The New And Improved Unofficial R65 Forum V2
General Category => Totally Off-Topic Discussions, Rants, Tire & Oil Threads, Etc. => Topic started by: Lucky_Lou on September 12, 2010, 03:32:26 AM
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I installed a set of heated grips, and I cut holes in the ends of the heated grips, and there were the wires, right at the end of the grip. :(
Rob we may be related
I was putting a water pipe out to my garage so i chopped the pipe with an angle grinder to find i had just cut through the gas pipe...stupid is what stupid does
Lou
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I installed a set of heated grips, and I cut holes in the ends of the heated grips, and there were the wires, right at the end of the grip. :(
Rob we may be related
I was putting a water pipe out to my garage so i chopped the pipe with an angle grinder to find i had just cut through the gas pipe...stupid is what stupid does
Lou
Lou, you're darned lucky you ain't now singing your cowboy songs with the angels!
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[movedhere] BMW Technical Q&A, Primarily R65 [move by] Rob Valdez 79 R65.
Yeah, and then there was the time I was drilling a hole in the floor of a closet next to the kitchen.
I unknowingly was drilling very close to the 220v line going to the stove.
The drill bit hit one side of that line giving me quite a shock!
If it had been slightly to the other side, I might have hit both sides of the line, giving me the full impact!
One nice thing about the USA, 110v can be tolerated by the ignorant better that the 220v standard of Europe! (although 110 is less efficient) Another example of bending to the lowest common denominator? (won't kill off as many 'mericans who are dumb enough to try and do their own electrical work?)
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I will watch this thread with interest as im sure there will be some hilarious posts on this subject so come on guys confession time.....i have more myself i will share later.
Lou
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Yea, I got one for ya. About 4 years back I had a BMW R27......kick starter. I am at the gas station and had just filled up. There is a small group of people standing around admiring the R27. I tickle the carburetor....and she fires with the first kick. The R27 is set up to be started while on the stand with you facing the cycle. I am beaming with pride. I jump it off the stand and swing into the saddle like a real cowboy. I put it in gear and start to easy out when a little old lady ask a question. I can’t hear her so I throttle back...am talking to her and the cycle dies on me. I swing off, jump it up on the stand and hit the kick starter another lick. It fires right up.......I am so proud. I smile at the adoring little group and ....... did you know a R27 can be started in first gear with out any trouble? Paying more attention to my fans than the cycle........ I forgot to put it back in neutral, started it in first gear.......and jump it off the stand ready to swing back into the saddle but........find my ass being dragged down the road. A R27 throttle stays where you left it last, it does not snap back to idle. It will drag you down the road at whatever speed you left the throttle at. I finally had enough sense to let go of the damn bike. Fortunately, there was no damage other than a bent brake lever...........Well, My pride was a little bent too. It seems to me the bigger the audience........the bigger I tend to muck up. I think that is because the more your head swells.........the more it compresses your brain till thinking is completely shut off.
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I remember drilling a hole in the floor-pan in a '65 Nova and hitting a brake line. That was a rude shock when I went to move it...
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Speaking of rude shocks, I was replacing an electrical wall outlet some years ago. To make sure the circuit was dead, I plugged in a lamp and went to panel box and threw breakers until the lamp was out. OK, the circuit should now dead. So I unfastened the outlet, and was pulling to out when I accidentally made contact and got a real shock. The outlet is two plug recepticals, one above the other. Seems for some reason the prior owner had cut the connection between the recepticals, and wired each one to a different house circuit. One was dead (the one I plugged the light into), but the other was still live. From now on, I check both recepticals before handling it.
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I knew I was destined to be an Electrical Engineer when at a very young age I decided to test my Dads new car battery. I knew that electrical things sparked when you shorted them out and it was only 12 Volts so what harm could I do.
I got the bread knife out of the kitchen and proceeded with my first lesson in ohms law or was it arc welding ! The tip of the bread knife was vapourised by several hundred amps. Frightened the life out of me and I was sure I must have wrecked the battery. It was fine of course. Dad never found out about my little experiment and neither did mum as I had just enough sense left to sharpen the end of the bread knife in the work shop before putting it back.
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Seems for some reason the prior owner had cut the connectionbetween the recepticals, and wired each one to a different house circuit.
This is usually done so one outlet will be hot all the time and the other would be switched, like for a lamp...
