Smitty Two writes:

A dozen 10000 UFd caps charged up to the voltage of a motorcycle battery
will do ... absolutely nothing. 12V DC is harmless.

Is that so? I'd invite you to try it yourself, with just *one* cap. Then
tell me how harmless it is.

What do you *think* it will do?

I have here an 82,000 uF capacitor, charged to 12 V. I can touch it
with my fingers and feel nothing. In fact, I just did. 12 V does not
cause enough current flow through (dry) skin resistance to be felt at
all.

Now, if I dropped a piece of fine wire across the terminals of the
capacitor, there would be a bang and a flash as the wire evaporated.
There's enough energy in the capacitor to do damage when connected to a
low-resistance load. But that's not true of skin contact.

And in most circumstances, this capacitor doesn't store enough energy to
cause much damage to low-resistance things either. If I dropped a piece
of heavy copper wire or a wrench across the terminals, there would be a
spark and some visible arc damage, but the wire or wrench would not get
noticeably warmer. A 12 V lead-acid battery is *much* more dangerous to
get a low-resistance load across, since there's enough energy to get
substantial-sized things very hot.

Dave