Bruce Clark's and Kevin McElhone's comments about spectacular failures
and dangerous springs brought to mind this little incident that
I thought you might be interested in.

In the early 1970's, when I was a teenager working for Johnson Organ
Company in Fargo, North Dakota, I worked on many pipe organs, band
organs, etc.  In this incident my boss, Lance Johnson, asked me to
look over a Regina disc music box.  It was a coin operated crank-up
machine that lifted the disc from the rack below into place, played
it, then returned the disc to the rack.  You could select whatever
tune you wanted it to play.

The machine played okay once the disc was up, but it had trouble
lifting the disc into place.  We assumed it was just gummed up.  We
cleaned it up but, no matter what we did, it just seemed to lack the
power it needed to work properly.  We finally decided to look into
the coil spring.

The spring was in a cylindrical housing.  Inside the housing was two
coil springs, approximately 2" wide.  We found that the outside end of
one of the springs had broken off the lip that connected the spring to
the outside of the housing.  The Regina essentially was running on only
one spring, with one-half power.  No wonder it didn't work right!

We thought we could get the end of the spring out, hit it with a torch,
bend a new lip end, and everything would work fine.  Wrong!  In the
process of trying to get the end out, it literally exploded!

What must have been 50 feet of spring exploded in my face.  I must have
had good reflexes because the way it came out, could have been very
badly hurt.  All I remember was running away from the bench as fast
as I could go!  As it turned out, my injuries were very minor.

We ended up stuffing the spaghetti pile of spring into a box and
shipping it to someone who repaired it properly and reinstalled the
spring into the housing for us.  When it was returned, the Regina
worked great.

The moral of the story here is, if you don't know what you are doing
with springs like this, send it to someone who does.  They can cause
serious bodily harm, if not worse.

Gary Rasmussen