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Post by tonycamphd on Oct 29, 2013 10:46:11 GMT -6
Svarts latest post inspired me to create a "War Stories" thread, maybe fella's will share some harrowing experiences of the electrical persuasion, pertaining to DIY audio. Hopefully, in the end, after a few winces, cringes and Yikes! the rest of us will be able to avoid the painful pitfalls of our bold and brave brethren who painfully paved the way to safer DIY?
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Post by tonycamphd on Oct 29, 2013 10:46:41 GMT -6
^ when i built my Ioaudio MK47(u47 mic clone), i set the voltage on the PS unit, i think it read 396vdc un loaded, i forgot to ground the mic body and 0v to the 5 pin connector, and as i plugged it in.... zzzzzzzzappp! i threw the mic across the room literally! Thank gosh darn i didn't put the Thiersch M7 in yet, i was testing with a chinese crapsule. I'm damn sure i didn't get all of it, but that shit hurt..bad!  btw, the reason why i think that happened is, i was so concerned with safety in the HV PSU, that i relaxed a little too much on the mic itself?? moral, never let your gaurd down. |
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Post by svart on Oct 29, 2013 11:17:50 GMT -6
Not quite DIY but I was playing guitar one night while it was storming outside. Lightning hit next to the house where the grounding rod was. The shock came up through the guitar cable and shocked me. My hands tingled for a few days afterwards!
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Post by svart on Oct 29, 2013 13:17:15 GMT -6
I once put my arm across a 400V 1F cap. The posts burned two holes in my arm in an instant! It looked like a bad snake bite and my arm was numb for some time!
The arcs actually fused the holes closed so no bleeding was involved. Just the smell of bacon for a few days in the room afterwards.
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Post by svart on Oct 29, 2013 13:23:34 GMT -6
Oh and I have a couple soldering stories.
I once had a board that was soldered to a connector that was attached through a metal plate. I needed to unsolder a leaded part and didn't want to go through the hassle of unsoldering the board from the connector due to the time it would take. I decided my best course of action would be to jam the soldering iron between the board and the plate, but it didn't quite fit. I pushed pretty hard and the iron slipped out and burned right into my hand. The tip went down to the bone and cauterized a nice hole so I could see the bone through the open hole. Quite some time was spent picking out solder and cleaning out the hole before the healthcare professional cut the hole so it would bleed and therefor heal. After a month or so, a small flake of solder worked it's way out of my skin and had to be cut out. Now I just have a small round scar.
Another one would be that once I had an iron covered in solder and it slipped out of my hand and banged on the desk. Hot solder sprayed off the tip an went everywhere, including in my eye. The solder had burned into my cornea and had to be picked out.
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Post by tonycamphd on Oct 29, 2013 13:35:11 GMT -6
holy crap Svart, you're like a veteran of all the wars from the turn of the 1900's!!
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Post by svart on Oct 29, 2013 13:38:28 GMT -6
Well, I've been at this a while.
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Post by dandeurloo on Oct 29, 2013 15:36:03 GMT -6
I was drilling a front panel out at my personal shop the other day. I laid the panel on my lap and used a hand drill to drill a small hole for the "catch" on the pots. ( the little thing that makes it so pots don't spin around on the panel) Anyway, I went a little to far and straight through the panel and about 1/2" into my leg. A chunk of flesh and a good amount of blood and a good pair of jeans all over the place. That is what happens when I'm in a hurry.
Moral of the story, do be in a hurry.
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Post by tonycamphd on Oct 29, 2013 17:40:36 GMT -6
Wow! Dan, ouch! I think we should designate the "like" button as the "wow!" button for this thread? seems weird to hit the "like" button for Dan drilling into his leg lol!
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Post by mulmany on Oct 29, 2013 18:21:03 GMT -6
A long time ago, I went into the work area at my parents house and saw my iron hanging by the power cord with just the tip touching the floor. Upset about someone knocking it off the bench, I reached out grabbed it quickly.... burned my thumb and pointer finger. A nice 2 inch long burn, the skin went instantly white and crispy.
