Finger of death
26th August 2008 – 1.44 pmI have picked up a bad but perhaps not unfair reputation of breaking something during pretty much every environmental test that I run. The reputation began quite early. When I first joined the environmental engineering group and was shown how to power on all the power amplifiers and cooling equipment for the main shaker, my first question after being allowed to do it myself was 'is that supposed to happen?' No, and it took a week of maintenance to fix a purely coincidental fault.
For the past few months, the various units under test have suffered my curse, with my aura causing them to fail and be in need of repair, which has led to some slipping timescales. On the positive side, there is a lot of repeat business, once the repairs have been effected.
Today I managed to break a charge amplifier, although I don't know how. It worked for one vibration run and then, without any changes being made, refused to work for a subsequent run not five minutes later. Because it had worked on the first run of the morning I couldn't even blame it on the test engineer who ran the previous test last week. At least this minor failure in our own test equipment could bode well for the unit under test itself, leading to a fault-free schedule. I hope so!
2 Responses to “Finger of death”
"Congratulations, client: your unit is so stable it broke our vibration equipment with its 733t inertia!"
My run continues, as the unit broke. Oops.