Can You Top This

as a student apprentice we often had to do odd jobs on site and we always turned off the power first or checked it with an old AVO to make sure it was off. A friend of mine had to re-wire something an the 415V 3phase. He first checked it with an AVO and all was well. He then thought as an extra exercise that he should do the job without touching the live wires at all and did so. This was a sort of neurotic thing he had. He then went to turn on the power. and found that it had never been off!! he had checked the voltage on the dc setting of the AVO!

Hardy

i usually love it when prisoners, while in prison, get to stick it to the system somehow, while on the inside.

here is how they did it in Vermont (a little less destructive than forcing a power outage):

and now i hear there is a movement to keep it!!!

Look at Cleveland's insignia here:

If he survived that then he is like a cartoon character. did you see his body smoldering at the end?

that's pretty good. both are subtle, but one is macroscopic and the other is microscopic.

Supply locked off, key in pocket. Separate lock and key for each person involved.

In college many years ago I had a prof in a lab who unplugged two phases of a running 10Hp 3hase 440v motor to reduce the noise so he could explain something. He proceeded to swing the two cables around with everyone expecting that the two exposed plugs would hit and we would be rewarded with a back emf light show.

That was not to happen however, he rewarded us with something at least as scary. He plugged the two phase leads in the opposite sockets the motor that was still winding down reversed essentially instantly and and spun up to synchronous speeds in the opposite direction. This was more than 40 years ago I still have the imprint in my mind of the brief instant the armature came to a stop as it reversed.

w..

(snip)

Some time ago, I was working on a gate opener that seemed to have been hand designed and built. (No company name on it.)

It used two capacitor start AC motors, one for each direction. When reversing, it would stop one, wait a few seconds then start the other one.

Once while working on it, I had it switch directions, somehow by doing something inside the box. A few seconds later, I realized that when you switch on a running one-phase induction motor, it keeps going the direction it is going, and that the limit switch wouldn't stop it when it got to the end. I quickly hit the power off switch before it ran the gate into the stop.

-- glen

Good thinking! I have a reversible motor on my lathe. I once rigged up a circuit to stop it quickly when I turned it off so I wouldn't need to wait when I wanted to reverse it. It consists of a relay in parallel with the main winding that connects AC capacitors across both windings when the power is off. Boy, does that stop fast! I disconnected it after the first use. The lathe had stopped, but the chuck kept right on spinning. I just got something under it before it had a chance to nick the ways.

Jerry

Interesting choice. I might have decided to run without (if it would run that way).

?-)

stereo.=20

an=20

temperature it=20

find=20

knob=20

strip

mode=20

minutes=20

You had better hope that PETA doesn't catch up with you.

?-)

I knew the condenser was shorted because the engine ran without one, but very poorly. We were way out to sea by then (I didn't know for sure) and mightn't have made it back to land with the gasoline we had. (We certainly wouldn't have, as it turned out.) The engine failed in Long Island Sound. To stabilize the open boat in the storm that blew up while we waited to be found, I rigged a sea anchor to the bow. The outgoing tide pulled us out further than anyone imagined. I didn't get the outboard running till the next morning. The cutter that picked us up east of Nantucket computed from our course and speed the time we got the engine started that we had come about 40 miles east at cruising speed.

Jerry

for

thousands

it

of

us

run

=20

=20

=20

=20

Wow. 'ellava experience. Mixed result with the sea anchor. Thanks for telling the tale.

?-)

sands

run

=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

Jerry, If I ever get stuck on a dessert island with someone, I'd want it to be you!!

I've got a feeling you'd learn how to make a radio out of a couple of coconuts :)

Cheers, Dave

Jerry, If I ever get stuck on a dessert island with someone, I'd want it to be you!!

I've got a feeling you'd learn how to make a radio out of a couple of coconuts :)

Cheers, Dave

If you were stuck on a "dessert island", it would probably be a coconut cream pie instead of a radio...

This is where I wheel out story about one of my flatmates at uni thought it would be funny to flatten all my AA batteries with a paperclip.

Guess he was unfamiliar with NiCds... I imagine his thumb and forefinger still have the scars from the red hot steel wire.

On the "can you beat this" the worst thing I did as a kid was, with a friend, fly a kite over some electricity pylons with the goal of pulling the cables together. Don't quite know how far we got but there was a big flash and a bang. No reports of powercuts when we got home.

With your luck, you would be Gilligan! ;-)

You deserve you 'just desserts' for that typo! ;-)

I have no idea what we could do with coconuts, but I once made an AM receiver from a railroad spike, some tin cans, and wire from an abandoned telephone line. I was on a Boy Scout overnight at Alpine, NJ, across the Hudson from Yonkers, from which we had traveled by ferry. The Scout encampment was on land owned by Columbia University, where one of Edwin Armstrong's experimental FM transmitters had been located. There was an abandoned line of utility poles through the woods from which some of the wires were hanging. We wound a coil around a railroad spike (there were abandoned tracks, too) and put it into an empty can to make an earpiece, wound a tuning coil around a toilet-paper core, and used a safety pin and one of the scoutmaster's razor blades to make a detector. With an antenna probably a few miles long, we got enough signal for the contraption to work. The adults were impressed.

One of my colleagues at RCA built a transmitter using a spark coil and other materials from of the light plane he had crashed in. Help arrived in time to save the severely injured pilot.

Jerry