Learned to never assume that an iron is cold and to always pick it up by the handle.
Patrick
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Post by Deleted on Oct 30, 2013 6:42:06 GMT -6
As a young teen i wanted to have disco type colored lighting in my room. I bought the lamp, the three colored bulbs, the cable and the plug. I never built anything with electricity before. I measured how much cable i would need and went to the dining room for work. Home alone. I got my dad's toolbox. I cut the cable to length, unisolated the ends, screwed everything together, thought alot about it how this should work to not be dangerous or malfunctioning. I was mighty, mighty proud of what i did, because it looked sooooo professionally done. I got very, very excited about how it would look like with the colored bulbs lighting up and started to hurry. I screwed the plug together and put the bulbs in and decided to immediately test it in the dining room. I put the plug into the wall socket. For an hilarious reason i can not remember really the circuits fuse did not blow. ( I guess it was st. like a bridged fuse "because it blew too often", but my memory serves me bad on this one...) Well, anyway, nothing lit up and i could not think of a reason, started to control if the bulbs were correctly in their socket, when i starts to smell funny from the wall socket. I looked it up quickly and saw smoke. My heart nearly missed a beat and i totally paniced and pulled the plug. Two fat drops of molten metal dropped from the plug into the floor of the dining room right before the wall socket. You could see the brass amalgamed into the dining room floor and one of the plugs pins was half as long as before....... O-Oh, it was impossible to hide that so i had to tell my dad the whole story when he came home, because he would have seen it anyway sooner or later....you could imagine that he freaked out quite a bit......  After he checked the houses electricity, quite some swearing and grumbling, he calmed down and in the evening he told me about the danger i was in and showed me how a plug is mounted correctly - without having shorts. So in the end i got my disco style lightning.... When i build something nowadays i always check for a short at the plug before plugging into the wall socket. I never forgot the moment when i saw the smoke coming from the plug...  BR, Martin |
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Post by svart on Oct 30, 2013 7:52:09 GMT -6
Oh I've had my share of machine stories too.
I've had the drill press "grab" a part and sling it around and cut me up real bad too many times to count.
I've been hit in the chest by a chuck key for a large lathe because someone forgot that the key was still in the chuck when they turned it on and it got slung out and across the room.
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Post by Deleted on Oct 30, 2013 15:45:07 GMT -6
Oh yeah...
before i went to university i was in a metal workshop for a basic kind of training on the machines....
I had a colleague who had quite some problems working with heavy machine...well..maybe a cognitive problem, i don't know..,
I came from a cigarette break and i saw him at the lathe...and then i noticed how the jaw chuck starts moving along the axis,,,
I yelled at him, he turned around and in this moment the jaw chuck flew a meter, bumped on the floor, and i jumped at the side...i heard when the jaw chuck crashed in the wall, bumped off and still moved a few meters before it lay there........
It crashed a hole into the wall behind me...
At another occasion a metal cylinder size 5x12 cm flew a few centimeter past my head...from a milling machine!That guy had not fixed it correctly and i heard this stuttering sound from the milling head that sounds so utterly wrong...i turned my head and saw it flying my way. WTF! He wanted to cut an angular plane at one end of the cylinder, and because he wanted the surface of the cylinder staying nice, he put pieces of acrylic glass between the clamp and his cylinder, and the cylinder slipped right out while milling.... D'oh!
I asked him what i did to him, that he tries to kill me at every occasion!
After that one,the boss of the workshop gave him a metal file in his hand and banned him from all machines, lol. He was kind of a hopeless case when it came to machines.......
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Post by Deleted on Nov 4, 2013 14:11:27 GMT -6
this thread is very entertaining to read! The worst thing that happened to me (so far) was trying to unplug a printer from an outlet without looking and my fingers touched the hot and neutral plugs. 120V AC zap. nothin' compared to you guys, obviously!
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