worst tech accident contest...

This is just for shits and giggles?

Might as well toss up the idea of what you have seen or have had happen to you in terms of the worst DIY or DIY related tech accident.

So far I have a couple that come to mind.

1. When a friend of mine not thinking grabbed his solder pot while it was on and moved it from left side to right side of him. Gave his some nasty burns all along the thumb and index finger.

2. Was soldering up an audio snake when my phone rang. I picked up the phone and continued to solder. being left handed my Iorn is best in my left hand. Had the iron in the right hand at that moment I was talking and in a nice display of stupid. Proceeded to grab the iorn with the other hand so I could switch hands. The kicker was I grabbed it by the tip/hotside. and Proceeded to burn my hand which was followed by a Oh shit scream into the phone.
Not as bad as sme people but you never know.

The other day I was cutting down a tube of ic sockets so that they could be stored on my shelves easier. I was working on the last one and trying to avoid spilling them everywhere, which is what happened every time I cut upwards, and decided that I would cut down instead. Now the plastic tubing is stiff as hell and NOT easy to cut, but this time it was...the knife went through the plastic and continued right on down to where my hand was holding it and embedded itself deep into my middle finger, right to the bone.

It bled like a son of a gun and needed stitches, my first ever. In hindsight, I can not believe how incredibly stupid I was to cut towards myself, I know better.

Unintentional arc welding:



A few years ago I was working on an old Fender Twin (silverface) while it was still plugged in. I was reaching in one-handed (I'm not that stupid) with a pair of needlenose for something when there was a loud pop and a blinding flash of light. I had accidentally touched the tip to the chassis and another part of the pliers to the mains (hot) side of the fuse holder. The part that touched the fuse holder melted slightly, and about 2mm of the tip completely vaporized. The short was too brief to trip the power strip breaker let alone the mains breaker. Now I try not to do anything inside a live tube amp unless I have to check voltages.

More recently I was filing out a hole in a panel with a small round file. I slipped and stabbed my left hand with its sharp tip. Not terribly painful but annoying none the less.

this was stupid.
I was repairing a very old tube scope, it use a tube rectifier for the CRT so I replace it with some diodes in the tube socket. I was adjusting the dot shape with a pot near the rectifier and accidentally I touched the rectifier , 1200V throught my arm , a big jump, pain and my arm fell asleep for some minutes.

I ate after-dinner mints...... before dinner.

***************

On the techy side, as a kid, I had my first electrical experiment....pushing a hairpin into a wall socket :idea: . Had blisters all over my palm.
Circuit breakers back then weren't fast, like today's.
It took me years to become unafraid of wall power.

=FB=

I was actually at work. Pulled out the tip on my metcal to change it while the iron was on. Set the tip down on the table...didn't drop it. All I could get out for about five minutes was, "It was ON."

Another time I was bench testing a 2kW amp sample when the thing had a cap turn loose and the whole amp jumped up off the bench about 20mm. I kid you not. It probably weighed 8 or ten pounds. I don't know what that is in kg, but i have never seen that before. No injury though.

I haven't ever had a serious DIY accident beyond the usual stepping on an IC bare-footed, ploping solder on my leg while working in shorts, a little B+ here-n-there. Now in my younger days as an electrician, I had some near death accidents. I'm much more careful now when I explode 45KVA transformers.

When I was about 5 I was facinated with my brother's vox amp.
Wanting one of my own, I twisted two wires to a 6x9 speaker and pushed the other ends into a wall socket............ BANG!!

It was Sunday (My father's "day of rest"). He was sitting in his chair in the living room reading the Sunday paper, aparently unaware of the experiment gone wrong upstairs even though you could hear a pin drop. I was trembling very much from being startled and went outside to play.

I have zapped myself inside my jcm800 and a soldering iron layed on the body of a strat copy for a while. (Nice brown burn).

:Ron

[quote author="Butterylicious"]I haven't ever had a serious DIY accident beyond the usual stepping on an IC bare-footed[/quote]

Damn bloody hell!!!!

It was a hot day; our band was practicing half-naked.

I spotted a thin smoke coming from top grill of the amp on the edge of a stage.

I took a screwdriver and quickly unbolted a cover to examine what part is it going from. It was going from the bottom of the chassis... I pulled it up, bent over it to look, and accidentally touched an electrolytic cap by my naked belly... It had 350V on it (doubling rectifier for 700V plate voltage).

Reached behind a breadboarded chassis to adjust the gain while I talked into the mic, close talking as usual...until my middle finger touched the 325V supply input. That finger is still slower than the others. Knocked my ass across the room.

'Nother one: diluted Cramolin with Freon to make a solution for dipping parts...except instead of Freon TF I used refrigerant Freon without thinking. Put it in a glass jar. It boiled at room temperature and after a few minutes, BOOM. Luckily a half-completed Hafler amplifier kit was between me and the jar when it went off. That was, I think, my real Darwin Award stunt.

Still, none of us has done something as dumb as the guys at Chernobyl, where the night shift decided to try an experiment, simulating a major overheat with all cooling systems shut off. Left thousands dead or sick, large quantities of food crops across Europe sufficiently contaminated that they had to be destroyed, and a chunk of my family's home territory so contaminated no one's allowed to live there. Also lots and lots of kids with birth defects. That has to be the biggest techie screwup in history.

