In somewhat of a countdown format, [John McMaster] looked back over the last few years of projects and documented the incidents he’s suffered (and their causes) in the course of doing cool stuff.
[John] starts us off easy — mis-wiring and consequently blowing up a 400V power supply. He concludes “double-check wiring, especially with high power systems”. Other tips and hazards involve situations in which we seldom find ourselves: “always check CCTV” before entering the experiment chamber of a cyclotron to prevent getting irradiated. Sounds like good advice.
[John] also does a lot of IC decapping, which can involve both heat and nasty acids. His advice includes being ready for large spills with lots of baking soda on hand, and he points out the need to be much more careful with large batches of acid than with the usual smaller ones. Don’t store acid in unfamiliar bottles — all plastics aren’t created equal — and don’t store any of it in your bedroom.
The incidents are listed from least to most horrible, and second place goes to what was probably a dilute Hydrofluoric acid splash. Keyword: necrosis. First place is a DIY Hydrochloric acid fabrication that involves, naturally, combining pure hydrogen and chlorine gas. What could possibly go wrong?
Anyway, if you’re going to do “this” at home, and we know a bunch of you are: be careful, be protected, and be prepared.
Thanks [J. Peterson] for the tip!
Great article! There are a lot of builds and hacks I’ve done where I didn’t find out just how much of a risk I’d taken until years later at college (think 8 KV power supply cobbled together from microwaves). I’m always happy to see people encouraged to properly prepare for accidents.
Is this the guy who makes all those “Meanwhile, in Russia” videos?
“Takeaways:
* If you are going to do something stupid, film it
* Think twice before “stop, drop, and roll” as the floor may be on fire”
I think my favorite was the one where he tried using rosin to decap ICs and then determined that nitric acid would be safer. I can’t imagine that there aren’t too many other processes where using nitric acid is actually the safer option…
made me think of this: https://youtu.be/EZBhiJq4TL4 make sure to read the paper at ~2:09
He should do a project with that other mad genius from the UK, Colin Furze, they are both very entertaining in a uniquely British way.
Was He listed twice in ‘You have been warned’ show on Discovery channel?
https://www.youtube.com/user/colinfurze
Hydrofluoric is the worst. It doesn’t burn, so you have no warning how severely you’ve been exposed. Instead it rapidly penetrates skin, where it starts reacting with calcium to form insoluble crystals. Those crystals can remain in nerves and other tissues a long time, causing chronic pain and necrosis. A significant exposure can deplete calcium to the point where your heart stops. Happened to a local fellow when a pressure vessel exploded. Depending on who you ask, it was 10% body exposure, or the front of one thigh. He was immediately stripped naked, washed down, and rushed to the hospital where he would have received intravenous calcium gluconate. He died from heart failure halfway there. I’ve accidentally inhaled HCl, had most of my clothes dissolved by by H2SO4. Mistakes happen, but those acids are quite forgiving compared to HF. I draw a hard line, and never use HF except in extremely dilute forms and small quantities; for example consumer glass etching kits. Even then I take great care.
An invention by Dave Grohl can protect you from most of these dangers.
http://i.imgur.com/ZT45D9C.jpg
your link appears to be bad… imgur wants a login.
Nope, works fine here (on two different browsers) and I’ve never had a login on that site.
Just mash the any-key a few times until something happens.
Removing the “.jpg” from the link worked for me… Anyway, it’s that picture of Dave wearing an aluminum foil suit (so the aliens can’t control him?)
\ OK I’ll explain it for you.
“Looking back, I should have covered it in aluminum foil which is pretty resistant to nitric acid.”
https://siliconpr0n.org/wiki/doku.php?id=chemical:hno3:distillation
strip i. from the front and .jpg from the back
What OS are you using, that new one from North Korea?
The link I posted even works via a proxy so it is not a question of it just already being in my cache.
Cut and paste it into here and tell me if it works, http://dailyproxy.info/
yep – I needed to as well. win7,FF, runnig noscript and ABP.
Interesting, that leaves only Windows as the possible cause, or your network provider/country.
I can’t see the picture either. Google Chrome on a win7 machine.
Upgrade to Linux, that should fix the problem.
Sorry Dan – ubuntu 15.10, Chrome and/or FF, both stock. Same problem as everybody else
Try this in a console,
wget http://i.imgur.com/ZT45D9C.jpg
iv ZT45D9C.jpg
(I will assume you have wget and iv or know how to install them.)
Do you have an image file you can look at?
Worked in a water process situation with gaseous chlorine (2-ton cylinders of it…) and a bunch of leaky chlorinators. Air was bad enough to require an SCBA for entry. Let’s see…
1. Keys and coins in pocket all turned green.
2. Skin acquired a slightly oily feel that took days to go away.
3. Despite precautions (MSA SCBA) lost my sense of smell for a while.
4. Within days my clothes basically fell apart.
A host of a YouTube channel I watch called Elderly Iron regularly uses the phrase “Don’t do this at home… Do it at your neighbor’s house!” All of these seem to be good items to try at the neighbor’s.
The problem is that contingent remaining willfully ignorant. Because in their mind if it never happened to them or seen it happened to someone they know,it can’t happen and those who warn of the dangers are lying for some reason. With any kind of luck such persons would be taken out of the gene pool before they had the chance to reproduce. As it’s a task I wouldn’t assign my wort enemy, it’s with hesitation that I suggest that the Hackday staff assemble a safer work practices and a safer workplace manual. No doubt they already exist somewhere on the Web.
Far from me to encourage safety nazis, but to be honest on that _long_ list there was something conspicuously missing from all “Takeaway:” entries – “learn to respect dangerous stuff properly already, dammit, and start handling it accordingly; and no, that doesn’t just mean to wear a random amount of safety equipment even if every bit helps”…