Blind Engineers

[Nigel Goodwin]

When I was about 16-17 years old my younger brother was coming back from school and he looked up and said "why is the window open" (as it was winter time). My reply was "I was letting the smoke out", he found it highly amusing!.

As I recall a large capacitor had just exploded on my bed (which doubled as a work bench), and released a large cloud of evil smelling vapour.

 

[Someone Electro]

When the new electrolics pop it smells quite nice.Kinda like food.

I once tryed to blow a old non failsafe electrolic and even outside it stinked badly.To see how much bang they go whith no failsafe.Result very big bang and smoke.It was only a 470uf 16V cap

Oh and when i smell that disticntive electronics smell i start runing around to find it too.

 

[fingers]

My first experience of blowing up a component was testing a product at work. It was supposed to run off 110V, but I forgot to plug the variac in, so it got the full 240V! There was a 14pin IC which just split in half and a small flame came out of it. I found it most amusing.

 

[Someone Electro]

LOL

I i once conected a busted 555 timer IC acros a 20V transformer and pluged it in nothing for some time than a click and lots of smoke came out then i could take the IC in half.Altrough that didnt smell as bad as i expected