Post your Horror stories of getting lit up by Filter Caps anyone?

[Pano]

Originally Posted by teemuk

Made a burn mark that looked like a snake bite.

I know that mark! I made one on each hand - in one hand and out the other. Wasn't a tube amp, but very similar, an old Graphlex flash unit at 450V and 2000uF (200 Watt/second flash). Pow! Knocked me off the chair. I suppose I didn't get all 200 joules, as there was still enough juice left to weld the screwdriver to the terminals when I recovered.

Stored high voltage is no fun to play with.

[Cassiel]

Stored high voltage is no fun to play with.

YouTube tells you otherwise. A better wording would be: pain and death are no fun to play with.

[Pano]

Yes, I think you put it better.

[indianajo]

I was age 13, and trying to graduate up from testing tubes at the corner store and replacing them. Year was 1963, and there was no internet. I had a 6 V supply Ford Car radio with the bottom cover off, and a $5 VOM from Radio Shack. I had a schematic for a 12 V car radio that the 59 Ford car should have had, I think that radio must have had space charge tubes (12 v plate) and the Ford Shop manual had no warnings of any kind in the electrical section. ZZot!!. It had 400V at 20 uf in there for the tube plates. Was a 1956 radio with a vibrator AC power supply. I had the door closed and my parents were kind enough to not bother me until mealtimes. I could have died if it hadn't been a thumb to finger short.
Kids get their kicks now with jumping skateboards down stairs and athletic stuff with swings and ponds and minibikes and stuff. I had enough adventures with tubes and changing transmissions in cars etc. My father did carpentry and concrete for hobbies, my mother sewed and knitted, I was totally headed for outer space on my own. The Radiotron handbook,at the library in those days, didn't have a warnings page, either.

[Frank Berry]

Way back in 1976, I was sent to Guayaquil, Ecuador to install a 50,000 watt AM transmitter. It was a used RCA Ampliphase transmitter.
Everything went smoothly until I shut the transmitter down and opened the front door to the high voltage (16,500 volts) power supply cabinet. That should have caused the high voltage capacitors to discharge. They didn't. As I moved my hand into the cabinet to feel for hot spots, the hair on my arm bristled. I pulled my arm back out and discharged the capacitor bank with a grounded (Jesus) stick. Since then, I have never failed to discharge the capacitors before touching anything.

[nigelwright7557]

I have heard them go off when i was on an electronics training course when someone put one in the wrong way around.

I have cooked some 10,000uf with a class d amp that was bus pumping.
Been lucky otherwise in 30+ years in electronics.

[James Lehman]

I remember when I was just a kid, one of the bigger high voltage electrolytic caps went bad in my Fender Twin Reverb (all tube) guitar amp. As usual, I could find a replacement but it was the wrong physical size. I have no idea what possesed me, but for some reason (after the amp was turned off) I put my finger and thumb across about 600 volts. It just felt like it was super hot and it burned a groove the size of the wire where I touched it, with a little sizzle and the familiar smell of evaporated me!

[Trout]

Oh Boy,

I think I posted about this in the past, I forget how long ago.

Back in the late 60's for a science fair project my partner & I built a prototype Liquid Pulse Laser.
Inspired by a magazine article we set out to make one 100% from scratch.
My fathers company specialized in defibrillator service & sales which came in handy for parts sources.

In short, we built a strobe circuit to fire a high intensity flash tube to excite the liquid laser tube.
We got a couple caps from a defibrillator and built a supply around them. Several Joules in fact, I forget the exact values.
Despite our safety switches for the triggers, what we thought was fool proof was not child proof.
In a nutshell, my partner said, hit the flash button, I did,
He flew across the room backwards, hit the wall with enough force to cave in the drywall and ended up sitting humped over dazed for about 2-3 minutes.

This was one of those real lucky to be alive moments!
We did win our fair, but we never attempted to fire the unit again, my father removed several components and replaced them with dummies for the dummies.
I honestly thought my best friend was dead!

[AndrewT]

Melted the end off my favourite electical screwdriver with the bang of shorting a 20mF charged to 50Vdc.

[AndrewT]

not filter caps but much more dangerous.

A.
Toasting a slice of white pan bread on a metal fork at the bars of an electric heater.

Touched something that made me tingle/jump ! I was quite young and over-worked Mum was not looking just at that moment.

B.
Volunteered as a 12 year old, to "repair" the damaged flexible cable where it entered the back of the cylinder vacuum cleaner.
Went and got a screwdriver.
Unplugged the socket from the Cleaner. Removed the cover and started to unscrew the wire terminals securing the three core cable. My "pinky" touched the Live while I was undoing one of the others. Jump !!!!! I had forgotten to unplug at the Mains end.

This one may be the reason I push Safety so much on this Forum.

pinky = little finger opposite the thumb (in the UK)