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Can You Top This

In a game of "can you top this".....

I worked at a small factory where they made condenser capacitors for cars. Worst job of my life. I welded a bracket to the can thousands of times/day. The actual capacitor was like a roll of toilet paper consisting of foil and plastic rolled together......

So I am working at my station near the back of the plant and the whole building kind of shakes, there is a power interruption and I see a blue flash out the back door and I hear some laughing ... Beavis and Butthead laughing. I didn't think about it too much but a couple minutes later the same thing happens again.

It turns out that Beavis and Butthead were taking these capacitors and throwing them over the power lines like you would toilet paper over a tree.

Can you top this????

Reply to
brent
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I have a friend who, as a kid, took out power to the city of Arabi, Louisiana, by throwing a piece of wire over a power line.

Didn't we do this with carbon fibers at the start of the Iraq war?

--

John Larkin, President
Highland Technology, Inc

jlarkin at highlandtechnology dot com
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Reply to
John Larkin

A still-fugitive miscreant threw a 5-foot crow bar onto electrified tracks where, I presume, it was intended to derail a train. Instead, it shorted the third rail to one of the other two and tripped the breaker, thereby converting disaster to inconvenience. The outage was a long one. Pieces of rail had to be replaced. The crowbar had been welded.

Jerry

--
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
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Reply to
Jerry Avins

I remember those capacitors, and even the welded on part, working on my father's cars.

By the time I got my own car, though, no more ignition points and capacitors to replace. (Yes they always called them condensers, the name that they had since the Leyden jar days.)

Now it is rare to even find a distributor, instead one ignition coil per spark plug (or pair). The computer generates the pulses at the right time, so no mechanical or vacuum advance to adjust the timing.

-- glen

Reply to
glen herrmannsfeldt

Those condensers were pretty reliable, but subject to early failure. After two such failures, I stopped changing them when I changed the points. I kept the replacement in the glove box in case of need, but it never arose. When I had a condenser failure in an outboard in Long Island Sound, I ended up making a replacement from the paper liners of two packs of cigarettes and some wire. It worked well enough to get us to shore.

Jerry

--
Engineering is the art of making what you want from things you can get.
¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯¯
Reply to
Jerry Avins

...

well, this guy used his body instead of capacitor foil:

formatting link

the website says he survived.

--

r b-j                  rbj@audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
Reply to
robert bristow-johnson

Can't top it but we used to throw coins at 11kV overhead power lines when we were kids or put them on railway lines and try to find them once they had been flattened and thrown out at high speed. Kids don't always grow up.

====================================================================

"throwing coins at 11kV overhead lines" - what did that do?

Reply to
Dennis

In junior high I/we used to stick the leads of an electrolytic into a power outlet then standing back to the wall switch on the power with the heel of our shoes. Nice bang & smoke.....

Reply to
Dennis

Hi brent, After high school I enrolled in a two-year electronics technical school.

During the 2nd month we entered the lab to learn how to measure the voltage drop across series resistors driven by a variable DC power supply. The DC supply's output was in the range of 0 -to- 90 volts. Our class's Beavis would put his finger across the supply's output terminals while Butthead slowly turned up the voltage. Beavis 'held on' for as long as he could stand it. They called this exercise "Edison Roulette." Ha ha.

[-Rick-]
Reply to
Rick Lyons

s

Ah, you have reminded me of another great story.

I used to work with a guy who before his divorce...haha....

He got into an argument with his wife who was watching TV and trying to ignore him so he unplugged the TV and cut the power cord off. A few days later (after he repaired the cord) his wife got mad at him and he was watching TV so she took the cutters and BOOM. She didn't unplug the TV.

Reply to
brent

nds

=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF= =AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF=AF

A regular McGiver. I can't quite visualize it, but impressive

Reply to
brent

When my little brother was 10 years old he wanted to connect a naked loudspeaker chassis (stripped out of an old radio box) to my fathers stereo. Unfortunately he connected it to the power line. The sound was quite impressive, but very shortlived ...

Oh, and how we drove a colleague nearly mad (somewhere in the 80ies, in an electronics lab):

Step 1: removed the knob of the potentiometer which controlled the temperature of his solder iron and remounted it such that the temperature it pointed to was much higher than it really was. It took him some time to find out why the solder didn't want to melt. After two attempts he glued the knob onto the potentiometer.

Step 2: painted black the white arrow of the knob which points to the temperature, and painted a new white arrow onto the knob ....

Step 3: soldered a short piece of blank wire to the end of this solder strip which would not melt ...

The last step was to connect a 10 uF electrolytics capacitor in reverse mode to the 24V supply of the solder iron. It would take some 10 to 15 minutes after switch on before it blew off.

bye Andreas

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Andreas Hünnebeck | email: acmh@gmx.de
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Reply to
Andreas Huennebeck

Who was that? NymNoNuts? krw? miso? Slowman? Certainly someone with the brains of a pea ;-) ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Reply to
Jim Thompson

I prefer the natural selection examples. Two 30+ mental midgets climbed into an SRP transformer yard a few miles from here, intent on stealing copper. Their remains were "shovel-ready" ;-) ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Reply to
Jim Thompson

I did that once while "neatly" sizing an extension cord in my dorm room. Plugged it in, stapled it all along the baseboard until I reached my power amplifier... took out the dikes and cut it to proper length :-( Henceforth the dikes had a notch perfect for stripping wire :-) ...Jim Thompson

--
| James E.Thompson, CTO                            |    mens     |
| Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
| Phoenix, Arizona  85048    Skype: Contacts Only  |             |
| Voice:(480)460-2350  Fax: Available upon request |  Brass Rat  |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.     Sometimes I even put it in the food.
Reply to
Jim Thompson

no, just someone who is suicidal and likes to do it with flair.

maybe you can figger out who it is from the newsclip:

formatting link 

--

r b-j                  rbj@audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
Reply to
robert bristow-johnson

it might not be the same incident. there seems to be some differences, but both dudes are shirtless. never saw this video before today.

here's an interesting (and safe) display of the biggest jacob's ladder i've ever seen a video of. no suicidal crazies, but lot's of ionized air.

formatting link 

--

r b-j                  rbj@audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
Reply to
robert bristow-johnson

i remember, back in the 70's some guy in North Dakota that i sorta knew built his own "folded-horn" bass speaker cabinet. he literally used a simple two-prong heavy power cord (and connector) to connect speaker to amp. i warned him that some dipstick was gonna plug that amp bottom into the wrong outlet. i heard later that his big expensive 15" instrumentation-quality loudspeaker got burned out. must have been loud.

--
r b-j                  rbj@audioimagination.com

"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
Reply to
robert bristow-johnson

I don't know if it was carbon fiber, but we did take out power lines by dropping something conductive.

There was the famous power outage in Utah where prisoners were burning trash under the power lines. The plume from the trash was enough to make the lines arc over and trip a breaker. The breaker saved the system, but for some reason it took a while to get the lines online again.

Reply to
miso

I worked in repair/service 30 years ago when Bose had there 901 series speaker. They said they did a demo with 120 vac, and when it died, all the found was a broken wire between speakers. As I recall it had 8 or 9 speakers in series in the box. Mikek

Reply to
amdx

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