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Yeah starting fluids can be very very bad if not used right....We had this one Perkins diesel engine in a lift truck, aka forklift, it needed a little shot to get it to crank on cold days..OK this new kid, Victor, was a helper, went to the docks with one of our fuel guys, Lester, fill the lifts with fuel, check all fluids, and crank them....Well sir this young man knew that one lift needed a shot of ether, he gives it a huge shot, I mean Hey if a little does good a lot is going to be fantastic!!!! Right????.....Needless to say he gives it a shot, puts the seat down, gets on it and hits the starter....What happened next would have took a slow motion camera to have caught every thing that happened...That engine exploded!!!!...The head strips the bolts off, the head hits the seat, now that head, seat, and Victor, are going up, but wait....There's a headache rack on it...So all three arrive at the headache reach in order, Victor, the seat, and the head...Now there is one more thing in play....A HUGE fireball.....That lift truck had been working a "cotton ship" thousands of bails of cotton, loaded on that ship the day before....So its covered in cotton lint!!!! It catches fire....
As we all know "What goes up....MUST come Down!!!!!!....In order they come down the head, the seat, and Victor into that ball of fire!!!!!....Lester wasn't too far away, him and two longshoremen grabbed the fire extinguishers off of the fuel truck. which is only a few feet away from that ball of fire!!!!...150 gallons of diesel and 150 gallons of gasoline, plus ten 50 lb propane bottles, on that fuel truck!!!!!:shock::shock::shock::shock:..They get the fire out, Victor kinda jumps, falls off that lift truck....Victor looks like a snowman!!!!!...Ambulance called....
Final results????...It was freezing cold, Victor had on a set of Carhartts, coat and pants, his hard hat, with a foul weather "snoopy" type liner, his mono goggles, gloves, with a scarf wrapped around his face....Victor was taken to the hospital, had a minor concussion, but his pride and joy was GONE!!!!!...His scarf had slipped down just enough to expose his mustache he had been growing for 5 years, of course you had to look close to see it before...OH and his nose did look like Rudolph's for a few days...:ROFL:...
Yeah it was funny afterwards, all you had to do to get his attention after that was to spray a little ether in the air near him....That lift truck???? Well we had to rebuild it, but that was another funny, Victor wouldn't get near that lift truck.....:ROFL::ROFL:...Ether can be and is very very dangerous...It can cause more damage than if you were to just go on and rebuild that engine or buy a newer engine...
