Stupidest thing youve done with electricity
 

Just after I got back from Angola, was working in a high rise building had to run a cable from a roof top antenna to a guys office,was told drill where the red dots were,well after copping an RPD round thru my head in Vietnam ,had only colour vision in one eye,2 dots,2 foot apart one grey one red,drilled thru the red one with a hilti drill,right thru a 433v 28000A MI cable rising main ,KABOOM,thru me back 4 foot.Red dot was where a maintenance guy had repainted a fire hydrant thingy,paint dripped off on to the wall.

I peed on a Bull-Dozer electric Fence when I was 5. The "Bull-Dozers" were the most powerful electric fences you could buy, they would actually pop weed heads off themselves... I Hollered like a Cut Cat, my Dad ran over to me & said, "TELL me you DIDN'T do what I THINK you just did..", I just looked at him & sobbed.. No real harm done, but the MEMORY has stuck VIVIDLY w/me for 50 odd years now..

Actually paying attention to the guy who told me to try grabbing the bare wires for a 110-volt AC line I guess. He could do it with no reaction.

That guy musta had hella callouses.

I attended a party in Eastern Europe, in a soviet era high rise
Building - someone decided we should all go on the roof, which seemed like a good idea... I came extremely close to leaning on the feed to the building, which looked medium voltage, open wiring on ceramic insulators, and extremely accessible. Always important to be aware of your surroundings in a foreign country, have never seen anything this dangerous in Canada outside of condemned mine sites where it's acceptable... That's more of a near miss though, my worst ever shock came from a tandberg tube tape recorder - the b+ gave me a jolt so strong I haven't been shocked by anything in 20 years... Must have been 300 volts but it really connected with me strongly and provoked a new attitude about safety!

Reading my own message, it makes me wonder if
That really was the feed to the building...
Way up high would make no sense, it sure looked like it though I
Nearly jumped out of my skin once I saw what I came close to touching

In trade school (not reform school) we used to dangle wires through
a pipe going down to the janators room. Plugged in to AC of
course. He grabbed it every time ! Glad we didnt kill him.
We would also hook up the class in series to the mains.
Then we would eliminate one at a time in a big game of chicken.
Best I did was 4 in series, I can still taste it..........

73 Zeno:smoke:

Me & Bull Dozers... A fella come by the farm once, I remember he had a big 4-door 1967 Pontiac Executive, brand-new car, & he was a big, blond-headed fellow. His EYES were SO crossed, that on one of 'em, you could BARELY see his pupil.. I remember he grabbed the terminals of that damn Bull Dozer, had his pinkies stickin' up, & they would JERK when the thing shot the voltage out the wires.. He'd just LAUGH...I didn't ask him HOW his eyes got so crossed, but I had my suspicions..

I plugged in the power to a chassis that I was reinstalling into a 23-inch B&W monitor I had repaired, before I finished connecting all (or maybe any) of its connections to the cabinet's controls and jacks-or the CRT. I heard a slight hiss just before my finger(s) touched the live 16,000-volt CRT cap on the flyback transformer. Then I felt as if a truck hit me.

Accident but stupid. The worst shock I ever got was back when I was a teen. Put a waffle iron on a metal kitchen sink, plugged it in so we could have breakfast, touched the waffle iron and sink and buzzzzz, zap etc. My muscles locked from the 120V AC. Jerked off of it and pulled the cord. One of the terminals off the line cord had burnt off and fell against the metal housing, putting the full line voltage across both of my hands. It's a wonder it didn't stop my heart, at least I'm here to tell about it.

Sandy, you're not the only one that's done that. I did the same thing when I was 14 and that's a memory that stays forever.

I have a 18 kv 45 ma neon sign transfomer and some big glass diodes.
Got this stuff from omsi when i was 13.

I was using the transformer and diodes and several foil and plate glass capacitors hooked up to a bare wire strung across the room to propel tin foil ion rockets.
The supply was for a tesla coil i was building

It worked pretty good propelling the little foil rockets

My younger sister was making her own rockets and she told me mark do not plug it in.

All i heard was plug it in

Shocked her good

Stupid i know

I Did a lot of stupid things with that transformer

My folks tell me that when I was an infant I had an insatiable urge to stick my fingers in the outlets and shock my self. They tried EVERY outlet childproofing device they could find and the best one only lasted half an hour against my attempts to defeat it...I have no memories of this...

When I was three I tried to fix the rotted rubber cord of the motor of my a 30's Erector set toy that had been passed down. I used paper tape and I must have taped the wires together as it blew the fuse instantly when plugged in.

Perhaps the dumbest things I did with electricity were when I was a teenager...With in months I had discharged the HV of a SS TV, that had just been turned, off with my bare hands, and had taken Christmas lights off a shrub that they had been on for nearly a year (the shrub had been trimmed during that time) while they were powered on...It had either started to rain when I was doing this or had just rained, and a metal element from a broken bulb touched my arm...I jumped back and I had a good char spot on my arm and it had a lingering burning feeling for a good while after that.

from that I learned that 25KV DC will wake me up and get my attention, but 120AC is a lot more painful.

Just thought of another stupid thing I did, of course I was only 5 years old. My parents had a wringer washer (which they used) with the motor exposed underneath. As a kid I apparently tripped over the cord pulling the cord out of the motor, so with my logic at that time (5 years old), I just stuffed the cord back into the motor, and I was sure it would work. Well my dad plugged in in and POP, blew a fuse. Never got into trouble, but I'm sure my parents knew it was me that did the "repair" job.

Stupidest thing? When in technical school, someone had brought in a nice Magnavox console TV that had been to several TV shops and nobody could figure out what was wrong with it. Everyone in my class (including the instructor) had spent a fair amount of time on it, and it looked like it was never going to work again.

I spent days on that damn thing, and finally figured out the problem was in the flyback. I swapped it out with a used one we had, and got it going. I'll never forget how proud I was of myself that I figured it out!

After playing it for a few days, I decided to put the chassis back in the cabinet and button everything up. What I failed to notice was when I put the board back in and bolted it down, there were two metal clips in the back that the plastic chassis edge was supposed to go under...I laid the chassis on top of the metal clips.

Needless to say, when I powered it up again it went up in a cloud of smoke.

But it was a very valuable lesson.....I have never repeated that particular mistake !

You mean like this week....... or all time......?