What I Learned from My First Machine Crash
I was twenty-two years old and six months into my first real job in a machine shop. The shop specialized in hydraulic components for construction equipment. I had been trained on three gun drilling machines and had run about two hundred parts without any serious problems. The foreman gave me a job that I had done before: drill a 12mm diameter hole through a 600mm long 4140 steel shaft. The shaft was for a hydraulic cylinder rod. The material was annealed to about 28 HRC. I had run this exact job three times in the previous month. I was confident, maybe too confident. ...