Did something dumb today.

[WV Sawmiller]

Does this count?


 
I had this ball attached to the blade of my tractor and was pulling a 5X8 trailer with one ton of gravel today and it got in a bind and snapped the 5/8" or 3/4" shaft on the ball. I did have the safety chain on and it worked as designed and I was able to negotiate the trailer into position. I know this in not up to my usual standards but it will have to do in a pinch.

[Don P]

You got off lucky, I tore up the trailer coupling end messing around with a ball on the loader. That learned me, go get the truck.

I had forgotten one of my early marital misadventures till scrolling down the page talking about getting zapped brought it all back.

Her folks had retired to a house on a canal with access out to the Gulf. I got recruited on one of our visits to help jet in a new section of seawall. I did not grow up on the water, at least not in that way. We had a gas powered pump up on the dock and were waist deep or so in the water, jetting alongside the planks and sinking them into the sand. It was lunch or something and her Dad motions for me to kill the motor. Not noticing the stick he had put there I just reached up and pushed the ground to the plug. Walking on water just takes proper motivation.

[firefighter ontheside]

It'll do Howard, but I would have expected the story to be more like, "I was thrown from the tractor and....."

[Old Greenhorn]

.... I know this in not up to my usual standards but it will have to do in a pinch.

Having a lot of trouble getting this to post. Howard, buddy, after all the work I did to make it clear that you and I were not the top posters on this thread, and just moments before I was about to make a post remarking about how you nor I have posted anything in quite a while EVEN and in SPITE of the fact that you are working on the shed again and doing ladder work. You go ahead and bust my (our)bubble. Geez man!

[sawguy21]

@Don P Now I can't get that picture out of my mind. :D I bet that grabbed your attention real fast!

[chet]

I wanna see da pics,  Better yet da video.  :D :D :D

[Southside]

I did that with a generator my dad had, I was on dry land at the time and it had to be more than 35 years ago - I still remember the experience.  Can't imagine what being in the water would be like.  Come to think of it I remember seeing the stick after the fact too.  

[doc henderson]

were you standing in water after the fact?   :D :D :D        8) 8) 8)   

[samandothers]

Well never play with the spark plug wire when someone is working on the engine.  Back in the 60's dad had an older 40 some model Gravely 2-wheel walk behind tractor and it needed something done to it.  He took it to a friend that helped keep our stuff going.  The guy had removed the spark plug while he was working on it.  The plug was on top of the T head engine, and I was fiddling with the spark plug wire where it clipped to the spark plug.  He reached and spun the fly wheel/pull start pully.  I never will forget how funny he and dad thought my reaction was.  Good thing I did not know any cuss words then or it might have been embarrassing.

[Don P]

Those things were kind of like learning to water ski. Which, I never got used to being another skipping rock either :. When it has drug you all over heck and creation till all you can do is hang on, then you can pop up and ski  :D. I think the Gravely's were something like a cylinder from a radial engine strapped to a model T tranny.

[Southside]

Of course when that plug bit me I let go, which caused the generator to pop, fart, and backfire like it was going to explode, which I knew would make my dad mad, so while one hand had crawled up into my arm socket I was desperately trying to use the stick to shut the portable electric chair  down fully expecting it to finish me off....either way I was certain that was my final day on Earth and they would just make another one to replace me.

[K-Guy]

My dad was taught by an uncle who unhooked the old style crank phone from the wall, gave one wire to one of the kids and had the rest hold each others hands in a row. Then he told the last one to grab the cat's tail as he cranked the phone!  :D

Electricity can be fun!! But not for the cat.

[Don P]

That was one of my childhood toys, an old telephone generator. That could explain that tic  :D I got a pic of one not long ago;


 
The  magneto is in the middle there.

Unlike in the public telephone network, which has a standard ringing cadence (the repeating pattern of ringing and silence), the ringing cadence when using a magneto depended on the skill of the operator. When ringing local extensions, some switchboard operators used local codes of ringing to indicate internal, external or urgent calls.

Brings to mind a line from a blues song.
The phone's a ringin, sounds like a long distance call

[Ljohnsaw]

I have one of those magnetos.  I mounted to a board with some banana plug and some light bulb sockets.  You can hook up LED and incandescent bulb in various ways.  Real feedback as to how much work a generator has to do as the electrical load increases.  Since it is AC current, you can hook a pair of LED lights in opposite direction and you get a train crossing flashing lights.  If you crank it fast, no problem lighting a 100w bulb.

[rusticretreater]

In my old days as a auto mechanic, a quick and dirty way to check for a misfiring plug was to take a circuit tester, ground it and plunge the pointy end through the spark plug boot on the distributor.  These were bigger, heavier rubber ends on GM High Energy Ignitions.  You could get 50,000 volts at milliamps go up your arm.  Couldn't hold a tool for a minute or two after that.  

I also managed to spot weld a wrench or two to the car while working on a battery terminal.  We used to charge up the capacitor from old point sets and toss them to someone.  The natural reaction is to catch it and you would get a shock.  Kinda like the old joy buzzer handshake.

[Resonator]

Back in my dad's day, some of the electrical guys got to the point they had no feeling left in two of their fingers. They'd lick the pointer and middle and use it as a "voltage tester".

