Only two really big ones
Over x-mas all of my house mates went back to our respective parents abodes and being as skint as we were turned the heating off. When I arrived back, with my little brother in tow, surprise surprise the pipes had frozen. I managed to talk the next door neighbours into giving me their oil radiator to stick in the front room. As other flatmates arrived back we all stood around in the kitchen waiting for the living room to warm while we cooked tea. Then we smelt the odd burning smell thinking it was crap in the oven, so we left it. It progressively got worse until someone realised it was coming from the front room.

The radiator had been placed in the middle of the room and had melted its was through both rug and carpet and was now starting to ignite the heated man made fibres. We put it out, with the final damage being a 1' by 6' hole right through to the floor boards. But being resourceful bunch we where we turned the rug round and put the sofa over the hole in the rug.


The second big fire I started was while messing around with some shape memory alloys (heat 'em and the return to the position they used to be) . My task was in 'programming' them by heating them to a certain temperature while holding them in a fixed position. After this they needed to be tested.

As an easy test I placed the SMA wire into some folded paper to give it a bit of resistance. Rather than opening the paper the whole bloody lot ignited. The lab technician saw the blaze and ran over quickly slapping it with his hand. Unfortunately as I was heating it by passing about 5amps and 15 volts through it he got a wee bit of shock and promptly got a wire burn mark across his hand. At this point I cracked up unable to do anything while the technician rolled around in pain, blaze and current still raging on the table. Fortunately the wire melted and a few seconds later the fire went out by itself having run out of paper to burn.
(el_meerkat, Wed 3 Mar 2004, 11:06, Reply)