Watch where you drive a screw

Drove a screw into the wall of the old shop to hang a broom on and there was a flash and pop and now the press doesn't run. Backed the screw back out to find the tip melted off. Should have known better and screwed a 24" long board into the nailers and then put the broom screws into that board at the desired height. The shop was built in 82 and I used 3/4 Blandex or chip board or whatever the new name for it is, for the inside walls. Wood was cheaper than steel so wood is the way I went. Never again. The good part is I can cut a hole in the wall there to get at the damaged wire and install a box to do the splice in without worrying about cosmetics much. The new truck shop has steel interior walls with all wires running in conduit so this kind of a stunt won't happen again. Jim

BTDT. Built an addition on to the back of a mobile home one time. Putting the LAST nail into the door trim, Snap, crackle pop, had to take off the paneling and repair. Hate when that happens. But was happy I was standing on a wooden stepladder at the time.

To avoid any possible future trouble with the insurance company, the wire splices need to be made inside an approved junction box.

Hi Jim
Probably a good thing it popped when you put the screw in or
you might not of put,two and two together about the press not
working.
I drove a screw into a water pipe on the eighteenth floor of a
fancy hotel. Took them 45 minutes to find the shutoff valve.
Water leaked all the way to the 12 th floor. It's amazing how
much water comes out of a 1/8 inch diameter hole. LOL
I can laugh now but I was just sick about it for a while.
Martin

50+ years ago we bought a farm and were putting water in the house. Had a screened in back porch with a concrete floor that we enclosed, and put a false floor in for the bathroom with the plumbing under the floor. Tub was in, cabinets in, commode mounted, and nailing the last piece of plywood to floor when we heard water running. Yup, you guessed it, a nail right through the water line. Had to pull the last piece of plywood up repair the hard copper.

??it happens, about 40 years ago I drilled thru a 240volt range cable while doing cable tv install in a brand new house. Hot wire, never knew I hit it until I pulled bit back out and saw end fried. Little good luck, lot of bad luck.

We built our house 27 years ago. Had a good pluming shop do all the pluming and bath cabinets. When he put the first screw in for the cabinet, he got wet. He took the drywall out, fixed the pipe right and went back to finishing the job.

(quoted from post at 14:52:58 12/22/14) We built our house 27 years ago. Had a good pluming shop do all the pluming and bath cabinets. When he put the first screw in for the cabinet, he got wet. He took the drywall out, fixed the pipe right and went back to finishing the job.

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I did a similar thing one time when I was finishing out a new house. I was nailing cleats in a closet, had marked studs with the stud finder...only one happened to be a water line. Never made any noise, but when I came back with the shelf I thought it was a strange vertical shadow on the wall and instinct made me run my finger across it....oh crap!

I've hit a few of those with a drill, got
a water line once too but it wasn't rocked
yet. Went to a house in S City once
because they could smell smoke etc. Got
there and found out that the cable guy ran
cable around the outside of the house and
then drilled it through the garage wall to
get to the splitter. Just so happened that
the electrical panel was below it and the
electrician had ran all the Romex through
two 2" PVC out of the top of the panel.
Cable guy drilled through it and burned
off 4 or 5 wires including the ones for
the range. The smoke smell was from the
washing machine trying to run off of 240
volts, neutral wire was burned off of a
split wire circuit. Glad you caught it
quickly.

Had 26' high metal deck industrial roof re-sloped/repaired; roofer managed to hit and pierce an IMC conduit about 4" on underside of deck with an 8" screw. Conduit was carrying 480v/3 phase from MCC to O.H. door motor, luckily wasn't hot when he went through it, but showed up 4 days later when janitor tried to use door. Long odds for sure!

Here it is. If the drill/driver I was using to drive the screw had been metal and ungrounded I might not be here typing this tonight.

Decades ago when I worked at a boat manufacturer, I had to use a fly bit or small hole saw up in the bow to make a couple of small holes to drain down into the hull, whereas the bilge pumps removed the water. So anyway, I'm doing a tri-hull house boat and you gotta be careful where you put the holes because in one area, there's enough clearance into the hull for draining, and somewhere else there's no spare room up against the hull. So, I'm not paying attention or whatever and got the wrong rib and the hole through the deck was right where it mounted against the hull. I'm drilling, drilling, drilling and it never takes that long, but I'm drilling, drilling, and drilling...and finally pop through. I back the drill and bit out and instead of being dark like I'm looking down into an inclosed hull, I see light bouncing off of the concrete floor. Ohhh Noooo!!! I just went through the hull with about a 1.5" fly bit or hole saw, which ever of a finished boat that was supposed to ship that night to the dealer. Ohhh Noooo!!! I had never done anything like that before. I hopped out of the boat setting on its trailer ready to be shipped, ran around to the starboard side of the bow...a perfectly round 1.5" hole. OHHHH NOOOO!!!! Boss was real unhappy. Real unhappy. But, our repair guy had it patched, gel coated, touched up and buffed out by morning, so it shipped.

Things happen. As long as we don't make them habits, things happen and we get over them. Maybe even laugh at them one day.

Mark

About 10 years ago, my son came home from college in the fall and wanted to help. I had him disking cornstalks and a disk blade broke off. I knew which part of the field he was in when it happened, so I looked for it and never found it. Fast forward 5 or 6 years, I was combining beans in that part of the field, and the old 750 started making a awful banging noise. I checked everything over and couldn't see anything broke on the outside. Took the cover off to look into the cylinder, and there was the broken disk blade laying on the concave getting hit by the cylinder bars. I have found chains and harness rings with the field cultivator. Working for a neighbor when I was a kid, plowing a field and saw a piece of log chain dragging on a plow bottom, he had lost it the year before. Cultivating corn for the same fellow, I found a watch that I had lost the fall before plowing. The band had broken, so I would put it in the small watch pocket in my jeans, must have worked it's way out or else I checked the time and didn't get it pushed back in far enough. It didn't work anymore. When I was telling him about finding the watch, he said that back in the 50's an Air Force plane had crashed in that field and for years after, he would find small pieces of the plane in the dirt. Chris

Sorry, this should have been in the post above about find stuff in the field. My bad! Chris