, but there is a 9000-series magnesium alloy.

Toasted all the cables for the DRO on the lathe, fired the dry-chem system... made quite a mess.  Vacuumed that crap out of equipment for weeks after that.  That's when we started buying stock material instead of scavenging it from scrapyards.

Sonofa...  

It's funny now; wasn't so funny at the time. 

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Maybe we should turn this into a thread of "engineering mistakes that have made one say sonofaaaaa...."

[Ben]

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@for(imstuck) wrote:

...

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Maybe we should turn this into a thread of "engineering mistakes that have made one say sonofaaaaa...."

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We can do that.

We doing the first run of a high tech fuel pump and the control room was filled.

Started to spin it up and I watched as the displays bloomed with all of the signals coming to life with the background music of a jet engine wining.

17 seconds into the run the lead deign engineer said shut it down there is something wrong. He had noticed a sharp rise in the bearing temperature. The pump was dismantled and the bearing cut in half to diagnose. Turns out the tech who had prep'd the bearing for treatment wnated to make sure the oir way would not be blocked by the process so he stuck a toothpick in the hole. He had not noticed that the tip broke off when he took it out.

Son of a ....

I have that disected bearing in my collection of artifacts of my adventures.

Others like it are supposedly flying today, but of course with out the toothpick.

Ben 

[JW-JnJ]

For a big "Sonofa"

I few down to an AF Base for a big integration test. They had the range reserved, people to man the test equipment, range safety, and our team. We were just missing the test plane with the system under test. A day later of being told "we're almost finished", we get the excuse "We are 8% out of alignment, give us the rest of the day to align it". At the end of the day, we were told "We are 16% out of alignment, scrap the test". I shudder to think how much money was wasted because someone misaligned it THEN someone aligned it in the wrong direction.

My favorite "Sonofa" is getting an hour into debug and realizing that something wasn't plugged in. Happens more times than I want to admit.

[GregFreeman]

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JW-L3CE wrote:

My favorite "Sonofa" is getting an hour into debug and realizing that something wasn't plugged in. Happens more times than I want to admit.

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Happened to me the other day...we're not seeing a signal. Oh, the pulse generator isn't powered.

[Intaris]

I went into panic mode a while back when I was working on some code for a customer and suddenly could only find an old version of the project which I had since made some major improvements to.  Immediately started frantically looking for where the files had gone, even started getting out the backups after an hour or so until I finally realised I was sitting at the wrong PC.

Yeah Version control software would have saved my time, but as per usual, I needed this event to actually make me implement one....  After which it never happened again.  Reminds me of "The World according to Garp" where he decides to buy a house which just had a plane crash into it under the idea that it was already pre-disastered and nothing else could ever happen to it in future.

[crossrulz]

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@for(imstuck) wrote:

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JW-L3CE wrote:

My favorite "Sonofa" is getting an hour into debug and realizing that something wasn't plugged in. Happens more times than I want to admit.

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Happened to me the other day...we're not seeing a signal. Oh, the pulse generator isn't powered.

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At my first co-op, we kept proving the first two rules of EE:

  1.  It doesn't work if it isn't plugged in.

  2.  It doesn't work if it isn't turned on.

That's what happens when you don't have automated tests...

Here's another fun event that happened here recently.  We switched out signal generators in a test set for calibration.  Ran the system self test.  It failed.  It took somebody a long time to realize that the GPIB address on the new generator was wrong.

[SnowMule]

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crossrulz wrote:

At my first co-op, we kept proving the first two rules of EE:

  1.  It doesn't work if it isn't plugged in.

  2.  It doesn't work if it isn't turned on.

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That's the first thing I ask people when they come to me saying something's not working... "Plugged in, turned on?"

They laugh at first, then realize that's actually what's wrong...