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I was about 11 or 12 when a couple of pals and i decided to build a gun, in those days fireworks were easily obtained and "bangers" were made of black powder we had a piece of 1" steel tube about 2 foot long flattened one end drilled a small hole for the fuse packed the contents of half a dozen bangers in it and a large ball bearing propped it against the wall aiming at the fence lit the fuse and..........Hit the cross member shattering it and pushing a fist sized hole in the surrounding wood work fortunately no one was passing at the time.
Funnily enough ive been interested in ballistics ever since.
Lou
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Banger guns I remember them well Lou.
We used to raid my dads workshop for copper tube and plumbing fittings. A stop end soldered to one end of the tube produced a neat gun barrel and we would drill a small hole to light the fuse and arrange a short piece of tube to slide over the hole after it was lit.
Can't think why they never blew up in our face .
Happy days though when boys could be boys without being "protected" from all the dangers of the world. I knew one lad who made his own gun powder from weedkiller. Sodium chlorate and charcoal ?? They put fire depressant in the stuff these days. No fun at all.
I bet the Texas boys had real guns to play with.
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OK, I'll just warn you right now that my last near miss at self-Darwination gets a little 'gross' in the details, so you can stop reading now if you get squeemish.....
I somewhat unintentionally "napalmed" my whole front yard a few years ago - gasoline vapors can spread out over a huge area, and unlike in the movies, I discovered that it is physically impossible to outrun a ball of expanding, fiery gas explosion, and I can still run pretty fast. I ended up leaping and trying to throw myself out of the ball of fire and jumped into the lake to try to stop the skin from continuing to burn and blister on my feet, which was a good try, but still not good enough. I think that was the LAST time that I will ever listen to my brother again, but I digress..
Would have escaped mostly unscathed, except I was wearing sandals at the time - any millimeter of skin from my ankles down that wasn't covered by the sandals had 2nd degree burns (or worse) on both feet. I spent several weeks' of individual bandaging every toe and both feet in the morning before going to work (and of course couldn't wear shoes as a consequence) waiting for skin to grow back. My toes were literally 2X their normal width from being blistered, though in many places I'd barely or no any skin left.
I self medicated, bought many yards of bandages, hydrogen peroxide, ice cubes, and a medical product called "Nu Skin" (highly recommended BTW) ..
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So what did your brother suggest, that got you in this fix?
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So what did your brother suggest, that got you in this fix?
Yes how did this come about .... Nu Skin know it well stings like hell when applied but sterilizes and seals the wound.
Lou
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We had been working on a lot of landscaping, brush clearing, etc and had a large pile of brush which we intended to burn. It was a cool, damp day with fog coming in quick, so there was practically 0 risk of starting a forest fire, and we needed some accelerant to get the pile ignited. Unfortunately, I had run out of lamp oil, kerosene, lighter fluid and couldn't get a hose long enough to siphon any diesel out of the tractor, but, I did have a can of gasoline. Not my preferred chemical for this sort of thing, but I figured if we were careful it would be OK.. Ha!
I poured a fair amount of gas onto the brush pile and went to toss a match onto it right away, but my brother said "Wait a a couple minutes to let the gasoline work its way into the brushpile" -so we did, but what this REALLY allowed was for the gasoline to vaporize, and with the temperature inversion we were experiencing, the fumes then to flow down the brushpile and fill the entire yard up to about 6-12 inches from the ground with gas vapors. So, when I did finally toss a flaming paper onto the top of the pile, the flames shot up, and then down the brushpile, sending a wall of flame across the entire yard in all directions.
It sterilized the ground and the BOOM! shook the house - and other houses for a few hundred yards.
We had begun running away after tossing the lit piece of paper, but the flames along the ground quickly shot right past us, such that we were running through fire. My brother and brother in law were wearing leather boots, but had shorts on, and the fire burnt all the hair off their legs but they were otherwise OK. As I had just been working on the dock in the water, I was still wearing my Teva sandals, and that proved to be the "fatal flaw".
I never use gasoline to start fires any more. :D
I seldom listen to my brother now, too!
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That is quite a story. Thanks for relating it.
Less gas - ignite sooner! :)
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Mike, I think you get the award - thankfully not posthumously!
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:o Wow, Mike! As Graham says "not a good idea". Yikes.
You win so far...
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I bet the Texas boys had real guns to play with.
Yes, we had real guns but not to play with. We were taught to hunt and to respect firearms. Woe be unto the young man that was caught "playing" with a real firearm.
But, when it came to things like cars, boats, and motorcycles, on more than one occasion you might hear someone say "Hey, hold my beer and watch this!"
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I bet the Texas boys had real guns to play with.
Yes, we had real guns but not to play with. We were taught to hunt and to respect firearms. Woe be unto the young man that was caught "playing" with a real firearm.
