Engineering Disasters

[Hornbein]

It's always nice to read about other people's major screwups.

 

[jedishrfu]

I remember some of those stories, but I never heard the actual horror stories that caused the recall.

One toy not mentioned in this video was Clackers. It consisted of two acrylic balls attached to a common string with a ring halfway between them.

Kids would grab the ring and begin moving their hands up and down to make the clackers hit each other, but before long, they started doing it so forcefully enough that the clackers would hit on both the downswing and the upswing.

The result was that some clacker balls shattered, and the kids and their nearby friends often got hit by these super-sharp acrylic shards.