The Hot Water Pipe Balls Up

The worst mistake I ever made as a kid.... Was flood the house.

Yeah, so... my parents had a new central heating system put in, all the floor boards up job, British Gas did the work... and for some unknown reason they left all the floor boards up when the finished the job.

To this day, I don't know why they left the job, with hot exposed pipes in the floor space.  But they did... Pinky Swear.

So, Saturday morning my Dad set about putting the floor boards back down, he embroiled me in this, despite my not really knowing one end of a hammer from the other, he put the first board in place and started to put the nails into the holes they had come out of and tamp them down.

He handed me the hammer and said to put in the two nails at my end.... I placed the nail in and hammered it once.... Handing the hammer back to my Dad and we crawled forward to the next joist.

And then I felt wet on my knee... Water was merrily flowing up out of the nail hole and across the wood... warm musky water... heating system water, fresh fernox.

OMG!!!

But my brain said "hey Dad, there's water coming out this wood"... which in retrospect is one of the most spectacular brain farts I can ever imagine, they were the words my brain delivered so my mouth spoke thus.

Panic!!!!

We pull the board up... to put a finger over the hole... but we can't... the hole is in the side of the pipe... the nail had gone down, turned about 60 degree's and gone into the side of the pipe... how it managed this I'll never know, unless I buy that house strip that floor board out and dissect that joist.

So this hole in the pipe was well out of reach below the level of the joist in this cut, you could not put a finger in it... and the heating was on, this water was getting burning hot.

We wrapped towels around it, all sorts, i got scolded pretty badly by it... British Gas wouldn't come back, their home care insurance cover for this didn't cover us for our sticking a nail in the pipe, despite the argument that they pulled the bloody boards up why didn't they put them back down!!?!?!!

To this day I'll never understand why they were left like this.

But this all became my fault.

A plumber arrived about an hour later, he drained the system, cut the pipe, two compression joints and bosh fixed.

I never lived this down of course, this was over 35 years ago, but I still hear about it, and I've even written about it right here, so it plays on my mind.  Not for my ineptitude with a hammer... but for the physics of the thing, how did a nail, driven in straight as far as I could tell... How could it turn like this and stick into a pipe's side, it's lower radius of that side even from a straight above shot?

Pulling it out, the nail had a bend added a perfect bend, as though it had gone slightly into the joist and just turned.  The other nail was still straight and true...