But, when it came to things like cars, boats, and motorcycles, on more than one occasion you might hear someone say "Hey, hold my beer and watch this!"
These stories just scare me though....
Joke: What are the last 4 words of a redneck?
Ans: Hey Bubba watch this!
Pat 2: What are the last 6 words of his dumber cousin?
Ans: Aw Hell! I can do that!
;)
This all reminds me of the "getting the fuel out of the fuel tank story." I havn't laughed so hard since I read the Homer Hickum story of how he blew up his mother's white pickett fence! :D
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Ah, adolescence, cherry bombs and M80s!
There's a high bridge (several, really) in Lynchburg, VA, where I grew up. My neighborhood buddy and I built model planes in his basement & had our own way of disposing of those that we no longer wanted — we blew them up in mid-air. The models had insufficient wing surface to create much lift, a deficiency made worse by the weight of the CB taped to them, so they were aerodynamic bricks. Still, the vertical drop (maybe 150-200 feet over a wooded ravine & railroad track) was great enough to allow detonation before the package hit the ground. Pretty impressive to a kid!
Cherry bombs also made great pretend-antiaircraft devices when used in conjunction with a Wham-o Slingshot. Safe operation required a two-kid crew: a gunner to load the unlighted CB into the slingshot pouch and an igniter to light the fuse. Even the flash and smoke puff appear reasonably authentic to a kid, and detonation occurred far enough (and high enough, hopefully) to be very loud, but harmless.
One kid in our neighborhood made "squirrel bombs" by dipping cherry bombs into glue, rolling them in BBs, and letting them dry. Delivery system into the tree canopy was the Wham-o. (BTW, the "Wrist Rocket" was a later Wham-o improvement. If the wrist brace more powerful elastic had been available at the time, the greater range and accuracy would have been most welcome.)
Ever see the result of dropping an M80 (AKA "depth charge" or "ash can") into an empty glass one-gallon vinegar jug? A lot of shrapnel, fortunately on a mostly high-angle trajectory. (Swift legs and a wall or bank for cover are advisable.) The M80 was powerful enough that it could be used for illegal "fishing" if dynamite was not available. (That's one thing we never did.)
And then there were the principles of physics that could be learned from those devices—for example, the enhanced destructive power of underwater explosions. Drop a CB or M80 into a toilet (the fuses had an oxidizer in them and would burn underwater), and the result usually was a big bang and a big mess from water splash. (At worst, the porcelain bowl would shatter, a cost of "only" a few hundred dollars.) But drop one into the loo and then flush it, and the destruction is much more severe, according to where detonation occurs. The best case, where detonation is still within the porcelain fixture, leaves nothing above the level of the floor (essentially the same damage as the previous scenario). OTOH, if the explosive had passed into the pipe, it likely ruptures, perhaps shattering completely, the pipe inside the floor or wall. Neither good nor amusing, but crudely educational.
Case in point: the latter kind of explosion occurred in a high school graduation prank within the class two years ahead of mine. The perpetrator was an honor student who had won just about every athletic and academic award that could be won. He was stripped of as many honors as possible, and his parents had to pay a huge repair bill to the school. (He played football for a prestigious university, became a physician, and about 20 years later, went to prison for Medicare fraud. Go figure where the short was in his brain.)
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Case in point: the latter kind of explosion occurred in a high school graduation prank within the class two years ahead of mine. The perpetrator was an honor student who had won just about every athletic and academic award that could be won. He was stripped of as many honors as possible, and his parents had to pay a huge repair bill to the school. (He played football for a prestigious university, became a physician, and about 20 years later, went to prison for Medicare fraud. Go figure where the short was in his brain.)
That is my favorite part of your VERY entertaining post! (except for the BB encrusted CB).
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I had some friends who got into alot of trouble with their fathers after blowing up some fenceposts on their dairy farm with M-80s. The dairy cattle didn't care for the noise, either.
I think that they were inspired by the 'Dukes of Hazzard' TV show here in the US - they had taped an M80 onto an old arrow and were shooting at fenceposts.
Kids - don't try this at home!
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Had to google M80 to see what they were all about intresting stuff especialy this bit
There have been documented cases of users losing their fingers or hands[5]. Peter Criss, drummer for the rock band Kiss, was a victim of an M-80 during a 1976 Richmond Coliseum concert when a fan threw an M-80 onto the stage, nearly knocking him off his drum riser and leaving him with partial hearing loss for the remainder of the night.[6]
Pity they didnt throw some into the audience to drowned the din.....
