Police: Thief Gets 7,000 Volt Jolt While Trying To Steal Copper Wire

7 NEWS ^ | October 12, 2007 | Lance Hernandez

[potlatch]

Thanks for the link george, I saved it! Cute gif.

[eastforker]

And if you want to bust into somebody’s shop to steal copper so you can buy some crank, there really isn’t a safe wire to cut first.................... True, however if you can find the proximity gloves first it might not be such a big deal.

[AnAmericanMother]

“It’s the volts that jolts, but the mils that kills!”

[AnAmericanMother]

[devolve]

.

Stand your hair on end.......

Even a hot bare copper wire touching a 12 volt car battery terminal will cut into flesh and sear your fingers or hands like a red hot knife

Turn on your brain before playing with electricity

It will weld pliers together in a flash

A faulty ground wire on an lighting fixture can knock you silly for a while

High voltage cable racks (AT&T/WE) can be fun too - pliers in your back pocket can cut they thick insulation and melt and yet somehow you can survive

[Dumpster Baby]

I’ll not miss cathode ray tubes when they are gone

In my younger days I couldn't afford modern TV sets so I had a long series of hand me down tube TV sets. I usually had to fix them periodically as heat and age took their toll. One day I was rooting around in the back of an old tube color TV set and the high voltage anode lead from the CRT to the HV cage broke loose at the cage end. The springy HV wire whipped around and zotted me in the cheek, discharged the CRT anode into my face, about 35 KV. That hurt. After that I learned to pay close attention to the aquadag grounding straps and to always use a grounding probe to discharge the CRT on TV's, computer and CCTV monitors, etc.

[potlatch]

Bad hair day??

[SunkenCiv]

“throw another thief on the bar-b...”

[battlegearboat]

I’m glad I came and read your’s and other’s posts this afternoon, as I fear I have become less vigilant while attending to my vast array of electronic gadgets that threaten to overwhelm me.

[Clinging Bitterly]

Heh - I was the one responsible for keeping a working TV at home from the time I was 10 or so. Back in the day salvaging was allowed at the local dump.

One day I found a big old color console set aside right on the edge of the dumping area and we hauled it home. The picture was just a giant hum bar. It was the same Joe Simon I referred to up-thread who taught me how to check filter capacitors by clipping on a substitution and I found the culprit and installed a suitable replacement from a dead chassis in my collection - the set worked fine for a few years after that.

Mr. Simon was a TV repairman by trade and owned a shop here in Eugene (60 miles away from the little town where I grew up) - teaching was his second job. I thought about going into that line of work but I’m sort of glad I didn’t. For the last 15 years or so it seems stuff like that just isn’t economically repairable, and the little storefront TV shops are nearly all gone. Even where I have spent my entire working life, in the construction equipment business, we find we can’t rebuild a $12,000 Diesel engine cheaper than we can buy a new one.

I still like to dig in and try to fix things if I have free time, but I'll usually stop if I need to buy a part, 'cause it just isn't worth it.