A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I worked at a Coke plant. One of the jobs you got early in your machinist’s apprenticeship was to tighten hogrods; hogrods are the big threaded bars that hold the coke batteries together. They’re twenty feet long and three inches in diameter. There are two on each oven, and 120 ovens on the battery.

The rods stretch. They are holding together millions of tons of refractory brick that is surrounding coal dust being heated to 2100 degrees. The temp of the rods is usually several hundred degrees.

SO every week some poor bastard has to take a 120 lb impact wrench, with a socket the size of your head, and lift it up on a scissor lift, and tie the impact off to the battery, and sit for a half hour EACH NUT and tighten the hogrods.

After you’ve done this two hundred times, in August heat, in a coke battery tied to an oven whose surface temperature melts lead, you want to make it stop, please sweet Jesus just make it STOP.

So on my third trip around this merry go round of the damned, I was all for doing anything that would make it last longer between jobs, so I tried to tighten just a little bit more. In normal operation, you would connect the impact wrench, and turn it on, and stand there while it went “THAK THAK THAK THAK” at about 90 db for a half hour, usually causing the nut to rotate one revolution (approximately) before it stalled.

I knew that I could use steam on this impact, and that the steam would make it a bit more powerful than air, so I cranked away, getting a full turn on each nut in less than fifteen minutes, and on every one I could, I tried to get another at least half turn.

The impact was heating up even more than usual because of the steam, but you wore heavy hot mill gloves for everything there, so who cared? Anyway, I had gone through about fifteen rods and was on number sixteen when I thought, Damn, I’m gonna get one more full turn on this bastard and I won’t have to hit it again for another two weeks!!

About three quarters of the way through the second turn the bolt snapped. The force of a 3″ bolt snapping caused the 20′ rod to be propelled out over lake Michigan, where it spashed down next to a marker buoy, and the broken nut and stub caused the whole scissor lift to sway back and stand, for a few anxious seconds, on the balance point of it’s outside two wheels.

I felt a little funny in the pants, for a moment, as my testes attempted unsuccessfully to reinsert themselves in my inguinal canal, and my buttcheeks grabbed the handrail of the scissorlift, and then it settled back down, bringing the impact and my helmeted head into clanging contact with the side of the battery.

Thus was born the One More Turn award. The broken off nut and rod stub was sandblasted, gilt, and mounted to a board. I was honored with the first occurrence, but it got many other engraved nameplates after I left.

Two years ago, I replaced the front axle bearings on the Exploder and the lower and upper balljoints. Monday, I replaced the bearings AGAIN, and discovered one of the balljoints was bad AGAIN. So tonight I swapped it out, and in the process fo reassembling it, managed to SNAP THE 12MM BOLT THAT HOLDS THE UPPER IN.

Don’t know my own strength, even now.