On Wednesday, 13 March 2019 13:27:27 UTC, dennis@home wrote:
On 13/03/2019 10:38, whisky-dave wrote:
On Tuesday, 12 March 2019 18:12:08 UTC, charles wrote:
In article , Dave Plowman (News)
wrote:
In article , Bill Wright
wrote:
On 12/03/2019 03:57, Archibald Tarquin Blenkinsopp Esq wrote:

Like yourself though, they all knew everything there was to
know about the subject even before they did the course.

Your sarcasm fails because actually I do know everything
necessary to check the safety of a mains extension lead. As do
many people.

Unfortunately for technical pseudo-elitists it really isn't
rocket science.

Are you saying you've never come across such a thing miss wired,
Bill? In the days when people made up their own extension leads?

I've seen plugs where the brown went to earth. After all brown is
closer to the colour of earth than green.

If it's pre-harmonisation german equipment - red is earth

About 20 years ago one of our German research student wired a plug
up, like that. Perhaps that one reason why we don't allow DIY lead
making and if we really need to they get PAT tested.


One of the engineers at GEC made up some plugs that would pass a PAT
tester but they were so dangerous we banned him from touching anything
electrical.
He stripped about 1 1/2 inches of insulation off each core and screwed
the end into the terminals, we found it after fuses started to blow if
you moved the flex a bit on some he hadn't tightened the strain relief
enough.

When we first started PAT testing I had to unscrew the tops off any none moulded plug for such things checks and change the fuse from 13amp to 5 amp or 3 amp.
Any plug without shrouded pins was removed and replaced.
I had a box of 100s of 13amp fuses at the end, probbly still have them somewhere.
Then the lead was PAT tested using the PAT testing machine.