TOO good to be true

Well mine was actually a "too true to be good". I went to Dayton OH several years ago to look at an electric motor and bid on it. The contact guy said it was a 1935 DC motor being taken out of a wind tunnel and was too big for the current contractor to do anything with it. It tipped an 80 ton crane when they dragged the rotor out of the stator. I figured "how big can an electreic motor really be" and thought the crane operator had just goofed but they told me to wait and see how big it really was. The thing had landed on a second story I-beam and concrete floor and broke it sending concrete down into the battery room below. They got another 70 ton crane and together got the rotor down and then the stator. When I got there, they were sitting about 12 inches deep into the asphalt parking lot. I was astounded at the size. It had a 24 foot shaft 18 inches in diameter with thick brass rings on it. I could walk into the stator and couldn't reach high enough to touch the top inside it. The windings were actually one inch copper bars that had copper staple shaped ends welded on to make the connections from one to another. This thing is the most massive motor I've ever seen (wish I had taken pictures of it). They had tried to cut it up with a torch, but noone could cut the shaft or the 8 inch thick pieces of the rotor. I said I couldn't bid on it, but bid a price for them to pay me to remove it. I lost that one and someone got it for a penny a pound. I would sure love to know how much copper they got from that monstrosity. I now know from other jobs that I could have cut it with a liquid Oxy and Propane rig or even an Oxylance (I haven't used one yet but saw someone cutting 5 inch stainless with it.) So this one turned out to be too true to be good for me.