bud-- wrote in news:e5611cbd-ea3c-4de1-88dc- snipped-for-privacy@v18g2000pro.googlegroups.com:
He whom I killfiled long ago is persistently reminding me why I killfiled him. And he's wrong. And when he gets a fine red-gold-black coating across his face sometime he'll know how wrong he is.
That's about the size of it. It only happened to me once, and it wasn't even that big, it was just the ends of some 100A cables burning back from a contact, lasting about half of a second. I'm a civilian, but that's about as close I know to the experience of being shot at by live rounds at close range. It's a deeply shocking experience, it makes reactions poor, instead of reversing the move that caused the event, a stunned brain only registers a failure and retries the SAME move! Never mine autonomous seizure in case of electric shock, neural shock DOES this without the added woe of electrical contact. It took a real effort of will to override my body's false assumptions and prevent a third blast, and it taught me something of what soldiers have to learn to do in combat, so they respond correctly. I'm lucky I remained standing and didn't shit myself, and equally lucky I have good eyesight remaining after being flashed at and coated with enough copper to make my eyes sting for days. If the whole cable had gone up it would have probably slammed me against the wall and broken my spine and fractured my skull. As it was the sound was like the most brutal and guttural swearing, it carries an emotional weight as well as just being very loud. I know this is just the brain trying to rationalise its experience, but that's my point, even in mild form like that one, arc flash at many tens of amps is a STRONG experience.
I had a lesser one that did nothing to me, but still shows the power. It was two fully charged industrial deep cycle 105AH 12V lead acid batteries in parallel. I managed to let one wire drift and gently pass its end across the side of another one, and there was no resistance, just a complete destruction as one passed through the space occupied by the other. In this case the arc was just weak enough that some sputtering occured instead of total plasmafication, but there was a lot less copper bits than were eaten out of the cable, so even there, most turned to separate molecules of copper oxide and vanished in the ambient airflow.
I wrote this because I'm annoyed with the claim and counterclaim, flame and counterflame. It's MY experience, and no-one, whatever they say, is going to be able to contradict it. Hopefully no-one's going to try.
I know that a high resistance input can be interpreted across a known load, but I also know enough not to argue against assertions that meters made to do this are both safer and more convenient. I just use a Fluke meter and some load I have to use if needed, but I don't have to do this every day. If I did, I'd make it pay for the meters that do it as I'd need it done.