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Another bit of fun and games with a serious technical side
Very often in my line of work as an industrial ceramist it pays to be practical. Yesterday I suffered what posh folks would call a 'faux pas' but in my native Derbyshire UK tongue would be more commonly referred to as a 'cock up', and I had to use my practical 'nous' to dig my way out of the mess!
I was carrying out some quality control tests in one of the factory departments where it's necessary to measure the density of a litre of clay materials in suspension in water. In the industry there are precisely calibrated lidded stainless steel vessels called pyknometers to do this job. Here in the factory someone in the past decided to forgo these vessels and replace them with very delicate laboratory glassware in the form of 1000 ml volumetric flasks.
Now a litre of high density suspension of clay in water can weight almost a couple of kilos so you might guess what happens when the flask and contents slip out of the wet right hand fingers of yours truly and land on a small but sharp piece of quartz sand sitting on an otherwise flat solid surface. You got it! A sound like a dull explosion and shards of glass flying outwards followed by a rapidly expanding pool of clay suspension on the work surface, over the nearby electronic balance, flooding my calculator and finally spilling over onto the dept. manager's shirt which he'd left hanging on the back of a chair after changing into his work clothes! - plus of course me left clutching the stem of the flask and muttering expletives!.
It's times like this when you wish you could turn invisible especially when sod's law ensures that everyone is watching you acting like a complete and utter novice on his first day of work!
After cleaning up the mess I turned around to the departmental manager and asked 'who in their right mind decided to use such a fragile piece of equipment in a factory environment' - my not so skilful way of trying to cover up my accident! The answer was vague but accompanied by the question ' ...how else can we measure the weight?' Well, a trip to the supermarket on the way home gave the answer....
One bottle of Chardonnay fizzy white wine chosen not for the quality of the grapes catching the early morning mist on the south side of the terraced valley vineyard but for the transparent glass and the shape of the bottle which looked a lot more stable and definitely a heck of a lot stronger than that **** stupid laboratory flask!
And to make my standby equipment more precise than that volumetric flask, which relies on operator eyesight to fill to a marked line, I used my Dremel with a diamond point bit to drill a small overflow bore hole in the neck of the bottle to ensure the it always gets filled to the same level. The final touch was to engrave a conversion factor onto the bottle to convert the measured contents to a 1 liter equivalent density.
So on this occasion there were no flies on this aging ceramist, despite my idiot's cock up, plus on the positive side I got to sample yet another type of wine last night, even if this time the Chardonnay wasn't to my taste - LOL!
The icing on the cake?
The purchasing department were pretty pleased about my solution. After regularly buying two or three replacement flasks a year at around 45 USD equivalent, a bottle of wine costing just over 4 USD was a nice alternative - and that includes the contents! I also found out later that news of my accident and the solution flew around the factory grapevine like lightening leaving me with favourable 'brownie' points from a couple of the more sceptical of the departmental managers. All in all a nice outcome!
Saluti!
Very often in my line of work as an industrial ceramist it pays to be practical. Yesterday I suffered what posh folks would call a 'faux pas' but in my native Derbyshire UK tongue would be more commonly referred to as a 'cock up', and I had to use my practical 'nous' to dig my way out of the mess!
I was carrying out some quality control tests in one of the factory departments where it's necessary to measure the density of a litre of clay materials in suspension in water. In the industry there are precisely calibrated lidded stainless steel vessels called pyknometers to do this job. Here in the factory someone in the past decided to forgo these vessels and replace them with very delicate laboratory glassware in the form of 1000 ml volumetric flasks.
Now a litre of high density suspension of clay in water can weight almost a couple of kilos so you might guess what happens when the flask and contents slip out of the wet right hand fingers of yours truly and land on a small but sharp piece of quartz sand sitting on an otherwise flat solid surface. You got it! A sound like a dull explosion and shards of glass flying outwards followed by a rapidly expanding pool of clay suspension on the work surface, over the nearby electronic balance, flooding my calculator and finally spilling over onto the dept. manager's shirt which he'd left hanging on the back of a chair after changing into his work clothes! - plus of course me left clutching the stem of the flask and muttering expletives!.
It's times like this when you wish you could turn invisible especially when sod's law ensures that everyone is watching you acting like a complete and utter novice on his first day of work!
After cleaning up the mess I turned around to the departmental manager and asked 'who in their right mind decided to use such a fragile piece of equipment in a factory environment' - my not so skilful way of trying to cover up my accident! The answer was vague but accompanied by the question ' ...how else can we measure the weight?' Well, a trip to the supermarket on the way home gave the answer....
One bottle of Chardonnay fizzy white wine chosen not for the quality of the grapes catching the early morning mist on the south side of the terraced valley vineyard but for the transparent glass and the shape of the bottle which looked a lot more stable and definitely a heck of a lot stronger than that **** stupid laboratory flask!
And to make my standby equipment more precise than that volumetric flask, which relies on operator eyesight to fill to a marked line, I used my Dremel with a diamond point bit to drill a small overflow bore hole in the neck of the bottle to ensure the it always gets filled to the same level. The final touch was to engrave a conversion factor onto the bottle to convert the measured contents to a 1 liter equivalent density.
So on this occasion there were no flies on this aging ceramist, despite my idiot's cock up, plus on the positive side I got to sample yet another type of wine last night, even if this time the Chardonnay wasn't to my taste - LOL!
The icing on the cake?
The purchasing department were pretty pleased about my solution. After regularly buying two or three replacement flasks a year at around 45 USD equivalent, a bottle of wine costing just over 4 USD was a nice alternative - and that includes the contents! I also found out later that news of my accident and the solution flew around the factory grapevine like lightening leaving me with favourable 'brownie' points from a couple of the more sceptical of the departmental managers. All in all a nice outcome!
Saluti!
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