Equipment destruction feel-better thread

Hey everyone,

I just put a tiny scratch on my BRAND NEW T3i's outside shell of the articulating screen by slipping with the tissue and scratching it with my fingernail a little too hard and it wont buff out.

I feel like I've murdered my newborn. :(

Anyone else got some equipment destruction stories to tell? Might turn out to be a fun thread.

One I can think off the top of my head is that I blowtorched a countryman lapel mic while trying to record flames, and another time I crushed a lapel while getting high-impact metal SFX.
 
On the first day of shooting the film out in Canada the DOP got out his brand new HD monitor for the 2nd AC to set up.

Long story short- not enough sandbags= monitor falling flat on it's face in the middle of the road. big crack, broken casing.

It still works okish but the resale value tanked.

I don't break my own stuff :D
 
Any musical instrument I've had. That first ding hurts the worste.:)

Seconded, dear god seconded. I usually escape this by buying cheap and/or used instruments. My SG was a factory second, so when it gets knocked about, I don't mind so much.

HOWEVER, I had a cheap acoustic/electric that had an absolutely perfect tone. Not as easy to play as some, but AMAZING bass response and resonance. That was sitting in the living room. That got knocked over, exactly right and ripped the bridge right out. Eventually I did fix it (put some better parts and flatwound strings on it and it ended up sounding better), but when it happened, I was too stunned to even be angry or upset for a while.
 
Seconded, dear god seconded. I usually escape this by buying cheap and/or used instruments. My SG was a factory second, so when it gets knocked about, I don't mind so much.

HOWEVER, I had a cheap acoustic/electric that had an absolutely perfect tone. Not as easy to play as some, but AMAZING bass response and resonance. That was sitting in the living room. That got knocked over, exactly right and ripped the bridge right out. Eventually I did fix it (put some better parts and flatwound strings on it and it ended up sounding better), but when it happened, I was too stunned to even be angry or upset for a while.

First week with a Takamine AN-12, answered the phone pissed because I was practicing and what heathen would bother me knowing that? I walked through a doorway, smacking the headstock, and folded the G tuning peg in half - it didn't break, it folded.

I wasn't nice to the person calling me. :yes:
 
Fell down the side of a mountain once trying to film with an 800 dollar canon 10-22. Lens totally destroyed. They fixed it and had me a new one in a month though.

Turns out mountains get pretty slick as the dew accumulates.
 
On my 9th birthday (1976) I was allowed to buy my OWN present at the RC hobby store. I brought home a little RC corvette. After about 3 hours it stopped responding to the remote. I took it apart trying to fix it and lost some little bits. Turns out the batteries were dead in the remote. DOH! Since then its been similar cases of me doing "smart" things in a stupid way.
 
My little girl asked me to hold her Christmas present first digital camera while we went hiking last year.
We were stepping across some rocks in the mountain stream, she passed it to me, I slid it into my shirt pocket then leaned over to hold her little hand to help her across - and the [expletive] thing slid right back out of my shirt pocket into the stream.

Nice one, dad.
Real slick.

Lightning fast hands couldn't snatch it back out of the stream faster than water could pour into its crevices.

My kids bring it up whenever they feel like stabbing me through the heart with a good length of rebar.
 
Hmmmm......

In about 1978 The band I was playing with was performing on a very high platform stage. I had Hammond, a Rhodes on top of the Hammond and a Moog on top of the Rhodes. The stand for the Moog collapsed and the Moog fell almost 20 feet to the floor. $2,000 wort of electronic scrap was gathered up by the techie. The roadie responsible was fired.
 
My biggest screw-up with other peoples money goes back to this incident (and somehow I didn't get fired).

I was covering a change of command in 2003 at one of those gigantic military bases in the state that all of my "ex's" live in and I was all set up for the big news conference.

I had just been issued the station's newest Panasonic DVC Pro with a bitchin' Fujinon lens because I was an awesome news photographer and they trusted their newest equipment with people that didn't have a track record of doing stupid things. I deserved the honor of a new camera because I was a model employee...and I had received recent accolades for some nature stuff that made its way on to Good Morning America.

Then it happened...

A freak, must have been 50 MPH, wind came roaring down the planes and that lightweight Vinten tripod that cost $3K didn't stand a chance with that gust. In slow motion, the brand new DVC Pro slammed into the Earth, lens first, with me making about 2 meters distance in 1.3 nonoseconds only to arrive 1.4 nonoseconds too late as the camera slammed into concrete.

The bill? $8K for, effectively, a detached retina. The CCD's became unfastened. This bill was 1/3 of the cost of the camera and I only had it for about a week.

Somehow, I didn't get fired.
 
This one happened in my presence, but I was not involved. ROC and other soundies will especially appreciate this one.

About 1980 or so I was doing a "temp" job moving a music store from one location to another. The owner thought that by using a powered hand truck he could move a full sized upright piano down a flight of stairs by himself. He lost control on the first step down and a $6,000 piano tumbled end-over end to the bottom of the stairs where it hit a building support and split into multiple pieces.

I just wish that I had been able to record the sound.
 
I used to play the cello, and I had it in a store closet with a ton of other instruments. When I came back to claim my cello, I noticed it sounded strange in the case. I opened it up, and sure enough the neck was completely snapped in half.

Someone didn't want me to get first chair ;D
 
The first time i knocked a 1000+ lens against a pole i was standing next to. Nothing happened to it, not even a scratch but u shouldve seen the look on my face :lol:

Now i dont blink twice (not that i go knocking around my equipment all the time or anything like that.)
 
in highschool some kids stole a pair of 2000$ digiscales from the science lab, and once I got expelled for failling all my classes they acted like justice was being done for the stolen scales, meanwhile I think the principal knew it wasn't me but simply had a weak character and used the implication as a way of making himself out to be more of an authority figure.

4 years later, I went back for my transcripts, and my english teacher had a heart attack. Bad days.
 
Ha. Here's one. Intern thinking she's being cool drinking coffee. Rule is only Zorn, Rand(me), Eggers and Ryan have drinks in the control room of the studio. Next to the master control board is MacPro set-up for fast 3D graphics processing. During a move a destroyed a keyboard so I just replaced it. Intern gets up so I can show he something, hits the chair behind her, slips. Coffee goes airborne. It was like a NASA launch. Epic. Coffee splashes over brand new $50 Apple keyboard, coffee mug launches into the far left screen (all processing computers in studio are duallys) and cracks the glass on it. Normally I would say some colorful words, or whip out my middle finger. But all I said was, "Do you have a shovel, cause I'm digging you!" Then she got my number and called me. She asked why I didn't chew her Out. Why I took the blame. Then we started texting. Next thing I know is she's the best girlfriend in the world, even though she left because "video broadcast isn't my scene." Equipment-Destruction-Love-Story! (true story.)
 
Two weekends ago...
Me: We really need a sandbag on that soft box.. Someone is going to trip over the cord.
Grip: Hey everyone!! Watch out for the cords here please...
3 minutes go by....
Me: Go grab the ladder so we can move the china ball.
The grip takes 3 running steps, trips over the cord and yanks the soft box down to the floor.
That is a sound you dont forget.

The soft box turned into a glass shards carrying case.

The grip then proceeds to bring me a house hold 65w CFL bulb to replace the ones in the soft box.
 
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