Lou
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M-80s and toilets -- what a combination. When I was in high school, someone took a M-80, placed it on the floor behind the toilet in the boys room, lit a cigarette and used that as a fuse extension that would last over 5 minutes. Virtually every student in the school knew this was coming and not to use that boy's room -- but not *every one.* The class nerd did not know, and he went into that stall to take a dump. While he was at it, the M-80 let loose and blew apart the toilet he was sitting on. Fortunately, he was not hurt, and the administration never found out who did it.
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When I was a young lieutenant we had great fun by sending up m80es tied to meteorological balloons filled with hydrogen. They gave a tremendous whoosh when the hydrogen ignited :-)
It was a cheap way to train our artillery observers in observing air rounds and in foggy weather the illusion was almost complete.
greetings from a wet north
(https://bmwr65.org/smf/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Flh5.ggpht.com%2F_IG1zYdpfI5U%2FTJefq8vei6I%2FAAAAAAAAPys%2FIaHE9IIchrc%2F20102010.jpg&hash=14ad44680df7f57ead91c8aef708127f1e1bad7b)
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Too bad M80s and Cherry Bombs, and Silver Salutes, are no longer available as they sure a lot of fun! I bet Bob could use some of Altritter's "squirrel bombs" on his pet rats! ;D
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I bet Bob could use some of Altritter's "squirrel bombs" on his pet rats!
Especially if he wants additional air circulation in ceiling and walls. ;D
"Wait a a couple minutes to let the gasoline work its way into the brushpile" -so we did, but what this REALLY allowed was for the gasoline to vaporize, and with the temperature inversion we were experiencing, the fumes then to flow down the brushpile and fill the entire yard up to about 6-12 inches from the ground with gas vapors. So, when I did finally toss a flaming paper onto the top of the pile, the flames shot up, and then down the brushpile, sending a wall of flame across the entire yard in all directions.
[I'll have to choose my words carefully for this one, lest I offend someone.] This reminds me of a public health practice used by the US Forces in Vietnam. On the firebases and in the base camps, the toilet facilities ("latrines" for the Army, "heads" for the Marines) were outdoor privies that collected the material in empty oil (or gasoline) drums that had been cut into two cylindrical halves and placed under the privies with a shallow layer of diesel fuel in the bottom. The Army hired local (i.e., Vietnamese civilian) laborers to clean the latrines by dragging the half-drums out into the open, pouring an additional quantity of diesel into the drums, and lighting them. The diesel burns with a huge, black, greasy smoke cloud, but it sanitizes quite well. (If anyone remembers watching television news footage of morning interviews on Vietnam firebases, that's what the numerous clouds of black smoke were in the background. They weren't battle damage, just burning honeypots.)
The system worked quite well, but there was an occasional problem: Vietnamese laborers, many of whom were not literate in either English or Vietnamese, were not universally capable of distinguishing a container of diesel from one of gasoline. In the mornings, American soldiers often smoked during their morning trips to the privy. In their half-asleep state, many of them found that the most convenient way to dispose of a lit cigarette was to flip it into the diesel drum below. Under these circumstances, a cigarette ordinarily will not ignite diesel fuel—but gasoline is another matter altogether! A colleague told me of being nearly asleep one morning, dropping a cigarette between his legs into the hole, and as the cigarette was on its way down, having this horrible fear rush, with the flashing question: OMG, is it diesel or gasoline??? Truthfully, I never heard of this causing a fatality, but I did hear that some privies were destroyed, and guys sustained minor to moderate burns. (Picture it as the 1960s version of a wax job.)
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There's quite a bit of "asking for trouble" in industry. When I was young (a long time ago) I worked a while for British Rail in London, the tracks had third-rail electrification and it was accepted that newcomers had to walk on the live rail. Just to show how tough we were....It was I think 700 volts and sky-high amps. A good-hearted chargehand showed me how to do it without too much danger but I still go a bit cold thinking about it!
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There's quite a bit of "asking for trouble" in industry. When I was young (a long time ago)
Reminds me of a trick that the Electricians played on apprentices who were made to hold the output leads of a "Megger" and given a high voltage shock.
The trick was that the apprentice was told to hold on tight and if they did as they were told they presented a relatively low resistance to the Megger which prevented it from producing a very high voltage so the shock wasn't too bad.
If they were scared and held the leads lightly they presented a high resistance to the Megger which allowed it to produce a very high voltage that gave them quite a nasty shock.
Any apprentice who was not smart enough to learn something from the experience would never make it as an Electrician
(A "Megger" is an insulation tester which produces a very high voltage but little current)