My help dropped a 3/8 drive socket wrench into a bin of hay pellets. A few months latter they got it back after it traveled through several augers on the way to the hammer mill. The magnets caught it just prior to.
A part let go on the harp cutter. That's the thing that cuts the clay slug with two hydraulic pistons, cylinders, fed from a 40 hp 3000 psi hyd pump. Never mind that the factory original pump was 10 or 20 hp.
The hyd pistons (cylinders) have a rod end with a magically hardened rod through the end, that gets held down to the cutter frame with machined parts like a round clamp that gets bolted to the frame.
I was walking by and found those machined hold down rod clamps made to bolt on, just lying on the floor. I figured they may need them, they looked OK with some gouging.
So I find the mechanic and give him these parts I found. He's talking in a heavy Russian accent, actually trained as an electrical engineer in Russia but was mechanic in the brick plant. He's saying they come from the Pug Mill (giant clay extruder two stories tall). I'm like 'oh great, you've got spare parts for the Pug Mill'.
But he's repeating himself in heavy Russian 'no, they come from the Pug Mill'.
I finally figured out what he was saying. They broke off the harp cutter, rod hold down clamps, got picked up by the waste augers, waste belt, then back to the Pug Mill and back out through the clay extruder (driven by a 200 hp electric motor geared down to ~ 1 rpm extruder by a gear reduction box that was two stories tall). The gouging on the clamp part I saw probably came from the extruder. It had broken before, made the round trip through the extruder, bolted back in place, broke again and found laying on the floor.
We bolted the rod end (rod) back to the cutter frame with the found parts so the cutter would go up and down again. I found the parts on the floor before I knew what was broken or where they went.
I've said it before, never seen more suffering in a workforce.