BreakPoint
SON OF A...
@Jeff Bohrer wrote:
@Ben wrote:
@PaulG. wrote:
... My hand lands flat on the metal on the tank. "OUCH!" I tried it again. "OUCH! DANG!" Again. "SON OF A ....!!!!" I had no idea it was the 24V and that it could hurt that much. Son of a ...
which remionds me...
I was maintianing a search radar in the Navy (Mk 86 A maybe?) that had a 14K supply for the Klystron tube. The power supply had about 30 screws holding in place ...to start with.
Every time I took it out and put it bak I left another screw out, not realizing the screws were the ground path.
I drew a 6 inch arc while reahing for a swinging scope probe in heavy seas.
I now put all of the screw back in.
Ben
On my first ship I was the radar and nav ET I was pleased to find the serial number in the "SPS-10" was "2" (1 was at "ET "A" school, 3-4 at the bottom of the Pacific due to WWII action, I saw # 5 on the "USS Wasp" on my next ship tour in Bremetrton, WA) (I swear I could get it up and mission ready in 10 hrs)
The first time we pulled into home port (Sasabo, Japan) [I HAD asked the detailer for a small ship on the west coast- not specifying of what country - so the USS San Bernardino LST-1189 home-ported out of Sasebo met the bill- I got the billet]
So, I'm doing the semi-anual cleaning of the SPS-10 Modulator (a 250KWatt Magnitron Radar) and well, it does have safety shorts, interlocks, and tag-outs. I was pleased when the step that requiered me to use a shorting probe did not draw any sparks! (P.S. That was the last time I ever used a shorting probe without first OHMING it out!)
I took the entire Pulse Forming Network and it blew me accross the room! Jeff did not function well at that point... 1 IV later and a trip of base to the JMSDF hospital (3 blocks off base) Improved my funtionallity too the point where I was dischagred from the JSMDF Hospital. But, they had not inserted the IV...... they would not take it out.
When walking on the sidewalks of Sasebo Japan with an IV bag held over your shoulder. You do not need to wait for the "Walk" signal- Traffic WILL stop.
I was unscathed. Except for a bruised ego. I was a 7-level technician fresh out of serving 8 years in the Air Force, forcryinoutloud. On the flight home my boss (an EE who's first job was designing locomotives) explained to me at a ninja level the differences between current and voltage and how they behaved on the human organism at different levels. That was when I first learned of Nikola Tesla and his coil, a 9V battery on your tongue, how an electric chair works without frying the electrocute-ee ... and modern locomotives. I absorbed every word. I consider the overall experience extremely postive. 
Jeff Bohrer wrote:When walking on the sidewalks of Sasebo Japan with an IV bag held over your shoulder. You do not need to wait for the "Walk" signal- Traffic WILL stop.
I was picking my wife up at the hospital today (she's a nursing student) and I saw a guy walking outside with an IV. I busted out laughing because this was all I could think about.
Ok, a number of years ago I was working on a team to get the first production example of a new generation of towed sonar arrays working in time to be installed on the test submarine, which was "going to be at blah on the 28th of December and we will be waiting on the dock". Unfortunately we were having a lot of issues, the engineering unit had worked pretty well, but when we tried to translate that into a production model, not so much. We had some of our brightest, senior engineers, and me, working on it for weeks, upper, upper management was flying in on a weekly basis to ask about our progress ( I tried not to be near when that happened, our most senior guy was not noted for tact, so I didn't want my name burned into their retinas when he might say something like "we'll get it working a lot quicker if we don't keep getting interrupted with stupid *** questions"). This unit ran on constant current, rather than the more familiar constant voltage. The result of this was if we had a couple of segments connected (it was in roughly 20 meter lengths, which could be added together up to something like 300 meters total length) the voltage across the segments would be around 12 volts or so. We had a test bench that was about 50 meters long running down through the building. Along the length of this was a grounded bare copper wire to allow us to hook our ESD straps anywhere. I'm walking through the test area during the lunch hour, no one else is around, when I see one of our analog o'scopes turned on and hooked up, with the brightness set to max and the sweep set to very, very slow (we were trying to detect a suspect glitch). I reach from the other side of the bench (not wanting to walk all the way around) to turn down the brightness so that we didn't damage the phosphors on the screen and in doing so I did two things, 1) drape my arm across the ground wire, 2) brush the scope's frame. Well, the scopes were working with isolated grounds as that was the only way we could hook them to the arrays, and we had an almost full length array connected, so it was running around 500V. That arm didn't work exactly right for a week, the muscles hurting pretty badly for most of that time. The good news was that it was just arm pit to finger tip, the better news was that the "twitch" caused me to break connection. SON OF A ...
