Under Pressure
Not my story but my brother's. Sadly, he's not here to tell (unrelated) and so I feel duty bound to do the honours....

Picture a GCSE CDT workshop a few weeks before practical projects need to be completed and Pencil (for such is sort-of his name) is staying after school to work on his electric golf-trolley. This will require various lengths of metal tubing to be bent, cut and brazed together. And tonight is to be bending night.

"You can't just bend it, it'll kink" he is informed by thoughtful CDT teacher. "Fill it tight with sand and that will support it from the inside while you heat it and bend it" quoth he. Pencil being relatively trustworthy, the teacher then sods off and leaves him to it.

The following half-hour sees Pencil fill his tubes with sand and ram wooden plugs hard into both ends with a club-hammer, little considering that the sand is just a shade damp. He then begins to attack the first with a lighted blow-lamp. Now, if my rather rusty physics serves, a liquid upon vaporising expands to 42000 times it's original volume, and so a 500 degree blow-lamp applied to damp sand trapped tight inside a metal tube develops quite a pressure.

Had he been standing at the end of the tube when the wooden bung finally shot out, it would surely have passed straight through him. Fortunately, however, he is standing just to one side as a monstrous bang sees this cellulose bullet issue forth at about Mach 4.

Roused by the noise, teacher re-enters the workshop to see Pencil in a state of shock and a thick layer of red dust gently settling over the entire room. The collateral damage resulting from this unintended WMD having been the instant annihilation of a huge tub of powdered flux. Teacher then proceeds to practically piss himself laughing, and Pencil spends the next hour wiping flux from every imaginable surface. We lost him early, but it could so easily have been 15 years sooner.
( Ugi , it's a game of give and cake, Fri 13 Feb 2009, 18:06, 4 replies)

Ha!
Nice one, mate...
( SpankyHanky, Fri 13 Feb 2009, 19:24, closed)

Brilliant!
When was this?! I did (enforced) CDT and I don't think I made anything more advanced than two pieces of wood nailed together ... I fear I may have been in the CDT windowlickers' class now.
(Penguins_Made_Me_Do_It is a dolt ... and she don't care, Fri 13 Feb 2009, 19:55, closed)

Around 1992
Pencil was 1976 vintage, so his GSCE year would have been 1991-92 ish. Device ultimately finshed by us both putting in an all-nighter the Sunday before handing-in day only to find it ran backwards! Doh! A classic time.
( Ugi , it's a game of give and cake, Fri 13 Feb 2009, 20:07, closed)

This is rather good. :-)
My only related CDT story was when one of the guys in our class powered on a metal lathe with the chuck key still in the chuck, it snapped his arm like a twig, as well as doing some not inconsiderable damage to the lathe.

The very next day all of the chuck keys had springs fitted over the business end, so that it couldn't happen again.
(uk_viper stopped lurking on, Mon 16 Feb 2009, 15:04, closed)