Sounds familiar - when I was working at a repair shop fixing cheap
clock-radios and the like, the favorite was a 10uf 16v electrolytic
concealed in the mains plug of a soldering iron (here in the UK we
have fused plugs with quite a lot of space inside, and 240 volts to
play with....). This sort of escalated to the point that every time I
turned up there , I had to tur everything on at arms length, with a
stick in case of explosions....

=46or retalliation I resorted to somewhat more subtle tactics - we had
quick-connect 'safebloc' mains connectors on the bench, and I
dismantled the 3 amp ceramic mains fuse from one , and inserted  a
ground-down 1N4007 diode inside the ceramic tube, in place of the fuse
wire. I think it must have killed the internal fuses in about half a
dozen clock-radio mains transformers before they figured it out....=20

This tactic is also highly effective in bench lights, which run at
half brightness!



On Tue, 27 Aug 2002 21:14:02 +0300, you wrote:

>On Tue, 27 Aug 2002, Olin Lathrop wrote:
>
>>> I'll see your fluro starter and raise  you a line of metal can =
transistors
>>> in the lab power sockets and then turn the mains on.
>>
>>When I was a kid I wanted to see what would happen if you plugged in =
one of
>>those little neon lights *without* that silly series resistor.
>
>Hehe. That I did too, by mistake. I dropped a sofite neon bulb and it =
fell
>into a schuko receptacle on a power strip. Then I tried to pry it out
>using the screwdriver I was using (the other hand was holding =
something).
>The driver slipped into the phase hole and at the same time touched the
>lamp which was resting against one of the ground springs. No GFI =3D big
>bright flash and metallized glass flying everywhere. I was blind for a =
few
>minutes after that.
>
>Peter

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