Pocket Tazer Stun Gun, a great gift for the wife.

[Gunsil]

When I was a kid we'd visit the old family farm in NW OH. Small family diary and corn/soy operation. We younger children were always told to never touch the electric fence. Naturally my older cousins liked to have fun and one went into the barn and shut off the electric fence while another showed me you could hold that fence wire with both hands and nothing would happen, telling me it was just another adult lie that the fence was dangerous. Naturally I had to grasp the wire with both hands at which point somebody signalled the cousin in the barn who turned on the juice and they all had a rolling on the ground laugh as I jumped and yelled from the shock. Only good thing was that I wasn't the youngest of us 17 cousins and got to pull it on other cousins when I became a teen. Then of course there was my father who when the gas lawn mower wouldn't start told me to hold the spark plug wire while he pulled the start rope so he could see whether it was lack of spark or gas causing the no start. It was gas naturally and I jumped pretty high but did learn about checking for spark!

[kootenay joe]

Ken, thanks once again for the stun gun info. I'm learning good stuff here as well as knives. It is the volts/amps thing that i have never understood. The stun gun has high volts low amps. I think there must be high volts and high amps to kill a person as in power lines or household 220V ?
kj

[Mumbleypeg]

Roland, think of electricity as a liquid. The "liquid" is electrons. Amperage is the number of electrons (the amount, or volume). Voltage is the pressure or force. So a stun gun applies a small number of electrons with high force.

A person killed by electricity typically has come in contact with high amperage (a large amount of electrons) at a high enough voltage (force) to move enough electrons through the body.

The third important element in all of this is resistance. The size of the pipe through which the liquid is being moved. In our analogy the pipe would be the wire through which electrons are being moved. In the case of liquid the amount or volume that can be moved is limited by the diameter of the pipe. Too much volume and/or pressure will burst the pipe. The equivalent of the pipe's diameter is the size or gauge of the wire. Too many electrons (amperes) and/or too much pressure (voltage) will burst the wire. It will melt or burn.

Ken

[kootenay joe]

Thanks Ken. I really enjoy learning here whether about knives or electricity or all the other topics i have never understood.
kj

[jerryd6818]

Excellent job of breaking that down, Ken.

[royal0014]

Very similar joke out there about a feller what ran over a live
fence wire with his push mower. Mower ran better after, he could change channels
on his tv with a fart, and also offered a reward for the safe return of his testicles (!)
Kinda crude but still funny ... 'course I'm kinda crude, too ...

[OLDE CUTLER]

Another one that will hit you hard is the magneto from a Wisconsin combine engine, especially when you are 7 years old. Dad was getting the combine out of the shed and ready to use for harvest and he was doing a tune up and had the magneto off the engine and turned it by hand and it made a big spark. He then laid it down and went back to the garage to get another tool. I thought that is really neat, so I picked it up and turned it by hand and ZAP. I was holding on to it in a different place than dad was, and it got me. Even worse, I dropped it and it fell right on my foot. Double ouch!!

[samb1955]

Very similar joke out there about a feller what ran over a live
fence wire with his push mower. Mower ran better after, he could change channels
on his tv with a fart, and also offered a reward for the safe return of his testicles (!)
Kinda crude but still funny ... 'course I'm kinda crude, too ...

Good one!

[Mumbleypeg]

The magneto from an old hand-cranked telephone can light you up too. Some of them can put out around 80 to 100 volts AC!

Ken

[fergusontd]

Jerry, a great sea story! Hey this ain't no sh...t! ftd

[zoogirl]

I can personally attest to the complete inadvisability of touching a Radio Shack microphone with your lips, while holding the metal mic stand, barefoot, on a cement floor. I may have touched the base of the stand with my toe, too.
It left a pea sized purple lump on my lip that didn’t go away for quite some time.
My ex got such a zap from a faulty guitar that it knocked him right on his rear, onstage at a gig. Now that’s embarrassing!