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Not amateurs, but a NASA contractor managed to mess up Hubble's mirror back in the day.

Involves chipped paint and household washers.

https://hackaday.com/2020/04/29/test-equipment-shim-washers-...

Simon Winchester also covers it in great detail in his book Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World

If you're interested in precision making and how it all came to be it's a very joyful read.

I spent 25+ years in the precision optics industry, a large portion of which was building machines and instruments for fabricating and testing aspheric lenses and mirrors. Designing, performing, and validating null tests is technically terrifying. Not only is the clock ticking, but every operation on the artifact carries a risk of destroying it, or making it unusable.

It's not life-and-death, but it's pretty satisfying nerd work.

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