[joneeboi]

I burnt a TREAD the night after spending all morning and a bit of the afternoon cooking it up. I managed to stuff it into a wall wart, and it worked fine all day out of several different outlets. I put it into my surge protector just to be "extra cautious" when it was only driving my CMoy. I later plugged it straight into the wall, went for a shower, and came back to a room smelling nasty. That was one of the grossest smells I had ever encountered, and I recently had my wisdom teeth yanked, a procedure that left a rotting taste in the back of my mouth of everything I had eaten the whole month; the surgeon neglected to give me not only the squirty thing that cleans out the teeth holes but also my wisdom teeth

. Anyway, that bad boy was sitting in customs for six weeks before I put it together and blew it up in only a day. You can be sure once my ego recovers I'll post a "what did I do wrong" thread here.

*whimper*

 

[IcantHearU]

Not a blow up, but startling nonetheless - I was changing capacitors on a Millett Max to some 1800uF's - it so happens that I had breadboarded these 1800's ONE WEEK ago while testing a power supply (yes,the supply had a bleeder resistor) - Anyway, I insert the legs of the cap and every LED (3 of them) lit up on the MAX board - actually scared the **** out of me for that instant that I thought I was working on a 'live' board.Also made me appreciate the quality (at least as far as leakage is concerned) of Panny FM caps.

 

[joneeboi]

I remember hearing a story of a guy salvaging computers in a dumpster who got severely shocked by capacitors sitting in one of the computers that [was] over 10 years old. In class, they told us to discharge any caps with a resistor before working with them to prevent getting shocked. Either way, that's a pretty cool story, and we're all glad you're okay.

 

[UserNotFound]

Quote:

Originally Posted by joneeboi /img/forum/go_quote.gif I remember hearing a story of a guy salvaging computers in a dumpster who got severely shocked by capacitors sitting in one of the computers that [was] over 10 years old. In class, they told us to discharge any caps with a resistor before working with them to prevent getting shocked. Either way, that's a pretty cool story, and we're all glad you're okay.

I usually have a 5w 220ohm resistor handy for discharging, when when scrapping some equipment in lab I used a pair of scissors to discharge a 4700uF cap...and now I can't open the scissors.


BTW, safety glasses, fellas, safety glasses!!! You don't want to have to tell stories of luck. The first time you REALLY blow a cap, you'll wear them every time. They can sound like a .22 pistol if you do it right

 

[Chu]

I was soldering some new leads on a fan in my computer because the fans I used didn't have the standard 3-pin headers or molex connectors on them (industrial panaflows).

In a complete brainfart though, I forgot to turn the computer off first.

When the iron hit the live power supply wire it let off a spark bright enough that I could see the afterimage for several hours. The resultant shock killed the power supply, three hard drives, the fan, and a CD-ROM drive. Somehow the motherboard and CPU survived.

And when I say killed, I mean dead dead. All three hard drives smelled of burnt silicon. One of the hard drives would rattle when shaken!

A very expensive lesson

 

[Lazarus Short]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Chu /img/forum/go_quote.gif A very expensive lesson

Yes, very. A simple oversight can do more damage than weeks of careful planning...

Laz

 

[threepointone]

Haven't had too many misshaps recently. . .let's hope my luck stays good.

I was putting together one of those strobe kit things for a little (animatronics, i guess?) project I had. I made a little mod to it so that it (should) have been controllable with a microcontroller. The strobe flashed once, and then just stopped--in the middle of the run, I decided to see what was going on with the board. Touched the heatsink of the power transistor for a fraction of a second and I burned my hand.

Apparently, I hadn't realized that when the 555 turned off, the transistor was still turned on, putting full dc right across the step-up transformers. I'm quite surprised none of that magic smoke escaped!

 

[motherone]

My most exciting blow-up was when I put a half-wave rectifier diode in backwards on a DAC I was modding. Blew up a 16v/4700uF cap only a couple of feet away, and managed to squirt electrolyte on my glasses. Also took out the 7805 regulator, but fortunately, none of the down stream digital components were damaged.

The other really bad one was when I got two different sets of FETs mixed into the same bag, and overbiased the opamp on my pimeta. Accidentally left it on, came back an hour later to smell the opamp had gone kaput, and the left channel on my AKG K401's had been taken out by DC.

Other than that, it's mostly frying a regulator here or there by accident. The last time that happened was due to a cap still being charged while desoldering (even though I'd tested to make sure it'd discharged), and the braid shorted at the regulator, killing it.

 

[empty265]

I blew up my Creative X-mod the other day while building my first cMoy

Accidently let the audio signal touch the V+, the next thing I saw was "USB device not recognized"



On a side note, I also trashed my Belkin Tunebase while trying to add an antenna to the unit. Accidently let the solder catch on my skin, and in reflex I took out the neighboring soldering points and the caps... Hopefully I'll be able to salvage it...

 

[sterence]

not blown up, but ripped apart: MY SR60s. RIP.

i've learned to not strip wires whilst soldered to sensitive components.

 

[Apocalypsee]

My Prodigy HD2. Accidentally shorted something when modding. Halfway through loading Windows XP, I smell something funny. I unplug the power cord as fast as I could but too late, the card is FUBAR'd. There's a big black spot on where it shorted, and the PCB trace is peel off

 

[splaz]

I did the same thing when trying to jump my car.

It was late at night and I'd left the lights on, trying to see under the engine bay, only one of the posts had a coloured cover over it.

Connected it up and got a brilliant shower of sparks then a nice big puff of magic smoke.

Turns out the positive post had a black cover over it, in the darkness I couldn't see any other markings so assumed it was right.

When I helped someone out recently the same thing happened, except I'd learnt my lesson and connected my side up right, he did his wrong though but that time I think I disconnected them on my end just in time to stop any real damage to any fuses.

 

[Budgie]

This thread strikes me extra funny tonight since I just got back from meeting an old friend at a bar tonight and having a bit much to drink. Only thing blowen is a few brain cells!

 

[Kenneth S]

Blew up a power supply, sparks flew and i binned it.

 

[funch]

OK, ladies and gents, top this one! Many moons ago (early 80's?) I was rearranging my two-channel setup. I was using a couple of small homemade tables with spiked feet. Everything looked good, but as I grabbed the TV cable by the grounded nut, ZAP! House current! What the ..... ? As soon as I stopped cursing, I realized what I had done. The table that I was touching when I grabbed the TV cable was spiked right into the hot side of a two-conductor power cord, so when I touched the grounded TV cable, ........ !