I remember one of those pawn shop TV shows saying the Army field phone (like Radar on MASH had) could give someone quite a jolt too, the faster they cranked, the worse it got. franken-smiley


Also read down south they had to make "telephoning" fish illegal. Guys would rig up the crank phone components, then shock the water, and net up the stunned fish.

[sawguy21]

In high school we had a substitute physics teacher that knew nothing about electricity and was scared of it. After we hooked up a model T coil and formed a chain to mess with her she took it away from us then got upset because we couldn't complete our assignments.

[SawyerTed]

Back when I was student teaching the agriculture education teacher was teaching small engine repair.  As a joke he put a charge on some of the condensers and slipped them back into the boxes.  

Two or three students got "bitten" when they pulled the condensers out.  

What the agriculture teacher overlooked was he had pulled that joke for years.  Several students dads or older brothers had the same joke pulled on them by the same teacher.  

Someone told the students that year how to put a charge on the condensers.  The ag teacher got to where he couldn't pick a condenser up that semester.    

On a similar note, I was teaching electronics and drafting during my student teaching.  When I was teaching about capacitors, I pulled out an old military surplus 120 volt power supply that had two big capacitors.  

The idea was to power up the power supply, switch on a light bulb attached to it and see how long the bulb would burn when the power was disconnected.  This was to demonstrate the charge on the capacitors would allow the bulb to burn for a time.  Think quart jar sized capacitors.  The bulb would burn 25-30 seconds.  

The other part of the demonstration was to allow the bulb to burn for several seconds after power was disconnected THEN short the output to demonstrate that the capacitors were powering the bulb.  To short the output we (my supervising teacher or I) would use a screwdriver to short two copper wires.

When I was doing the demo the first time, I didn't allow enough burn time on the bulb to discharge the capacitors sufficiently.

Imagine a group of a dozen or so high schoolers and a 22 year old student teacher gathered around the power supply.  The arc of electricity not only melted the copper wires, about 3/8" of the screwdriver was vaporized.   

Mr. Casey, my supervising teacher, was observing.  Needless to say he had to leave the room to keep from laughing out loud!    :D  Once the smoke settled, the kids thought that was the coolest thing they had seen in a while.

[doc henderson]

I am sure it was!  video?   :D :D :D 8)

[bigblockyeti]

Yikes!  An arc flash in front of a bunch of close proximity high school students might not earn you many accolades today.

[Don P]

Happily before that, we had to do a report on a hobby in 9th grade english. I can't remember anyone's except George. Speaking of coolest thing we had seen in awhile. He had wire from the wall plug to a beaker of water, from the water to a pair of carbon rods nearly touching in a holder and back to the wall.  The teacher asks the 9th grader "is this safe?" "Sure teacher" and he plugs it in. Nothing. Then George begins slowly pouring salt into the beaker with the water and the wires, and the arc light comes on, more salt and it comes on full blast. And then everything goes out.

These were old school buildings  :D.

But that was cool 

[WV Sawmiller]

  Reminds me of a tale I heard about a Herpetology professor showing how to handle dangerous snakes to a class of college students. He reached in and pulled out a large cottonmouth but got a poor grip and it twisted in his hand and bit him. The prof turned loose and the snake was hanging by one fang in his hand. The slow talking, deep voiced graduate assistant at the back of the room calmy asked "Joe, can I have yore truck?"

   Its nice to have a good support network.

[Don P]

George probably wouldn't have stood in the Atlantic ocean and grabbed the plug wire  :D. Between all the flopping, I didn't think to look for stunned fish.

[Southside]

High school chemistry class we were supposed to be boiling salt water or something like that, not me.  I had found a "recipe" on how to make nitroglycerin, so of course I had to try and do it using all the school supplied equipment.  My lab partner had defected from Poland and didn't speak much English which turned out to be in my favor when the beaker boiled over and "WHOOMP" a mushroom cloud suddenly formed over my table.  I turned to him and said something along the lines of "don't say a word" and ran up and down the isle yelling "the experiment is bad, turn it off" trying desperately to deflect attention from the blob of boiling doom at my station. The chemistry teacher ran over and somehow I managed to convince here that I hadn't done anything wrong, even though she had run the same experiment for probably 30 years.  All the other kids knew I was up to something, so none were too quick to shut off their experiment.  

Imagine doing that today.  

[doc henderson]

I made potassium tri-iodide in college.  It is a contact explosive after it dries.  I had made some and we we set off a filter paper full in physics class.  the president and the dean of admissions walked in and asked my prof. what was going on.  He said Henderson made some explosives.  I smiled and gestured towards the 4 remaining filter papers with the brown iodine on them.  I turned and looked at what I thought would be proud mentors, when I then bumped one and they all four went off.  I was laughing so hard as the dean of admissions ran out of the room, but could not hear myself or what I am sure were the kind accolades coming from administration as the left in a hurry.  I was student senate/class president, I did speak at my graduation, and I did graduate.   :D :D :D
I was in a band and we were doing 4 decades history of music, ending with (at the time) the 80s.  I was the drummer in "Kiss" for the last decade at the time and the contact explosives were detonated by my drum sticks.  I did have a little fun in college.