Heating Your Nuts
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sandman
- Posts: 32
- Joined: Sat Jun 14, 2003 1:23 pm
sandman
Reading this topic, I thought I'd pass along a dumb-ass moment I had last year. After my 30 ton press failed to knock out a frozen ball joint from a 79 Super, I decided to heat the outside of the control arm. After placing it in a vice, I broke out the trusty oxy-acet. and set about the task at hand. Guess what happens when you heat grease in a closed container? One minute I'm standing there,torch in one hand,cigar in the other watching O'Reily on the tube, and the next minute, I'm lying flat on my back, torch on the ground, cigar who knows where and deaf as a post from the resulting explosion(about the volume of a 12 ga. shotgun). The ball blew out and hit me in the groin with enough force to knock me down( I weigh 270#). Had it hit 1 inch to the left of where it did, my right testicle would have been on the ground with the torch and cigar! Been working cars for 40 years and it never even occured to me how dangerous this was. BTW, after my hearing returned and the swelling subsided( 3 days), what remained of the joint pressed out with no effort. Don't know whether it was the heat, the force of the explosion,or both!
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zilch02pcusa
- Posts: 1130
- Joined: Tue Jan 28, 2003 12:01 am
Re: sandman
hurts just reading about that... ow...sandman wrote:Reading this topic, I thought I'd pass along a dumb-ass moment I had last year. After my 30 ton press failed to knock out a frozen ball joint from a 79 Super, I decided to heat the outside of the control arm. After placing it in a vice, I broke out the trusty oxy-acet. and set about the task at hand. Guess what happens when you heat grease in a closed container? One minute I'm standing there,torch in one hand,cigar in the other watching O'Reily on the tube, and the next minute, I'm lying flat on my back, torch on the ground, cigar who knows where and deaf as a post from the resulting explosion(about the volume of a 12 ga. shotgun). The ball blew out and hit me in the groin with enough force to knock me down( I weigh 270#). Had it hit 1 inch to the left of where it did, my right testicle would have been on the ground with the torch and cigar! Been working cars for 40 years and it never even occured to me how dangerous this was. BTW, after my hearing returned and the swelling subsided( 3 days), what remained of the joint pressed out with no effort. Don't know whether it was the heat, the force of the explosion,or both!