- List your biggest failure in a project ever on the forum thread for this course unit.
I am a man of many failures, I've burned things up, dropped them, deleted them, or simply have failed to figure them out.
Possibly my most spectacular was when I was using a crucible made from a 4 inch steel pipe to melt aluminum with a homemade furnace in the driveway in front of my house. I used a beautiful surplus industrial blower fed with a hose from a propane tank to make the fire inside the furnace. I had a 1.5 inch conduit connecting the furnace to the blower output with a slight downward angle from furnace to blower. I had my sand mold prepared and standing by ready to pour in the liquid metal. I had no way to measure the temperature of inside of the furnace. I knew it was too hot when the conduit going between the furnace and the blower began to smoke and droop and molten metal began to come out of the fan.
Metal melting furnaces I have built since then have had a drain hole at the lowest point. Crucibles I have used since then have had melting points above the maximum that the furnace can produce.
Most of these failures have been "private failures" and so not particularly traumatic. For me, the ones that hurt the most are when I've promised something and it's turned out that I cannot make it happen. For me,even minor "promise failures"--such as going over a time estimate for contract work--seem to sting more than much more spectacular private ones.
- In the event you’ve never had a big failure, explain why you think that is.
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