Stoopidest Thing Youve ever Tried

[rave154]

ok folks, just fro fun and to releive the tension a little...

The STOOPIDEST thing youve ever tried, circuit-wise, etc...in order to "just see if that would work" ?

I'll start the ball rolling,

Solar panel, next to a plasma ball, in parralell with a micro wave oven transformer wired backwards ( stop laughing !, i just HAD TO KNOW ! )

[kooler]

i put 120 volts at two amps thru a really big joule thief thats was a air core..
my work table has a steel top and it would walk and wobble across it ..
i think i still have brain damage from that day..

robbie

[theremart]

Hall of shame

poured gasoline on hot coals.


There was a wish of steam then Pow!.


Will not do that again.

[blackchisel97]

Attempted to disconnect exterior 40m dipole antenna from ham transceiver during thunderstorm. It was the first time I literally felt the "electricity" in the air.



V

[nvisser]

Executed a cripple fly with two wires with 220V on it.
I was 8 years old.

[Armagdn03]

Once upon a time, I was forced to take an 8:00 am physics class, for which my friend and I were too advanced. We bargained with the professor to let us do a project that showed our mental prowess and got the OK to build an electromagnetic linear accelerator (rail gun) instead of having to wake up at such a terrible hour.

One of the components was a capacitor bank that was several farads at several thousand volts. We used to awe people by sticking one electrode in a glass of water, then using the other to start the top of the water on fire through arc discharge electrolysis. How cool that you can start water on fire!

One day we were working, and I reached my hand out to disconnect the bank, not realizing it was charged...........My friend from across the room threw a text book with the accuracy of a sniper and yelled, WTF are you doing!!!. My hand was whacked away instead of blown to smithereens.

I was young and dumb, and never have and never will make a similar mistake again!

Remember, a smart man learns from his mistakes, a genius learns from others....so learn from this one...Electricity is fun...and incredibly dangerous.

[rickoff]

Hmmm, it's kind of a tossup for me. Now that I'm in my later years I can think of so many stupid things I did when I was younger, and it's difficult to choose which was the stupidest. I think I'll have to tell at least a couple of these stories.

For the first one, I was about 16 years of age and sailing on Long Island Sound with my uncle. It was an unbearably hot day, and not much of a breeze, so we were moving slow. We both longed to cool off, and my uncle suggested that we throw a line in the water, over the transom, and take turns being towed through the water. Sounded like fun, and it did help to cool us off. It wasn't until several years later that I realized how stupid this was, after watching the movie Jaws. Basically, what we had done was to use ourselves as human bait to troll for sharks. We were just lucky that day not to have caught anything. We were aware that sharks were in these waters, and would see a few fins every day during our travels, but when we looked around and didn't see any we would assume that the water was safe. Not any more!

The second one occurred when I was about 23 years of age. I was operating an automotive machine shop, and a fellow came in and asked me to test a starter. He had already disassembled it to check it out, but couldn't find anything wrong with it. I ran the customary growler test and commutator/armature shaft ground test, and the armature was fine, so I turned my attention to the field coils. A resistance check between the field coil/brush jumpers and ground looked good, so I then ran a hi-pot (high potential) test to make sure there was no breakdown of insulation between the field coils and the case. I had done this countless times before, using a pair of handheld test probes connected to a high voltage source, and an insulation breakdown would show as an electrical arc at the trouble spot. This time, though, things went badly for me. As I pressed the probes into place, my fingers evidently got a little too close to the metal probes, and the current was shorted through my body. I could think, but my muscles froze and I could not move. I wanted to tell the mechanic, standing there beside me, to turn off the tester or pull the plug, but I couldn't speak and he apparently had no idea what was happening to me. I knew that my only hope was to walk or fall backwards far enough to pull the tester's electric cord out of the wall socket, as the test leads themselves had secure connections to the tester. I found that I could just barely move my feet alternately to slowly inch my way backwards, and it took all the strength and determination I could muster. Finally, after what seemed like an incredibly long time to me, the tester fell off the workbench and hit the floor while yanking the plug from the wall receptacle. Needless to say, the experience was a shocking revelation to me. Ever since that time, you can bet that I look at every situation that I am in with extreme caution, and with the foresight to imagine and avoid nearly anything that could possibly go wrong.

Rick

[rave154]

ARMA & RICK..yikes...some scarey stories there

[Stealth]

I was working night shift about 10 years ago, when I got off work it was raining so hard you could hardly see where you were going. It was about 100 yards to the parking lot, and before we got there, we had to go through a turnstile,in a guard shack.Most of the guys were running to the guard shack, where there was some shelter, before going on to the parking lot.Some of us had umbrellas, so we didn't get in any hurry. As we were the last ones to leave the building, we popped open our umbrellas and proceeded toward the guard shack. Just as we left the building, it started lightning and sparks were flying off the steel rods in the center of our umbrellas. We hadn't even thought about the possibility that we were carying lightning rods. Some of the guys actually got shocked. I guess I was lucky, becasue,although I was carrying the same kind of large umbrella that they were, I didn't get zapped.I have since bought one of the smaller ones with all plastic center rod. It is not as good as the larger one, but it sure is safer. Stealth

[sucahyo]

Charging a lead acid with raidant charger with loose connection on one cell. It produce a lot of bubble. When the connection fall off, it sparking and goes "boom". Luckily it is only a small 4.5Ah one.

