[SEL] Humour

[Dave Croft]

A certain person known on these groups (called Kim Siddorn) posted the attached tale on the English engine group.
I think it is worth repetition. 8^)
Read the Instructions!

 A friend of mine once built a canoe.  He spent a long time on it and 
it was a work of art. Almost the final phase was to fill both  ends 
with polyurethane expanding foam. 

He duly ordered the bits from Mr Glasplies (an excellent purveyor of 

all things fibreglass) and it arrived in two packs covered with appropriately 

dire warnings about expansion ratios and some very good notes on how to use it.

Unfortunately he had a degree, worse still two of them.  One 
was in Chemistry, so the instructions got thrown away and the 
other in something mathematical because in a few minutes he 
was merrily calculating the volume of his craft to many 
decimal places and the guidelines got binned as well. 
He propped the canoe up on one end, got a huge tin, carefully 
measured the calculated amounts of glop, mixed them and 
quickly poured the mixture in the end of the canoe (The twin 
pack expands very rapidly).

I arrived as he was completing this and I looked in to see 
the end chamber over half full of something Cawdors Witches 
would have been proud of.  Two thing occurred to me, one was 
the label which said in big letters: 
"Caution - expansion ration 50:1" (or something similar) and 
the other that the now empty tins said "approximately enough 
for 20 small craft".  Any comment was drowned out by a sea of 
yellow brown foam suddenly pouring out of the middle of the 
canoe and the end of the canoe bursting open.  My friend 
screamed and leapt at his pride and joy that was knocked to 
the ground as he started trying to bale handfuls of this 
stuff out with his hands. Knocking the craft over allowed the 
end as well. A few seconds later and we had a canoe with two 
exploded ends, a mountain of solid foam about 4ft high 
growing out of the middle, and a chemist firmly embedded up 
to his armpits in it.

Round about this time he discovered the reaction was 
exothermic and his hands and arms were getting very hot 
indeed. Running about in small circles in a confined space 
while glued to the remains of a fairly large canoe proved 
ineffective so he resorted to screaming a bit instead. 
Fortunately a Kukri was to hand so I attacked the foam around 
his hands with some enthusiasm.  The process was hindered by 
the noise he was making and the fact he was trying to escape 
while still attached to the canoe.

Eventually I managed to hack out a lump of foam still 
including most of his arms and hands.  Unfortunately my tears 
of laughter were not helping as they accelerated the foam 
setting. Seeking medical help was obviously out of the 
embarrassment of having to explain his occupation (Chief 
Research Chemist at a major petrochemical organisation) would 
simply never have been lived down. 
Several hours and much acrimony later we had removed 
sufficient foam (and much hair) to allow him to move again. 
However he still looked something like a failed audition for 
Quasimodo with red burns on his arms and expanded blobs of 
foam sticking everywhere. My comment that the scalding simply 
made the hairs the foam was sticking to come out easier was 
not met with the enthusiasm I felt it deserved.


I forgot to add that in retrospect rather unwisely he had set 
out to do this deed in the hallway of his house, it being the 
only place with sufficient headroom for the canoe, achieved 
by poking it up the stairwell.
 
Having extricated him we now were faced with the problem of a 
canoe construction kit embedded in a still gurgling block of 
foam which was now irrevocably bonded to the hall and stairs 
carpet as well as several banister rails and quite a lot of 
wallpaper. At this point his wife and her mother came back 
from shopping......Oh yes - and he had been wearing the 
pullover Mum in law had knitted him for his birthday the week before.





Dave Croft
Warrington
http://oldengine.org/members/croft/homepage
http://community.webshots.com/user/crftdv