Hi as we always know the avoidance of shock and arc flash is a primary concene at all times in fact it's a part of he training that is very important I recently saw a guy on YouTube who calls himself electro boom who shows just what can happen if you don't isolate a circuit you want to work on I was thinking his videos mite be a good thing to show to students and apprentices and also think his survival so far is due to him being in 110 volt land ide hate to think how he'd get on in 220/240 volt country
ElectroBoom is an experienced electrical engineer. All his "booms" are carefully staged for educational/entertainment purposes and are (relatively) safe.
The one of his that absolutely terrified me was when he made a Jacobs ladder from microwave transformers and tipped it onto his lap. I realize he probably had it rigged to shut off... but 2000v is not to be sneezed at when it can supply several AMPS of current at that voltage!
He may be a professional engineer but he is certainly accident prone he's worse than me. I've not seen the Jacobs ladder video yet I will watch it soon I've only recently discovered his channel so I've not yet been through all the videos that take my fancy. I know from personal experience that a shock of 3500 volts even at a few milliamps is painful I wouldn't even consider playing with a microwave tx!
I suspect it is not as ad-lib as it looks - it is quite hard to produce an 'off thre cuff' film that fits together that well, and like other internet characters who do dangerous looking engineering, (Colin Furze, Kreosan, Russian hacker and Photonic Induction come to mind, but there are others ) clearly he needs to know enough about what is happening to make things that actually do work more or less to plan on camera. I suspect that there are other measures, perhaps a foot switch to trip the breaker, that make it less reckless than it appears (certainly I'd do something like that...) Also quite a lot of the bangs and flashes in other shows are just too convenient - I suspect there are carefully placed charged capacitios just waiting to give a theatrical flash.
For open frame Jacob's ladders, if you ever need to do one for a show or similar, the simple precaution of earthing the centre of the HV, and tripping at more than micro-amps of out of balance current flow can make touching a live arc impossible (I have done tests on similar funny equipment using a sausage with an earthed wander lead to model an errant finger. This can be introduced on an insulating pole and instrumented to verify such things really do shut down as expected , and to assess the likely burn injury from the delivered energy during the shut-off time I2t with attitude ).
