`Gawwwd'! Please don't let me get into this thread! Help Me! I don't want to get involved! Ok, I can't stand it so here goes... First, I've done most of the stupid things folks have mentioned (ie: Grabbing the 2nd Anode of a CRT before it was discharged, etc). 1. I went to Benson Polytechnical High School in Portland, OR. It was an incredible place with everything from Electronics, to Welding, to Aviation with a real F-86 jet and a real engine test stand, to building real aircraft and houses. I majored in pre-engineering electronics but we had to take other courses the first two years. I chose welding, sheet metal, electrical, and aviation. It was a wonderful place to get into trouble ;-) 1a. Someone knocked over an acetylene tank that shot through 1.5 buildings (3 concrete walls). No one was hurt... 1b. A friend in welding class named Hickock wore cowboy boots. We dumped water in his boots when he had the welder cranked up to 400A burning a hole in the table (He liked doing that). He survived and we were still friends... 1c. Favorite prank in pre-eng lab classes was charging large caps up to 600V and tossing them to a friend. We survived though we could never resist the temptation to catch the cap ;-) 2. Working on a RADAR project in the USAF, I grabbed 60KV while adjusting the Maggie which knocked me several feet. What makes this more stupid than it appears is that I did this often... 3. When the LOX folks would come out to the aircraft, we would spill a little into a metal pan and drop rice (Baht) bugs into it. Then drop the bugs onto the concrete and watch them shatter. What make this more stupid than it appears is that these bugs were a delicacy and a handful of them could gain you the `services' of a `lady' for the night... Fortunately, there were hundreds of them hovering in the lights above the reventments at night. Unfortunately, those same lights made us good `targets'... 4. (and finally) My first job after the military was an engineering `job shop'. Lot's of interesting projects. One of them was producing baseball pitching machines for Joe Paul Industries. This is basically two rotating tires with speed controllers. We had just switched to a new RCA TRIAC and were experiencing a lot of failures in the field. I suspected we were exceeding the dV/dT rating so I made a little test setup. I would lean over the board, about 5" from my face, and look up at an O-Scope while cycling the motors on and off. After hours of trying to duplicate this, I finally saw a spike go up to around 1.5KV. Like a near-death experience, time went into s-l-o-w m-o-t-i-o-n. I thought to myself; "This thing is going to blowup". Of course it did. Now at this time of my life I was working on my long-haired pony tail so I would fit in with the rest of my friends in the early 70's. Well, my face was black and my hair blown back and smoking like a Disney cartoon. I did'nt realize how I looked when I went to the Sr engineer and said "Dave, I think I found the problem". It took several minutes before Dave regained his composure and then he led me over to Christine in production who pulled out a mirror. This definitely called for a party so we shut down early ;-) - Tom ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Tom Handley New Age Communications Since '75 before "New Age" and no one around here is waiting for UFOs ;-)