I missed this the first time around, so I apologize for the late post. I don’t apologize for resurrecting a funny-ass thread, though.
An old high school friend of mine, Jayson, could put most of you circuit jockeys to shame. I’ve sort of lost touch with him, but when I knew him, he was Captain Insane on the gadgets. Just in his car:
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he had a mondo shortwave amp, such that he could hand you a fluorescent tube, then turn on his CB, and the tube would light up
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he had a 120-decibel loudspeaker under the hood, cross-patched through a switch to the CB mike
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he had a jumbo-jet landing light set into a handheld “gun” – several million candlepower at the tip of his fingers
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he had inserted some sort of relay into the headlight circuit, so when he flipped a dash switch, his headlights would alternate bright/dim left/right, like a cop
That’s just in his car. At home, he had built a rack of car batteries outside his bedroom window, so if the regular electricity ever went out, a breaker would kick over and power his computers, stereo, and so on, for about an hour. Plus, he once set the front of his house on fire in a huge flaming cloud, by spilling a coffee can full of liquid O2. Also, he solved the “snow in the driveway” problem by making a blowtorch out of a small can of propane, and melting the snow away. And he used to fry the neighbor’s TV on a regular basis with his (illegally overpowered) ham-radio setup. And so on, and so on.
And, of course, he electrocuted himself on a regular basis, which is what this post is about. I was present for much of the above, and can vouch for it first-hand. For this reason, I have no reason to doubt any of the stories I wasn’t there for. Including, naturally, this:
One time, just to see how it worked, he took apart a touch lamp. He said it basically worked on discharged capacitance, with a low electrical threshhold so the user wouldn’t feel themselves get zapped.
So, as an experiment, he took apart a neon sign he had lying around, and pirated the step-up transformer. Then, somehow (he was unclear on this part), he patched the transformer through the guts of the touch lamp.
The result? The touch lamp hummed, and he could turn it on and off by waving his hand at it from a couple of feet away. He also discovered that he could trigger it by dipping his finger in a glass of water that was sitting on the table about a yard away.
Then, of course, just to see what would happen, he touched the lamp.
Remember: Wet finger.
Result: The light bulb shattered, and the breaker blew. He didn’t notice right away, though; he only realized what had happened when he woke up a few seconds later, on the other side of the room.
Did he learn his lesson? Did he start following basic safety protocols, including simple common sense. Of course not. What doesn’t kill you, you know, makes you stronger.
So six months later, on the Fourth of July, I was there when a whole package of bottle rockets went off while he was holding it, burning a hole through the web of skin and muscle between his thumb and hand. Wasn’t funny at all at the time, but like everything Jayson did, it was, six months later, freakin’ hilarious…
(By the way, if anyone here knows someone in Olympia WA fitting the above description, and can confirm that he’s still alive, it would be a major load off my mind.)