Lucky we are still alive

[Lucky_Lou]

I installed a set of heated grips, and I cut holes in the ends of the heated grips, and there were the wires, right at the end of the grip.

Rob we may be related
I was putting a water pipe out to my garage so i chopped the pipe with an angle grinder to find i had just cut through the gas pipe...stupid is what stupid does
Lou

[montmil]

I installed a set of heated grips, and I cut holes in the ends of the heated grips, and there were the wires, right at the end of the grip.

Rob we may be related
I was putting a water pipe out to my garage so i chopped the pipe with an angle grinder to find i had just cut through the gas pipe...stupid is what stupid does
Lou

Lou, you're darned lucky you ain't now singing your cowboy songs with the angels!

[Rob Valdez 79 R65]

[movedhere] BMW Technical Q&A, Primarily R65 [move by] Rob Valdez 79 R65.

Yeah, and then there was the time I was drilling a hole in the floor of a closet next to the kitchen.
I unknowingly was drilling very close to the 220v line going to the stove.
The drill bit hit one side of that line giving me quite a shock!
If it had been slightly to the other side, I might have hit both sides of the line, giving me the full impact!

One nice thing about the USA, 110v can be tolerated by the ignorant better that the 220v standard of Europe!  (although 110 is less efficient)  Another example of bending to the lowest common denominator? (won't kill off as many 'mericans who are dumb enough to try and do their own electrical work?)

[Lucky_Lou]

I will watch this thread with interest as im sure there will be some hilarious posts on this subject so come on guys confession time.....i have more myself i will share later.
Lou

[scottyintex]

Yea, I got one for ya. About 4 years back I had a BMW R27......kick starter. I am at the gas station and had just filled up. There is a small group of people standing around admiring the R27. I tickle the carburetor....and she fires with the first kick. The R27 is set up to be started while on the stand with you facing the cycle. I am beaming with pride. I jump it off the stand and swing into the saddle like a real cowboy. I put it in gear and start to easy out when a little old lady ask a question. I can’t hear her so I throttle back...am talking to her and the cycle dies on me. I swing off,  jump it up on the stand and hit the kick starter another lick. It fires right up.......I am so proud. I smile at the adoring little group and ....... did you know a R27 can be started in first gear with out any trouble? Paying more attention to my fans than the cycle........ I forgot to put it back in neutral, started it in first gear.......and jump it off the stand ready to swing back into the saddle but........find my ass being dragged down the road.  A R27 throttle stays where you left it last,  it does not snap back to idle. It will drag you down the road at whatever speed you left the throttle at. I finally had enough sense to let go of the damn bike. Fortunately, there was no damage other than a bent brake lever...........Well, My pride was a little bent too. It seems to me the bigger the audience........the bigger I tend to muck up. I think that is because the more your head swells.........the more it compresses your brain till thinking is completely shut off.

[Justin B.]

I remember drilling a hole in the floor-pan in a '65 Nova and hitting a brake line.  That was a rude shock when I went to move it...

[k_enn]

Speaking of rude shocks, I was replacing an electrical wall outlet some years ago.  To make sure the circuit was dead, I plugged in a lamp and went to panel box and threw breakers until the lamp was out.  OK, the circuit should now dead.  So I unfastened the outlet, and was pulling to out when I accidentally made contact and got a real shock.  The outlet is two plug recepticals, one above the other.  Seems for some reason the prior owner had cut the connection between the recepticals, and wired each one to a different house circuit.  One was dead (the one I plugged the light into), but the other was still live.  From now on, I check both recepticals before handling it.  

[Barry]

I knew I was destined to be an Electrical Engineer when at a very young age I decided to test my Dads new car battery.  I knew that electrical things sparked when you shorted them out and it was only 12 Volts so what harm could I do.

I got the bread knife out of the kitchen and proceeded with my first lesson in ohms law or was it arc welding !  The tip of the bread knife was vapourised by several hundred amps. Frightened the life out of me and I was sure I must have wrecked the battery. It was fine of course. Dad never found out about my little experiment and neither did mum as I had just enough sense left to sharpen the end of the bread knife in the work shop before putting it back.

[Justin B.]

Seems for some reason the prior owner had cut the connectionbetween the recepticals, and wired each one to a different house circuit.  

