When I worked at McKinney Corp. Race Cars, Murf had a screw-type air compressor that actually used the supply lines as its storage system. The pump ran continuously, from starting time to quitting time.
One of the machinists was working on a mag throttle pedal assembly for the Joe Gibbs McDonalds dragster and he had let the program run, but saw a place he thought he could touch up, so he was running the tool back in, manually. And it touched one of the clamps and sparked, which was catastrophic, what with all the mag chips in the mill. The mill was immediately an inferno, which caught the plastic covers on fire. And directly above the mill was one of the big PVC air lines, leading away from the compressor. The PVC sagged quite a bit, before it finally got too thin and burst. So we suddenly had a fire that was being fanned by all the air from the compressor. It was blowing flame away from a second level deck, but it was fanning the flames out into the shop, so we couldn't get very close to try to extinguish it.
It was pretty dicey for about 10 - 15 minutes. We were out in the county, with a small volunteer fire department as our only hope. Some guys were on a bucket brigade, whilst the rest of us were frantically trying to move cars out of the fabrication shop. We had stands for the dragster chassis and we had added some longer legs to some of them, because we had run out of room, so we were double-stacking cars, back there. There were either 10 or 12 dragsters and a couple of funny cars back there, at the time, not to mention the stuff that was on the jigs, up in the jig shop. Murf was well-known for being high-strung, whilst at the shop, but he was really in orbit until he was certain the fire was out.
When the line was replaced, it was replaced with galvanized.
