MIT machine shop mushroomed tool discovery

Tom confiscated a fifty-year-old mushroomed steel bar from the MIT machine shop and cut a section to pass around class as a deformation specimen. Linked to a recurring eye-injury hazard from chips flying off mushroomed hammer heads.

If you want to see another example of deformation where things are folding over, here is one. [Tom produces a steel bar with a mushroomed head, cut down from a larger piece.] This was a tool that was probably in the MIT machine shop for fifty years. When they were working on the milling machine they just had a big steel bar — it was bigger than this before. I was walking through the lab one day and I saw this thing with the mushroom head. So it's mushroomed, and you can see the deformation, you can see cracks forming. I've had three or four cases where someone was using a hammer that had a mushroomed head and the piece broke off and flew in their eye, and they're blind in an eye now. In my horror, I thought that thing should have been thrown out about forty years before, when it started to mushroom. But it wasn't, so I confiscated it, and then I decided I'd just cut it off and pass it around class and show people deformation. There it is — deformation, and rolling over as something deforms inhomogeneously.