This is usually done so one outlet will be hot all the time and the other would be switched, like for a lamp...

[Lucky_Lou]

I was about 11 or 12 when a couple of pals and i decided to build a gun, in those days fireworks were easily obtained and "bangers" were made of black powder we had a piece of 1" steel tube about 2 foot long flattened one end drilled a small hole for the fuse packed the contents of half a dozen bangers in it and a large ball bearing propped it against the wall aiming at the fence lit the fuse and..........Hit the cross member shattering it and pushing a fist sized hole in the surrounding wood work fortunately no one was passing at the time.
Funnily enough ive been interested in ballistics ever since.
Lou

[Barry]

Banger guns I remember them well Lou.  

We used to raid my dads workshop for copper tube and plumbing fittings.  A stop end soldered to one end of the tube produced a neat gun barrel and we would drill a small hole to light the fuse and arrange a short piece of tube to slide over the hole after it was lit.

Can't think why they never blew up in our face .

Happy days though when boys could be boys without being "protected" from all the dangers of the world. I knew one lad who made his own gun powder from weedkiller.  Sodium chlorate and charcoal ??  They put fire depressant in the stuff these days. No fun at all.

I bet the Texas boys had real guns to play with.

[nhmaf]

OK, I'll just warn you right now that my last near miss at self-Darwination gets a little 'gross' in the details, so you can stop reading now if you get squeemish.....


I somewhat unintentionally "napalmed" my whole front yard a few years ago - gasoline vapors can spread out over a huge area, and unlike in the movies, I discovered that it is physically impossible to outrun a ball of expanding, fiery gas explosion, and I can still run pretty fast.  I ended up leaping and trying to throw myself out of the ball of fire and jumped into the lake to try to stop the skin from continuing to burn and blister on my feet, which was a good try, but still not good enough.   I think that was the LAST time that I will ever listen to my brother again, but I digress..

Would have escaped mostly unscathed, except I was wearing sandals at the time - any millimeter of skin from my ankles down that wasn't covered by the sandals had 2nd degree burns (or worse) on both feet.    I spent several weeks' of individual bandaging every toe and both feet in the morning before going to work (and of course couldn't wear shoes as a consequence) waiting for skin to grow back.  My toes were literally 2X their normal width from being blistered, though in many places I'd barely or no any skin left.

I self medicated, bought many yards of bandages, hydrogen peroxide, ice cubes, and a medical product called "Nu Skin" (highly recommended BTW) ..

[Rob Valdez 79 R65]

So what did your brother suggest, that got you in this fix?

[Lucky_Lou]

So what did your brother suggest, that got you in this fix?

Yes how did this come about ....  Nu Skin know it well stings like hell when applied but sterilizes and seals the wound.
Lou

[nhmaf]

We had been working on a lot of landscaping, brush clearing, etc and had a large pile of brush which we intended to burn.   It was a cool, damp day with fog coming in quick, so there was practically 0 risk of starting a forest fire, and we needed some accelerant to get the pile ignited.   Unfortunately, I had run out of lamp oil, kerosene, lighter fluid and couldn't get a hose long enough to siphon any diesel out of the tractor, but, I did have a can of gasoline.  Not my preferred chemical for this sort of thing, but I figured if we were careful it would be OK.. Ha!

I poured a fair amount of gas onto the brush pile and went to toss a match onto it right away, but my brother said "Wait a a couple minutes to let the gasoline work its way into the brushpile" -so we did,  but what this REALLY allowed was for the gasoline to vaporize, and with the temperature inversion we were experiencing, the fumes then to flow down the brushpile and fill the entire yard up to about 6-12 inches from the ground with gas vapors.   So, when I did finally toss a flaming paper onto the top of the pile, the flames shot up, and then down the brushpile, sending a wall of flame across the entire yard in all directions.

It sterilized the ground and the BOOM! shook the house - and other houses for a few hundred yards.
We had begun running away after tossing the lit piece of paper, but the flames along the ground quickly shot right past us, such that we were running through fire.   My brother and brother in law were wearing leather boots, but had shorts on, and the fire burnt all the hair off their legs but they were otherwise OK.   As I had just been working on the dock in the water, I was still wearing my Teva sandals, and that proved to be the "fatal flaw".

I never use gasoline to start fires any more.  
I seldom listen to my brother now, too!