"Toby" wrote in message
...
ARWadsworth wrote:
"Al" wrote in message
. 4...
So what DIY experiments did you perform as a child? I know that one
regular poster deliberately electrocuted his sister.
Stupidest one? Half filled a jam jar with sodium chlorate and sugar
mixture, screwed the lid on good and tight and threw it into a bonfire.

The 'pop' was very quiet, but it took ages for all of the bits to fall
to
the ground. I suspect some achieved orbit.

Remarkably I escaped injury.

Electrocuted myself a couple of times (when I got bored with explosives
I
moved onto electronics). And once to my eternal shame I blew the circuit
breaker for an entire block of labs and offices while testing a new new
'invention'.


That's more like it. At school we made up lots of 13A plugs with the live
and neutral connected together and plugged them into various sockets
around the school at dinner time.

There were no fuses in the plugs as I owned a soldering iron. A few
sockets needed to be replaced.

Adam



We did a similar thing, but connected the neutral and earth, so the RCD
would just keep tripping - best place was in a socket hidden behind a
cupboard :-)


We did not have RCD protection at my school. The trick was to just get the
earth pin slightly in and then kick the plug in with your foot because of
the flashback.

Adam