More proof that books really can be mighty powerful!
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Stored energy is always a potential problem.
I was told a story once of how a student was asked to pressure test a prototype tank. Unfortunately nobody had thought to ask him whether he knew how to do this correctly. He duly went off to the lab and connected it to a compressor. You are supposed, of course, to use water because if the tank gives the energy released is much smaller. This guy was using air.
A supervisor passing by looked in and saw what he was doing. A very short time after the phone in the lab rang and the student answered it. It was the supervisor, from several rooms away, telling him to turn off that redacted compressor and get the hell out of there. The supervisor hadnāt even cared to wait long enough to shout a warning with only a stud wall between him and it. He had simply run for it.
They then evacuated the building and waited for the pressure to drop, which took quite a long time, because nobody would volunteer to go in there and open the valve.
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Iām really starting to like this guy. I almost hope we never see his face, because heās already a character in my headā¦
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That just made my day, and I shall be forwarding said anecdote to a machinist friend of mine 
It will defo make him smile.
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While there was a hole in the shield he was standing to the side of the hole. The hole was for the camera to have a clear view. I donāt see a safety issue there.
Reaching in, though, is another matter.
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I would like to see you try that one on a British H&SE inspector, who would also want to see the risk assessment carried out before the operation took place.
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Isnāt there a joke that goes something like āHow does a Russian drive in a nail? He uses his forehead. What if itās a really big nail? He finds a Finn and uses his forehead.ā
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Yeah, in the US, thereās no way in hell that would get by OHSA either, but I get the impression that he owns the shop, rather than being an employee, which means he can do whatever he wants by himself after hours.
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The possibilities for puns are basically endless, right? At least it took us several hundred years to turn the press, a tool for creating books, into an instrument for destroying them, so maybe the implications of new technology arenāt as alarming as we often think.
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Since people seem to like this sort of thing, Iāll tell you another one.
At one time I lived in a town where the church had a carillon - a kind of musical box movement that rang full size church bells. I was asked to take a look at it because it was malfunctioning.
I made my way up a tower to a room just below the bells. There I found an interesting mechanism which used old telephone relays - PO3000 for anyone who cares. The relay for the biggest bell had bad contact burnout, but it was easy to swap to another contact. I gave it a clean, then wondered what the relays were doing.
They were connected to a big rack of solenoid valves and a lot of piping, and I realised the mechanism was electro-pneumatic. But where was the reservoir and the compressor?
In a dark corner, nearly two metres tall and covered in spider webs, was an enormous pressure tank - the cylinders for the bells must have been rather big - that was entirely covered in a layer of rust. There was a fair sized three phase motor driving a compressor. The entire thing must have been more than 20 years old and in all that time it had almost certainly never been inspected or serviced. I departed rapidly the way I came and told the Vicar it would be a good idea to get a pneumatics engineer in to inspect, test and refurbish before the day came when an entire floor of the tower blew out.
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how did the vicar react?
[follow-up question: what is the Christian equivalent of āinshallahā?]
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Totally unworried. Heās the member of the family that didnāt follow tradition and go into the Army, I suspect if the tower did collapse heād just have said āOh well, it was pretty ugly anyway.ā
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Eh, itās a Finno-Ugric language, and no more difficult than Hungarian. Nincs semi bĆ”j.
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This guy rules. But yes, some OH&S concerns.
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For a moment, I felt a weird serial killer vibe in the manās satisfaction. But just for a moment.
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(Condensed edition)
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Iām hard pressed for words just now.
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If you watch his earlier videos, he didnāt even start with the safety screenā¦
ā¦as Andrew Wiles later described Fermatās Conjecture.
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