I'm grateful for the explosive machines fix. I'm glad it was only a bug, and I apologize for my angry tone in the previous post. The blast had destroyed 2 ultimate hybrid solar panels, which take 16 iridium plates each to craft, and I was a bit miffed at how many hours mass fabricating and diamonds I lost when the panels were destroyed. I've since rebuilt my house, and I figured if it was a glitch that destroyed my panels, there was no harm in using NEI to cheat them back in.
That being said, I've discovered another issue with the slow grinder. This one isn't nearly as bad though, just a minor gripe.
I've made a scrap processing plant to pipe scrap boxes into my massfab. Here are a few links to screenshots of how it works using slow grinders and buildcraft pipes.
-Screenshot 1
Here you can see there's three igneous extruders from Thermal Expansion piping cobble into the Slow Grinders. Each slow grinder outputs to the buildcraft wooden pipes, and the pumps are attached to the underside, wired to all turn on and off together with Redpower wiring. Offscreen there is an autocrafting table to turn the scrap into scrap boxes.
-Screenshot 2
This is a bit of an overview shot, you can see the pipe on top which carries the scrap boxes to the Massfab, and the crystal chest that holds all the output UU Matter. Also notice the diamond pipe and void pipe. The diamond pipe is set to sort the cobble out of the scrap and send the cobble into the void pipe for deletion. This is my stopgap measure to the problem.
You see, as the redstone engines heat up to their maximum speed, they outpace the slow grinders, even if the slow grinders are on MAXIMUM speed. And the error is that the wooden pipes yank the cobblestone out of the slow grinder's input slot instead of only pulling from the output slot as intended. You can see that my wooden pipes are specifically on the right side of the grinders, which correlates to the output, but my pipes are still pulling cobblestone out of the input slot once the engines reach max speed. This points toward an error in how the slow grinder's sides were programmed.
-Screenshot 3
Here you can see the problem beginning to crop up now that the engines are hot, the cobble is starting to come out of grinder #3.
-Screenshot 4
Here's the problem in full swing. No more scrap is being made at all, the cobblestone is passing right through the grinders without being processed at all and going right into the void pipe for deletion.
Thankfully, the wooden pipes are smart enough to pull scrap out of the grinder's extra output slots. So if I let them build up four stacks of scrap before turning on the engines, it gives me more time. But eventually, the engines eat through the buffer, exhaust all the scrap, and start yanking the cobblestone out of the input slot.
Is this intended behavior, or a glitch? Any suggestions from people in the thread how to get around the issue?
[It isn't harder than nuclear in my opinion and lasts forever]