Peace,
Paul

Yes, Chernobyl wins. I doubt those guys will be showing up to tell their version.

Several guitar amp repair shop zaps. Worst from an Ampeg V4. Think I took the full rectifier output voltage as stored by the first cap. Only to a finger, but it made my arm numb for a second to the shoulder. We like the 'one hand behind the back' rule when this happens.

There's a particular RCA preamp connector set that carries 120 AC from the wall along with inputs and outputs. There's a pair of identical connectors that are 180 degrees apart in alignment, and its very easy to mix up the one you are looking at. I've seen two of those have the 120 hooked up to the audio inputs rather than the power inputs. All that pretty new wiring just vaporizes as it takes out the fuse and throws the mains breaker. Good news is the modules survive.

in the factory, a tech was soldering something on the under side of a console and it dripped in his ear. deaf in that ear.

my personal favourites are when I smell burning flesh only t realize it's me! ~5- 10 times over all.

Back in 88 I was at the beginning of my learning curve working the night shift at Unique Recording. It was about 4AM and I was checking a hum problem in a Sony DRE-2000 reverb. It had the PSU regulator board mounted on the front panel door, and it connected with a 18 way amphenol type edge connector. I removed it to check for any bad solder connections, re-connected it, and kept it hanging off the door. I did not "check twice" and had re-connected it backwards.

When I powered it, these two perfect, whispy cylinders of blue smoke slowly moved out of the chassis fan holes. Perfect blue cylinders that I will never forget! It was quite surreal. I was as toasted as whatever burned, and it was the chief tech who saved my bacon. It was just a couple of components that burned, but I was chassis-shy for a while after that. That lesson is still "burned" into my current tech'ing procedures.

The actual problem was proximity to another power transformer. We moved it in the rack and it never hummed again! Doh!
Mike

Mmmh .... so many..... but I'm not a tech.

As a nipper ..... taking a piss on a bag of Pitchlor pool chlorine. Not sure about urea and chlorine but there was a hell of an explosion about 10 seconds later...... :green:

Then there was the the time I cut 3 phase power (450v AC here) ...... live...... 'nuther big bang ...... Fairly large hole blown through those cutters. The power to the industrial building was out until the next day. No I did NOT admit I did it :roll: ........

okay; you win

[quote author="mikka"]Mmmh .... so many..... but I'm not a tech.

As a nipper ..... taking a piss on a bag of Pitchlor pool chlorine. Not sure about urea and chlorine but there was a hell of an explosion about 10 seconds later...... :green:

Then there was the the time I cut 3 phase power (450v AC here) ...... live...... 'nuther big bang ...... Fairly large hole blown through those cutters. The power to the industrial building was out until the next day. No I did NOT admit I did it :roll: ........[/quote]

Not quite tech but stupid none the less
Being a youngster in an english military boarding school had it's moments..
Like being in a bath when somebody takes some sodium out its protective "in oil" small glass bottle and throws it into your bath water
or
Having your bed rigged up with a pull detonator so one side was attached to the headboard and the other end attached to your top sheet - thus when you pulled the cover off - bang
Well it would have worked if I hadn't gone into bed under the cover - I moved my face onto the other side of the pillow to feel the detonator cord against my face

Hmmm... If to speak of army... A pack of a cooking yeast dropped into a toilet makes lot of smelly foam the next day...

In my youth ... some lad on a school cadet camp ...... lit a toilet roll and threw it into a large camp latrine ..... (hole in the ground filled with sh*t) ..... just to see what would happen. It happened all right.

Apparently there was a massive BOOM that could be heard for miles .... and it took him hours to get cleaned up ..... :green:

In a previous life I was a theater tech. One time the resident ensemble was doing a bit of performance art, and they needed a fully-functional time bomb, with a payload consisting of a dozen or so stage smoke capsules (the kind that burns up, not the oil fog/dry ice variety). So I built one into a cash box, complete with a TTL-driven LED down counter. Now those 74xx chips are quite power hungry, and I wasn't quite sure if enough juice would be available at the end of the countdown cycle to activate the electrical detonator, so I added a NC relay and an extra set of batteries so that the thing would go off (albeit prematurely) if the main batteries were to run out early. That made the power-up sequence a bit tricky, as it was vital to connect the main batteries first, and only then the detonator power.

So there I was in my workshop. I'd hand-twisted the power leads to the main battery terminals, double-checked that the relay was energized, and connected the detonator battery. I gently close the cash box... and hear the 'click' of the relay switching off. Seconds later the workshop was completely flooded with smoke. It took the A/C hours to get it back to normal, as the smoke bomb was dimensioned for the main hall, and the 2x4m tech workshop didn't have any windows. Lesson learned: wires that are twisted together do not a reliable connection make.

A few months later I'd DIYed a computer controlled light dimmer out of a Commodore PET, some more TTL and a few opto-isolated triacs. Time came to test the prototype, and I asked a colleague to hook up a few stage lights. This he did, to the tune of 9kW, on a dimmer channel rated for 3.6kW. That day I learned that triacs fail shorted, and that even (especially?) for prototypes fuses are Not Optional.

Oh well.

JD 'You have the capacity to learn from your mistakes. You will learn a lot today' B.