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Spontaneous exploding table

suzywong said:
...“toughened glass”, I presume, cos all the bits were those small squarish bits like when the car windscreen breaks...
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Aren't car windscreens made from laminated glass, which is designed to crack but remain in place, rather than toughened glass which shatters into lots of small bits on impact?

@martin clark , does laminated glass suffer from the same problem?
 
Modern windscreens are made from laminated glass but in the past they were made from toughened glass, as the rest of the windows in the car still are I think.

US cars had laminated windscreens way back but there was a school of thought here that said bodies hurtling into and breaking through a toughened screen would suffer less damage than hitting and cracking but not breaking a laminated screen.
 
ToTo Man said:
Aren't car windscreens made from laminated glass, which is designed to crack but remain in place, rather than toughened glass which shatters into lots of small bits on impact?

@martin clark , does laminated glass suffer from the same problem?
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No - the failure mechanism is peculiar to toughened glass only owing to the huge amounts of strain energy locked-in by the toughening process.

As I wrote up-thread - for buildings and many other uses, where failure would cause issues then its usual to specify a heat soak for toughened glass; and this dramatically accelerates the failure mechanism to 'weed-out' its likelihood (it''ll come out of the heatsoak oven, broken)
 
Joe Hutch said:
I reckon it was the grandkids wot dun it.
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I once had that same thing happen to a glass desk top. I had let a small form factor Shuttle computer do some intensive internet "protein folding" overnight on top of it, back when I thought that was an interesting thing to do, and in the morning we were greeted with a loud bang and a 7 square meter room filled with glass shards and splinters - just like yours. I suppose I heat tested the toughened glass until it disintegrated. You live and you learn.

Oh, and a hatchback car window exploded once one winter day when I shut the hatch. That stopped us from going to "baby swimming" with our oldest girl - who is 22 today. So many years ago.
 
I manage buildings for a living. Great fun when a pane goes 30 stories up! Thankfully either the inner or outer pane tends to be unaffected.
 
martin clark said:
That's a useful correction - note the risk is estimated 1m2 in every 10,000m2 of glass
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So the risk is that for an item 1 sq m in size the fail rate is 1 in 10,000 items over the product's lifespan? For something 0.5 sq m half that? Sounds intuitively about right. Rare, but not unknown.
 
Never liked glass tables. Now I feel smugly justified for having avoided them. Can’t wait to trot out the “nickel sulphide inclusion” thing next time Mrs. Hook and I go furniture shopping. Thanks to Martin, I’ll sound like a genius! *


* In my mind. To everyone else, I will sound like Cliff Calvin.
 
Nero said:
well, it's definitely seasonal. The road is full of tractors at harvest time. Why do they have to be so big?
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Was at the Turriff Agricultural Show in North East Scotland today. The largest tractor on display was the Fendt 1050 Vario with a 510hp engine. It weighs at least 14tonnes before fitting any attachments. The skilled labour force in agricultural is declining, given the appropriate attachments and implements these tractors are capable of prodigious output in a day. In my lifetime tractors have changed out of all recognition. The Massey Ferguson 185 I drove at 17 had only 75 hp and had none of the creature comforts of these monsters. The size is limited by traffic regulations, any wider and movements on roads could require notification to the police.

The argument always was that the machinery replaced men, my view is that the increasing mechanisation has been because it has become much harder to find people willing to do farm work.
 
cctaylor said:
Was at the Turriff Agricultural Show in North East Scotland today. The largest tractor on display was the Fendt 1050 Vario with a 510hp engine. It weighs at least 14tonnes before fitting any attachments. The skilled labour force in agricultural is declining, given the appropriate attachments and implements these tractors are capable of prodigious output in a day. In my lifetime tractors have changed out of all recognition. The Massey Ferguson 185 I drove at 17 had only 75 hp and had none of the creature comforts of these monsters. The size is limited by traffic regulations, any wider and movements on roads could require notification to the police.

The argument always was that the machinery replaced men, my view is that the increasing mechanisation has been because it has become much harder to find people willing to do farm work.
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I was driving one of these in the early 70’s on my summer job on one if the local farms.


Mind you that was years ahead of what my father used back in the day, but he did say it was good company when stopped for lunch. :D

 
My parents had a glass shelf break in a china cabinet forty odd years ago. Nothing heavy on the shelf and the cabinet was in a dining room that was rarely used. A muffled crash was heard only to find the middle shelf had gone taking out the two below as well.
No explanation at all, temperature was fairly constant and the shelves were behind twin sliding glass doors.
 
I saw a toughened glass mug explode once, on carpet. It left a circular pattern of broken glass with a pool of coffee in the middle.
 
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