[gmeast]

Stupid, Stupid, Stupid, Stupid, Stupid !

This isn't actually something I consciously 'tried' but it's something I DID and I think it falls into the spirit of this post.

I was about 25 (33 years ago). My dad was a doctor. He owned a huge powerboat (yacht really) and liked to invite colleagues out for a day of fishing. It was gasoline powered by a pair of 490 (or so) cu. in. something or others ... big fuel tanks and all. Hauled butt too. I was cleaning and touching up a little. I had the fuel outboard overflow vents (pretty little chromie things) temporarily disconnected on the inside of the bilge. The dockmaster called me up to the office, it was my dad, he wanted me to top off the fuel tanks because he had some guests coming into town and that meant a fishing trip off Point Loma.

Well, so I did the procedure, closed the hatches, engines covers, turned on the blowers, started the engines, puttered over to the dock, shut everything down and began filling. When I noticed that the dock pumps had pumped more fuel than the capacity of the tanks, I knew something was wrong. No way could I have forgotten to reconnect the fuel overflows now, could I ?

Instead of burping overboard to indicate a full tank, the fuel was just going into the tank, up the vent line and down into the bilge.

BUT HERE'S THE STUPID PART. I opened the engine covers only to see about 120 gallons of gas in the bilge, 6 inches deep. Then I stepped down into the bilge to look at the vents and while so doing accidentally stepped on one of the voltage regulators bolted to one of the main stingers. My foot slipped off taking the metal cover of the regulator with it and shorting out the contacts inside the regulator in the process. EVERY WIRE GLOWED ORANGE HOT AS THEIR INSULATIONS MELTED OFF.

Thank goodness for the fact that chemistry actually works. Had there been the slightest breeze to waft even the smallest amount of air into the bilges, there would have been an explosion. The harbor police towed us to a location where the bilges could be safely pumped into barrels and the bilges cleaned.

I rewired the boat.

[Sputins]

Mary Poppins!

#1, As a youngster in school, I jumped off the roof with an umbrella.. I broke my ankle and had six weeks in plaster. (I had to get re-plastered again because I cut the plaster off with tin snips after I got sand in it). The worst part - I was given the nick-name of Mary Poppins by my teacher at the time. I had to live with that stupid nick name throughout my entire high school days.. (I can laugh about it now)...

#2, Capacitor discharge across the chest with a 0.5 uF, @ 2500volts DC cap! Nearly killed me!

Never Again! Lesson Learnt!


PS don't call me Mary!

[Sputins]

Bedini Bathtub.

A special kind of stoopid..

I placed the rectified (no capacitor) output of my single coil (medium size) bedini motor/energizer onto two stainless steel cylinders.. (To see if there was any strange electrolysis going on)..

I ended up placing the two electrodes (insulated on the bottom) in the bath tub. With the electrodes seperated by a few cm's and felt the field, little pricks against the skin. I climbed into the bath tub and found the prickly field to feel rather nice on the calf mussels. A nice massage if you will. Increasing the distance between the electrodes increased the "prickle" and the overall field strength. If the mussel was brought too close into the field a rather painful contraction of the mussles would result. Put your hand in and try to fight it, you can't!

Placing the first electrode at one end and the second electrode at the other end of the bath tub made the intensity of the field extreamly strong! Powerful contractions of the mussels would result. I found out by puting my foot in the water between the electrodes and it wrenched my foot extreamly hard, to the point where it tore a mussel and was painful for weeks.

However on the "gentle setting" it was rather nice.. I was caught sitting in a nice warm bath with my Bedini device going, wires and electrodes into the water with me sitting in there naked..

I still can't explain it...
I've probably just lost all respect.. lol.

[Sephiroth]

Not as exciting as some of the others here, but I guess trying to get two (SSG) bedini motors to self run by connecting the output of one to the input of the other and vice versa.

Stupid because a quick look at the schematic would have told me that this is a 24v short circuit.

Ruined the wiring of not one, but two bedini motors simultaneously

[cabetcl]

Here is one.

when I 1st started experimenting with HV, I wanted to find out where is the energy stored on a water capacitor (layden Jar).

So using the elimination process I started my tests.

I had a plastic water bottle wrapped with aluminum foil. filled the bottle with water, and place a 1/2 copper tube inside.

I then charged the capacitor with a TV fly back transformer.

1st test was to carefully replace the aluminum with a new piece. after replacing I check and cap was still charged. so I knew the energy was not stored in the aluminum foil.

then I re-charged the cap.

2nd I replaced the copper tube, and capacitor still charged. so I know the energy was not stored in the copper tube either.

so now I was thinking that the charge was in the water.

I re-charged the cap.

removed the copper tube, and carefully holding the capacitor with by hands, I took it to the sink and emptied the bottle.

now this where it got interesting. I had the bottle in one hand, placed the bottle under the faucet, and my other hand was ready to open the faucet to re-fill the bottle. as soon as I opened the faucet, I got Jolted so hard, that I even got a burn on the top of the roof of my mouth.


I got my answer and I will never forget... the charge is stored in the plastic bottle.