Modern ...What is your worst "oh cr*p" moment and what was your best "save"

[p.opus]

I saw this thread on this listing on ebay: This Ebay Auction Answered a Nagging Question. Tehis poor guy took apart his modern machine, and after not working on it awhile forgot how it all goes back together. He's now trying to sell all the peices to some "lucky" buyer who will put it all back together.

When restoring my first vintage, I had that sinking feeling we all feel when our machines are in pieces and wonder if we've gotten in over our head. Fortunately I had extensively bagged and numbered all my pieces so putting it back together was much easier than expected.

Of course sometimes things don't work out as planned...

So I wanted to know guys, When working on your machines, what was your most "oh cr*p!!!" moment? You know that moment where a slip of the hand or a bad decision makes you think you really just screwed something up. And as a follow up, did you "save" it? If so, how did you?

My CR Yamato is the first modern I've actually done any extensive work on. Recently I was trying to brighten up one of the LED's on one of the shock cannons and it required me to dig extensively into the machine. When I finally got to the LED board, I noticed the LED was "darker" than the other two. I tried various methods to "clean" it. But finally went to a Dremel tool. Well I ended up getting the stuff off the LED, but in the process, I "ground" a little too much off one side and killed the blue element of the multicolor LED.

Oh Oh...Now instead of a dim LED, I had one that was either a different tint from the other two, or completely off. Well that won't do.

I actually went back into the machine, located the leads to the blue LED elements on the other two cannons (with help of a magnifying glass), and managed to grind them off. Now all the cannons act the same, have the same tint, and same brightness.

It was as good a save as I could do. The cannon no longer matches the tint of the speaker LED's or Start Pocket LED's if 'blue' is involved, but at least they look normal now, and only I know the difference.

So guys, what is your best "oh cr*p" moment?

[heima]

What the hell happened here?
Emmadog replied with a great story.
Then Opus commented.
Then I wrote a long monologue of an event in my distant past.
Where did they go???

[Drunkenclam]

try the vintage section/ Not the modern

[heima]

Jeez, where have I been? Need more coffee.
Color me red for embarrassed.

[p.opus]

My bad. I duplicated the post in both forums because I wanted responses from both vintage and modern users...I know that some people don't read both forums. If you need to, you can merge the threads.