Dangerous things we did as kids

[1100 man]

In a similar vein to 'what was the first circuit you built?' I was wondering about the dangerous/ foolish things we naively did when we were starting to experiment with the mains and electronics?
I did smile at Panrocks arc lamp with two pencils across the mains
Dad had a coil consisting of a hundred or so turns of DCC 18SWG wire wound on a toilet roll which he used to connect in SERIES with the fan heater in the spare room so that he could de-magnetise his screwdrivers etc. I had watched him do this several times and decided to have a go myself one day. I was about 8 at the time. I sneaked the coil out of the garage and into the spare room. Mum was deeply engrossed on the phone to a friend so wasn't taking any notice of what I was up to.
I duly wrapped the ends of the coil around the pins of the plug (brown Volex plug, unsleeved pins) and shoved it into the unswitched socket. There was, unsurprisingly, a huge flash and a bang and bits of molten copper fizzed into the carpet There was a big black streak up the wall and two big chunks of pin missing.
After I had stopped shaking, I hastily managed to clean the black off the wall and found an identical plug and hid the melted one in the loft. Mum asked what I was doing as all the lights had momentarily gone out. "Oh nothing" I innocently replied. Amazingly, I never got found out!!
That was a good lesson on the difference between series and parallel I still use that very same fan heater (GEC Tropicana) in my caravan!
Cheers
Nick

[The Philpott]

i generally tried to justify/legitimise my experiments by orienting them towards 'the greater good', such as wasps nests with thermite, mole communities via concussive explosions, etc. Electronic wise i cured a cat fouling issue by the use of a pulse circuit and an ignition coil- cats could sense the HT and never even came near it; all very well until blades of grass grew to reach the conductor and rendered it ineffective.

Anybody recall as a child being told not to look at welding arcs UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES..? If i had been told why then it would have had more effect- it was akin to telling a child not to go into the locked room without revealing what perils lay beyond.. Fortunately i can still see.

[britishrocket]

As a teenager I was besotted not with a particular girl or other but with valve electronics. I used to get old hybrid TV chassis that were being dumped from a local repair shop. My room used to have several of these in various states of dismantling, much to my Mother's chagrin.

I used to experiment with valve circuits using rectified mains as HT. Sometimes my circuits were successful, sometimes not. I now realise that my two biggest successes were not killing myself of burning the house down.

My brother also loved and still loves electronics. He is 18 months younger than me. One day we were discussing the functioning of a piece of kit with the back off, whilst plugged in. Why wouldn't you? We were having a bit of a heated debate as to where on the pcb the mains entered. My brother said, "look, it's there" jabbing the erstwhile point with a finger to illustrate his theory. He was promptly electrocuted. My reaction was to laugh, heartily. God alone knows how either of us made it to 18.

My poor long suffering Mum used to say to me "when you get your own house you can fill that up with junk". I did.

Carl.

[Refugee]

I once watched a school mate connect a cycle dynamo light into a switched 13 amp socket. It arced profusely for several seconds.
I tried it with an MES neon bulb thinking that it was a mains bulb but it had no internal resistor.
It took a Victorian photograph complete with the correct sound effect for the cup of powder flash gun but without any film in it.
It made a neat slot in the screw thread but did not damage the screw terminal MES lamp holder we had nicked from the physics lab. It was bad etiquette to do mains experiments with anything less than a 13 amp fuse in the plug unless it was wrapped in aluminum foil in order to hide the fact that you had wasted your money on anything less or for that matter nicked the plug off something that had the correct fuse.
I did have a genuine accident that plunged a complete street into darkness.
I had been good enough to have actually fitted a plug but the screw was missing from the live terminal. This was quickly mitigated with a steel screw. The "new" screw was too long and punched thru the plastic but was safely between the plug and socket so I thought.
They did a little electronics class a school a mile or so away and along I went with this old instrument only to learn about metal framed power sockets. The bang was not all that loud in the classroom but must have been much louder where the street fuse cabinet was located.

[Croozer]

'Dangerous ' in comparison with today's practice, and worse because it was commonplace to acquire appliances without plugs, and to think nothing of jamming the bared wires into the live and neutral pins of the socket behind the plug of a table lamp etc. The permanent solution was (eventually ) to wire multiple appliances into the same plug.

I look back and shudder to think that one such appliance subject to this plugless treatment was a sledging bolt whose earth was peemently neglected. .......

I am glad standards have improved.

[Radio Wrangler]

Built an oscilloscope with 2.5kV EHT from a 50Hz mains transformer with a lot of smoothing C on it.

No flashes, no bangs and I survived.

David