Made By Monkeys

Thanks to reader Peter S for sharing this with Made By Monkeys, an unfortunate story of failing lock mechanisms... He writes:

Last night I was trapped outside my bedroom because the latch inside the door disintegrated leaving the spring-loaded bolt engaged. So instead of going to bed, I had to get a ladder out and climb in through an upstairs window.

Armed with a screwdriver and a pen knife, I eventually managed to push the bolt back against the spring with only a little damage to the frame - much less than would have happened if I have shouldered the door from the landing.

It turned out that the lock mechanism had fallen apart inside the door in such a way that the cam could no longer push the bolt back far enough to disengage it.

Thanks to reader Bob, from Milwaukee, for sharing this one with us, about his travails with his 2005 Jeep Liberty's RBQ 6-CD Changer... But will the "mother-ship" come to the rescue?

Bob writes:

I have gotten a lot of enjoyment out of the 6-CD changer that came stock  in my 2005 Jeep Liberty. Plenty of power out of 4 speakers and good clean sound. It has kept me company for many a long drive to Colorado from my home state, Wisconsin. Never had a problem not being able to play my own music mixes burned onto rewritable CD's either.

Do you believe this one? A French design company, Quarks Design, has apparently created a special paint that can be used to control appliances.

Coolest Gadgets reports the "Quarks has created a tactile 'switch', a fusion of paint and embedded electronic mechanisms that enable a wall to act as an electronic switch".

It quotes the APCI (Agency for the Promotion of Industrial Creation) as follows:

Thanks to Graham R. for this one, and his experience with the retaining screw on his Bosch jigsaw.

He writes:

The cutting angle on my Bosch jigsaw can be changed by loosening a screw, moving the shoe round, and retightening. This will be done more than once-in-a-lifetime, maybe more than once in a day, and of course the shoe has to be solidly fixed. The retaining screw has a fairly chunky head, and from the outside looks as if it will take the necessary amount of welly. After you've stripped the thread on the third or fourth time of use, however, you look inside and find that it has (had!) a 0.5mm thread more suited to a clock than a power tool (see pic left).

In the UK, objections to wind farms are often made on the grounds of "aestheticism", the twisting blades spoiling otherwise perfect countryside views. Hmmm. IMHO this is just NIMBY-ism in another guise...

However, wind turbines can be far from perfect, as this video darkly and dramatically demonstrates.

Thanks to the website GroovyGreen.com for this one: Exploding Wind Turbine Is Worthy Of Slow Motion Replay

The website writes:

"We're thinking that wind turbine manufacturers are less than thrilled with the above video circulating online. Apparently, this all went down in Denmark when a safety breaking system failed in strong winds. Reports say that two engineers were working on top of the turbine to repair the breaking system, but managed to get down before all hell broke loose. A 19 meter piece of the blade was thrown 20 metres away. Smaller pieces were sent more than 500 meters away."

Click on the image to see detailed view of the failed zinc casting.

Rolling luggage has to be one of the greatest engineering innovations of all time, so it's a real pity that their telescoping handles are so frequently a dismal failure. On a recent trip (to India, natch) the cheaply-cast zinc parts in the handle assembly on my husband's High Sierra brand bag (above) decided to give up the ghost. First he had difficulty getting the handle to extend, which seemed like the worst luck in the world-- until he couldn't get the handle to retract again.

You try checking a 22-inch bag with an 18-inch handle sticking out of it. Talk about needing a chill pill!