A funny story - even it was my own fault ... ;)

It was the year 1978 when I built a 2x20W stereo amplifier inside the wooden cabinet of a very fancy Garrard turntable. While showing off my creation to a bigger crowd the playing of the LP stopped abruptly, the turntable just stopped from full speed to zero for no obvious reason.

After opening the turntable by tilting the upper part as a hood (and letting the smoke out), we all laughed. I had erroneously soldered in one radial electrolytic cap the wrong way. It had bursted open at the top, and out came a 15cm long paper cone!! This cone just protruded via the only hole in the chassis all the way to the (on the underside perforated) turntable disk, effectively latching it into place, like a locking pin. That was the only time I have soldered any polarized capacitor the wrong way around...

Cheers,

Christian

Hungry rats eating cable insulation is 'common'.

I've come across 'always on' PA amps that have been a nice cosy place for rats and mice to kip on, with internal pcbs corroded by rat-pee.

And then there is my old (purple !) Soltek mobo that developed a RAID issue (graduated to scandisking itself on every reboot) and eventually died. On opening it I found that at least 70% of the capacitors had spewed their guts all over the board. It must have been runing like that for some time in increasing degrees - amazing that it worked at all !

geoff

Circa 1994 - CD payer had been working fine. Came back the next day and nothing. It wouldn't power on. Checked the outlet. It was on. It worked. Still nothing.

Thought I would take the CD player to the table for a closer inspection. Unplugged it carried over. That's when I discovered the part of the power cord nearest the outlet lay where I unplugged it and that the culprit was the pet rabbit that had chewed through the power cord.

Dirt bikes are equipment, right?

Riding in the desert, my friend's kickstand started dragging and we determined his kickstand spring came off. I looped back on the off-chance of actually finding it nearby... and I DID!

I came back beaming and holding the missing spring... at which point my friend pointed down at MY BIKE where MY kickstand was now dragging and MY spring was now missing.

Bermuda triangle for kickstand springs?

... the rabbit which was also laid out near the outlet ?

geoff

I got an RF burn on my lip from a transmitter tube. You see, I'd built an AM transmitter using some spare parts. It was working real fine....illegally of course, and I leaned in real close to look at the tubes interior plates glowing all nice and orange....and a jolt of RF came off the top of the tube and blew a "grain of rice" hole out of my lower lip. At the time I was playing Iron Butterfly's "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida."

I had recently upgraded from my Sony PD-150's to Sony Z1's and was set up for a two-camera theater shoot. My wife was running second camera for me that night.

So, everything is set up, sound from the mixer board was good, lighting, white balance. Everything looked good to go.

Then the curtain came up.

About thirty-seconds into the performance, my wife called on the intercom that her camera battery quit, and the backup battery also quit.

This sounded like a good time to panic.

I locked my camera down on a wide shot and ran to her position to investigate WTF? I had charged all the batteries earlier that day and they had always worked fine on the PD-150's. On the way I grabbed my backup battery. I gave her my backup battery and watched as the camera powered up and looked like it would run OK. I was sweating bullets for the whole performance knowing that neither of us had a backup battery. (We couldn't use the AC adapters because it was an old theater and using the AC adapters would have required running extension cords across the aisles, and the house manager wouldn't hear of it).

The performance and taping ended thout further issue, and we packed up and went home. The next day, I pulled the "bad" batteries and checked the charge level. Sure enough, within a minute the camera was rejecting the battery: "Please use a genuine Sony InfoLithium Battery".

I had given her two of the third-party NPF960 batteries, and I had two Sony batteries. Which explains why both her batteries failed and my spare worked.

Lesson learned - don't use non-Sony batteries on my new Sony cameras.

On one of my first video jobs: Had everything setup early, was waiting in the hall for the speeches to begin (politicians). Suddenly the first person comes out, walks straight to the mic and looks like they're about to start straight in. I quickly turn everything on & hit record - but the camera defaults back to standby !

I hit record again, and again it switches to standby. The polticians starts speaking and I'm missing it !

I calmed down and tried to figure out what the problem was. I switched everything off, then switched it all back on and waited. Everything came on fine and I started recording. (Luckily the first person was just doing the general intros)

Turns out I was just too eager, and by hitting the record button too quickly it forced the camera back into standby. The effect of nerves :-)

An emergency phone call gave me my first job outside of family. Despite the rush I was set up nicely, got good garden shots and bridal party preparations. The wedding ceremony seemed a bit long and to my mind the minister gave the couple a bit of a hard time with thinly veiled references to 'living in sin and not taking the whole thing seriously . I was confidant however that I had it all on a tripodded long take. On checking I found that the heads heads started to clog just after the shot started (analogue cam). Sweating and wondering what I could do about it I managed to get the rest of the night done on spare cam. Next morning phone call from mother of bride, "please do not put any of the church ceremony in the edited video, the minister was right out of order" PHEW!!!
Brian

We've had a Z5 camera that for most of an entire wedding failed to record the I frames, only the B and P frames. Spool the tape and you could see vision, hit play nothing.
Sony subjected the camera to every test they could think of and could not find any fault with it. Camera has worked flawlessly ever since.

Another story from the trenches, here the "equipment" was the thing between someone's ears.
Crew goes OS for a shoot with EX cameras. During breaks the director asks to see various shots. DP copies requested shots / tkaes to MB and plays them out in FCP. He then clears the SxS cards.
Weeks later in the edit suite director asks "can we try one of the other takes?"

Bob.

Another "between the ears failure":
Back in the day of vacuum tubes, I was looking for the source of failure in a kitchen AM radio (just dated myself on multiple fronts).

Took the chassis out of the cabinet and plugged it in on the bench, checking various voltages. Found what appeared to be the culprit, unplugged the radio and turned it over, and began to cut out the failed component. Got probably the worst shock of my life. Seems I had unplugged my soldering pencil instead and was introduced to the B+ voltage in a really negative way...