23 May
2009
23 May
'09
1:46 p.m.
On Fri, 22 May 2009 15:14:19 -0500 (CDT), Doc wrote:
> So has anybody come across any plausible stories
about having to clean
> washing detergent out of free-standing pack-based disk drives?
No, but I thought I was going to have to pay for
laundering my
neighbor's pants, the first time he heard an RA60 spin up.
He was appropriately awed at the size of the 11/84,
the RA60, and the
drive packs, and interested as hell watching me load the pack and start
the machine.
When the RA60 started spooling up he started
looking at it sort of
funny (they wind up like a jet turbine if you never heard one). When
the heads unlocked, he made the other end of the garage in one jump. :-)
Many years ago while on a service call at the Detroit Free Press, I witnessed a head
crash
on the composing room system, the drive spun up, the heads unlocked, than there was a big
Boom
when the pack turned to a large cloud of dust and set off the Halon system.
Luck for me I was around the corner working on an Autocon scanner and outside of the
blast.
After that I always took a few steps back when one spun up near me.
This earned me some strangs looks from time to time.
I would respond to these looks with the questions, Have you ever seen a pack blow up?
I have and was very happy I was not standing close to it at the time !
Many years later when I tried to put too much horsepower through a clutch, and it blewup
at about 8k rpm.
When asked what it was like, I said it went off like a head crash on an old washing
machine style disk rive.
Very few had any idea what I was talking about.
But they are the two bigest booms, I have ever seen that only involved kenitic energy with
no oxidizer or
combustion to assist.
The other Bob