The most deadly project on the Internet

I'll share my experience for those that think its trivial to play with high voltage. My high voltage gloves got partially pierced by a metal splinter on a ground transformer and allowed a path to ground on a 13.8KV line. It was only 20-30 seconds of time slowing down to where a second feels like a minute. You feel fear and a great sense of dread as your heart goes into afib because of confused messages from the vagal nerve trying to override your SA node. About three second in all your muscles start to cramp and burn(literally) along the path to ground. You cant make yourself let go and you cant think of why, but you definitely know you are being electrocuted. About ten second in you start to smell burning pork and your vision starts to close in around the edges because your heart cant pump blood. You feel as dizzy and high as you have ever felt as the color starts to leave your vision. About fifteen seconds in you start to miss your wife and kids because as your vision fades slowly out you understand you are dying. As your world fades from view, and a blackness so deep it envelops all of your being smothers you, you are left with a great sense of sorrow and pain that stretches to eternity, or in my case, when I woke up in the ICU a month later missing the small parts of me that made up the ground path. There was only sorrow and fear and pain the entire time from my grounding to my waking. It felt like I was gone for twenty years, like when you visit your childhood home after your parents are gone. Without perception of time, time has no meaning. The lack of perception is eternity. So yeah, as a ex lineman, I can assure you that you will feel more in those few seconds than you ever have before.

It's gotten so bad that the American woodworkers association has banned anyone from mentioning this on their website or blog.

about a year ago my uncle died trying to do this woodburning stuff off some youtube tutorial using a microwave. thanks for spreading more awareness and the explanation

My father warned me about this and crts as a kid. I was a curious kid constantly taking things apart, so I'm thankful and still remember it.

To quote AvE's sticker. Not only will this thing kill you it will hurt the whole time you're dying.

My dad (tv repair man) always told us to be extra careful when tinkering with transformers. To give more weight to his warnings, he zapped both me and my brother with a supertiny transformer and an AA battery, and then drew a schematic to explain what just happened. Times have changed, but transformers haven't.

My grandfather was an electrician and he has some stories about when he was young and first starting and some dumb stuff he did. He always told me to respect electricity because it kills you when you stop paying attention. I built a guitar amp once and because of his stories I was terrified of the filter capacitors.

Revisiting this video after a year. It's a great reminder to treat electricity with the utmost respect. Clive, you definitely deserve your soon-to-be 1 million subs.

"Chances are you won't do that again. Full stop." As one of my Sergeants used to say, "That's non-habit forming behavior."

Things I learned even in VERY amateur welding and electronics work: - NO WATER, ANYWHERE, EVER. - Heavy gloves, dry rubber-sole boots. - Never grab uninsulated wires... or any wires-not-intended-to-be-grabbed at all for that case. - Know which parts of the circuit are 'hot', and always give a second thought whenever you're about to interact with the Hot side. - Find and discharge ALL capacitors before mucking around in electronics - if you don't know, wear gloves until you can probe and confirm the entire thing's de-powered. - Triple-check these rules when you're about to use anything that has to be powered on during operation. I wanna die fighting a radioactive mutant Grizzly Bear shirtless on a mountain with a K-bar..... not 'bzzt owie zappie ded'. What a trivial way to go :(

"Complacency will step in and mistakes will be made" I'm starting to get into repairing stuff and those words resonated with me as if I were giving myself a warning from the future. Going to invest in some insulated gloves and tools just in case and never work with my microwave if it fails, a technician is a lot cheaper than potential death

I've got a strange collection of experience that overlaps really closely with this topic. I've done woodturning, I've worked professionally with high voltage, and I've worked on servicing and repairing industrial microwaves. This even involved sometimes, and carefully, working with microwaves that were connected while I worked on them. All that specific knowledge gives me is a clear understanding of why I would absolutely not try making lichtenberg figures in any of my woodwork. I love the idea of saying "I'm not saying no, but..." and then giving advice on how to do it more safely. I think that if I were ever to consider this, my basic minimum would be set up so that I'm not even in the room while the power is on. Much more managable these days with webcams and many options for remote power switches. Just stay far away from it.

Microwave transformers are fun to play with, I play with mine every day. Yup, heats up my coffee in under a minute. Of course, it is safely inside my fully intact microwave and it will stay that way!

Reminds me of a school teacher who flatly told us, we arbitralily assign words like conductor and insulator. But with enough voltage anything will conduct, and if you get to that point, hope you have a method of disabling it that doesn't rely on yourself as by then it's probably too late...

I used to work with repair of household appliances. Most of these repairs was done in the costumers home. Over the years I've had several costumers ask me if the job I did was something they could have done them self. I always told the costumer that most machines you can repair or change components on your self as long as you are somewhat competent and make absolute sure that the power is not connected. I always made a very clear point that there are two things you should NOT try to repair yourself. Nr 1 being microwaves; They are extremely dangerous, and can very possibly kill you. The highest voltage output I've seen on a microwave was over 6kV. Nr 2 is fridge and freezers, as the refrigerant system is often made confined in copper and/or aluminum tubes that are a PAIN to fix and/or repair, and secondly, the refringent liquid is something that would instantly evaporate leaving the product useless. And in worst case, some of the gasses used in fridges today are flammable, so you could potentially burn down your house. In short; don't touch microwave ovens and fridges.

An Australian YouTuber, Ann Reardon, has also made a video about this. It is so ridiculously unsafe. In addition to the mutilation of their hands, survivors' hearts are often permanently damaged. Thank you for sharing your experience and knowledge to hopefully make more people aware and prevent their deaths.

Hi Clive, when I was stationed in Hawaii, in the mid eighties, working in "avionics", in the shop next door, working on search radar, during a routine "technical training class", a radar tech was giving a basic class on the common working of the search radar system. He was setting the test set and the radar unit, and specifying "always check your cables, only use those numerically identified with the specific test set", while grabbing what he thought were in fact such cables. He hooked up the radar transceiver, turned every thing up, and was surprised at no function. Probing around inside, he had a hand on the case, probe in the other, and went through checking the low voltage feed. He didn't recognize the symptoms, and ended up probing the high voltage, something on the order of five KVA, with no response, and peering into the innards, his head approached the test set, and suddenly it arced out his forehead, and he died within seconds. He'd ignored his own warnings, had a wrong cable to the equipment, which had no correct ground connection. The power supply was such it had six or eight separate wires connected together as a "ground buss" on the correct cable, and in running it up, had no ground return for the high voltage until his head got close enough to ground, and it arced. In two decades of service as a marine, I knew of probably five or six deaths of similar way and form for in the most part, the same problem. We all knew every cable was made, designed for one specific test set, and multiple grounds were quite common because of sheer power. We held "tech training" every Wednesday, precisely because of such incidents, and all too often, the danger was greatest while "demonstrating safe procedure. I got hit with a two thousand volt discharge from a radar transceiver tube in 77, in my secondary school because the connection was always left open for troubleshooting, on the "bench test receiver/transmitter", blew the power for the whole Workcenter, left a scar on my finger 45 years later. I see folks playing with microwave transformers based on internet video's, so this is a major issue, thanks for a great tech lesson! John McClain, GySgt, USMC, ret.

Literally 2 days after you posted this video a couple in Wisconsin was electrocuted to death trying fractal wood burning. It's crazy to think if they stumbled on to this video it could have saved their lives.

Thanks for not just telling people not to do it but also sharing ideas on how to make one safer.