Tales of breakage!

[Colornumber9]

When I first got moved up from floor bitch to feeder bitch, I worked on a 640 Heidelberg CD from about 1990 with a pressman who was really superstitious. He'd do things like tapping every unit when he walked up and down the press and crawling it a certain number of revolutions every night before shutting down. If he ever pulled a sheet when the counter read 666 or 12666 or 566634 he'd freak out and try to stuff the sheet back in there. Any time I screwed up, regardless of what the mistake was, he'd always have some guidelines for how often I could make that particular mistake. For example, the first time I sent a double through and it disintegrated in the rollers he said "You get one of those every five years!". When I smashed a blanket it was "You get two of those every eight months." And so on.

One night we're running along at a pretty good pace, and I was loading paper back by the feeder, when the press makes a very loud, very unnatural noise, and stops dead. I ran up to the front where he stood with a terrified look on his face. I about crapped my pants too, because the delivery glass was broken and one of the gripper bars was sticking straight out of it. Apparently one of the side joggers had been a little sketchy for some time, and when he pushed the spears in to rack they hit the jogger and sent it into the gripper bar, causing this very unfortunate situation to unfold.

And I thought to myself, I wonder how many of those you get?

 

[spigot]

haha great reads!!
Ive had a few experieces, not too many of my own doing luckily

Top one - labourer trying to put blanket on by himself, it had an underblanket that was only gripped at front edge. He had it backwards, so was trying to stuff the flapping underblanket into the nip. Guess what - in went the hand. We heard screams and rushed over there, with the foreman jumping straight on the press to inch him out. He inched it the wrong way, this guy got pulled in up to his 3rd knuckes. Not nice, got gangrene and was off work for 5 months. no damage to press apart from blood stains

Antoher beauty - running a roland at 10,500iph when the blanket guard came off. dayshift had replaced 3 blankets but only tightened up 2 guards properly. This was a 10 colour 40inch press, a big one. stopped nearly dead, with a bang crunch silence...... lodged between plate and blanket, nearly 3/4 way through. That unit never ran right ever again. easy 50k damage

Where i am at the moment the other operator didnt put oil in his press for a year or so..... plate cyl siezed and vibrated itself to oblivion. When asked about the sight glasses, he said he didnt know anything about them 15k damage

an amusing one was an older guy on a heidi numbering. might have been an MO. The numbering ring came loose and wandered over into the path of the cam, and he was down the other end of the factory making coffee. Just heard bang bang ding ding etc as it fired chunks of numbering boxes out the front. 6 boxes totally mangled, and a cam that looked like a banana. Also a GTO where the sheet guide rod wasnt located properly in the side ring, came out and went between the cylinders.

I have also heard of spanners, allen keys and air conditioner remotes (!!!! old workmate now in darwin) go through machines and an early akiyama with no guards that stole a printers shorts when the nip got them.

 

[GazKL440]

Stolen shorts f**kin GOLD!!!!

we had a floor manager do some repair work on an aki a few years back... forgot to tighten some rather important cylinder bolts(may have been beering up whilst spannering) and then cracked the whip on the pressman to get goin... he hit run speed to warm ink and machine went KABAAAANG. apparently its now a reef in moreton bay hehe

 

[keldrewett]

Stolen shorts f**kin GOLD!!!!

we had a floor manager do some repair work on an aki a few years back... forgot to tighten some rather important cylinder bolts(may have been beering up whilst spannering) and then cracked the whip on the pressman to get goin... he hit run speed to warm ink and machine went KABAAAANG. apparently its now a reef in moreton bay hehe

No it would probably be running somewhere in India.....

 

[GazKL440]

No it would probably be running somewhere in India.....

nah she was properly smashed, we had plenty of spare blanket bars, plate clamps, roller stocks, dampening motors, a spare technotrans(or aki equivelent)... engineers solemnly shook heads and gave it last rights...

Our last aki(628) and Roland went over there last year... keep waiting for a horde of angry ink-stained indians to turn up here with guns

 

[maynard105]

getting punked?

getting punked?

Come on.... these stories cant be true!I've never heard or experienced such levels of sheer incompetence outside the pre-press dept.(perhaps a thread for pre-press mistakes would also make an entertaining read.)Seriously though, I almost wish i could work with guys like this to make me look that much better and negotiate higher salary.
Keep these stories coming, they're fascinating,compelling and ludicrous.

mikem

 

[billy gold coast]

gday few examples offsider upsets printer printer throws coffee mug at him smashes and bounces straight into bottom rollers on roland
boys on nights playing cricket smash fluro straight into rollers
note to printers who have left me in the crap over the years u owe me beers
ps thanks to all the apprentices who stuffed things while i had a smoke remember i covered your asses u owe me beers
pss i used to whinge about offsiders now theyve become obsolete id have you all back
and i probably owe you beers
to all who have passed their knowledge down thanks ive bought you beers
and to all the printers ive followed who thought they were something special but werent how did you ever get your big heads in between the units

 

[HachiZenki]

Hmm one I had was when we got our folder rebuilt going from an SC to an SSC. We were just bringing up the folder to full run speed on it's first run since the rebuild when all of a sudden I heard this loud BANG! so I immediately hit the stop button. The whole crew ran up to the folder to see the source of the sound. After a couple of minutes crawling under the folder I found the source of the bang. Apparently someone either forgot to tighten the bolts or thread lock the bolts holding the knurled sections of the nipping rollers on. Another 'tale of breakage' was when we were forced to run this crappy recycled paper from Abitibibowater's Snowflake plant. I mean this stuff was so bad that when you held it up to the light you could see places where the paper was so thin it looked like tissue paper. The worst part tho was that this paper sucked water like it was going out of style so web breaks were a constant headache. At this time we didn't have a web break detector on our UOP stack unit so, of course, the web broke in there and wrapped it up. But this wrap was so bad it destroyed the common blanket, the cyan blanket, the yellow blanket, froze the slip gears, and bent the drive shaft. About the only saving grace was that I was off that day so I heard about it when I returned.

 

[CD102]

An extra roller

An extra roller

Anybody ever work on a Roland 800? One night I was checking the ink level in a lower level fountain when I had to do a double-take. I could see an extra roller in the unit! Well, it wasn't really a roller. If you worked on these presses, you might remember that there was a fluorescent light fixture mounted below the water pan. The tube had fallen out of the fixture (why it wasn't designed with guards is beyond me) and into the roller train. Fortunately for me and the company, the tube didn't explode into glass shards when it dropped into the machine.

 

[sweede]

Old threads are the win.

Anyone work on a M300M ?

I didn't see it, but I seen the aftermath of the plate cylinder lockup hat coming off during full production (36kph) , fly into the unit behind it and then bounce back into the unit it came off of.

It nearly straightened the plate hat out.