2000 - 05 - 31 - 21:00

May 31, 2000

Testing

For a time I was a water analyst in a power plant. There was danger, but with the use of common sense and careful attention harm from lab chemicals was remote. Some hazard was attendant to mving around in the plant and in the gathering of samples, and more when I had to pump caustic soda to the boilers. It was demanding and interesting work and I enjoyed doing it for the thrill of having the responsibiliity for the purity of the water in the boiler and through the turbines, thus the insurance that no solids would get through and cause great trouble in the turbines.

After ten years there, we returned to our home town and the hunt for work began. Soon I managed to hire on at a metal work shop which supplied cabinetry to missle sites, etc. this shop was a vendor to the main contractor. About Christmas time we were told that the prime contractor had pulled them from the approved vendor list for the quality of what we built was not as it was supposed to be. We were handed a ham and a pay check which covered the hours worked and enough extra to feed us through the holiday.

The job hunt was on, early in January I managed to get on with a government contractor who was making equipment for the military. I stood out shivering in the cold, unaccustomed to the weather up here compared to where I had been living. I helped to set up and assist test engineers to run tests on the product. Some of these tests were to destruction and a lot of them were hard hat hazardous. One day I continued building a test fixture designed to hold a pressurized tank, a small one pressurized to 5000 psi. The purpose of this test was to demonstrate that this little tank could withstand penetration by small arms fire. The fixture had an thruster powered by an explosive and electrically fired. The tip of the thruster was machined to be the specific diameter of the small arms fire expected, the thruster was designed to have a throw of "x" amount.

The fixture finished, the tank pressured to 5000 psi and attached in the fixture, the thruster I carefully bolted in and stretched wires going into the building where the firing point was. Everything was set up to the test engineer's satisfaction and we went inside to safety and he initiated the test. Biggest dang noise I had heard in my life and all kinds of zinging, zanging rattling took place for a bit.

We went outside to see what had happened, the tank was gone, the fixture made of I beams and fishplates was bent. The brass had come running outside from their offices in the building to see what had happened. We found fresh holes punched through the galvanized siding of the shed where the test had been run. Flap, flap, flap and serious discussion took place there and then amongst the brass. It was decided by them that the tank had been a faulty tank, and that the engineer over-seeing me would cause to be constructed a fixture like the one just destroyed. And that the next test would be run at the bottom of a declivity to avoid danger to personnel if there should be a problem.

We built the fixture and all measurements were precise and passed on as okay by one of the inspectors. Another tank, another fixture, another thruster - - - - but the same outcome as the first one. More flap, uproar, debate amongst the brass.

The test engieer and I put our heads together, checked out another thruster, bolted it to a heavy piece of angle iron, and fired it. After the firing we measured the distance it had thrust, it had moved one inch farther than the specs. stated, thus pushing the base of the hardware forward far enough to push the much larger diameter shoulder into the tank.

All clear as mud due to my stumbling method of tale telling. Fortunately no one was injured and many a snicker and belly laugh was had by us when talking about the complete befuddlement and Chinese fire drill actions of the brass over this. There were more hilarious events in doing hazardous testing. The worst that happened was a few tests were not documented by electronics and cameras. We did some rocket firings on farmland away from the city with some crazy things happening. I remember watching one rocket launch and do a complete loop-the-loop directly above us, nobody ever figured that one out.

Many of the hazardous tests were run inside in the lab. One I remember was a long fixture which held, I think, fifty feet of Perlon rope firmly attached at one end and attached to a long hydraulic cylinder at the other. The bars and signs were put up to keep anyone from entering and the bets were made between us what would happen when it was pulled to destructon. There were marks on the walls and overhead made by the ends of the rope when it snapped back, on inspection the broken ends of the Perlon rope were fused.

Oh, well, boring to an audience but the test lab. team survived except for one. He crossed behind a device that was to be rocket propelled as the test was being set up. It was never really discovered what caused the misfire, but that man was dead. A man in the front of the sled making final attachments to the item being tested rode the sled to the very end and suffered heavy bruises. Not all the rockets had fired or he would have been another fatality. It only takes a fraction of a second when doing hazardous testing to turn up tragic - - - - - - - the same goes for crossing the street or driving I-25 or I-70.

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