Government workers, true story

[Iain]

I worked for a conservation department several years ago and at the end of summer a group of science officers went up in a small cessna to start controlled burn offs.
They used what was essentially a table tennis ball filled with potassium permanganate and had a large syringe and would inject the ball with glycerine.
This being done they would toss the ball out of the window and it would ignite about 20 seconds later and start the burn.
About 100-200 of these balls would be tossed out in a line to create a burn off line.
The science officers got fed up with injecting and throwing and got the 'Mr Fixit' to make a machine to do the job for them.
The master pice arrived, it was a steel box with a hopper to one side to hold the balls and a little gate to release a ball into a tube.
The gate would open and the ball would drop into the tube, the syringe would come in from the side, inject and retract then a bottom gate opened and the ball released.
Sitting on the test bench it worked perfectly.
The device was fitted to the aircraft and the tube extended through the bottom, skyward bound and off towards the burn off area. I wasn't in the aircraft but I heard all about it.
Our brilliant science officers, upon starting the machine at about 500' discovered venturi effect, we heard that when the first ball was injected and the bottom gate opened the ball blasted back up into the hopper and the whole lot flew into the cabin.
It was apparently quite an exiting twenty seconds trying to locate the 'hot' ball.

[RETIRED]

Great balls of fire!!!

[Rod Smith]

G'day
Reminds me of some years ago in Port Adelaide when the marine architects that work for the govt making sure commercial vessels are seaworthy etc. They were given the job of rebuilding a fishing boat into a research vessel, all the local boat builders and fisho's said it looked too top heavy as it was being built. Sure enough, it managed a few hundred metres in the dead calm port river before falling over. Ya gotta wonder.
Just being pedantic, in the balls of fire story, a venturi would have seen the ball sucked out of the plane.
cheers
Rod

[Iain]

Rod, this was true, maybe not venturi but external pressure being greater than internal pressure. I heard the story from the contract pilot who had a fair bit to say about the science officers with their bachelor of gumnut degrees.
I was the one who introduced venturi, not the person who told me.

[soundman]

Reminds me of the infamous CSIRO pasture growth meter.

Believe it or no a (suposed)means of measuring grass growth electronicaly.

Aparantly it was to eliminate the need for staff to wach the stuff grow.