- Joined
- Mar 27, 2008
- Messages
- 478
- Points
- 28
Nice! I want to see some aftermath pictures of the poor screwdriver you toasted.:eg:
The terminals of the cap look worse than the screwdriver does. Frankly it doesn't look too bad, just a dark deformed spot no larger than 2mm across.
The worst I've seen from shorting a cap was one time when I was attempting to fix a computer power supply. It was making a buzzing sort of noise that was identical to that of a wire just barely brushing against the fan as it spun. I had had this problem before so I did what I had done before. I knelt down to the computer and poked a screwdriver through the fan grill, while it was still plugged in (yes, yes, stupidest idea ever). Needless to say I accidentally poked the main capacitor bank and since the middle of the screwdriver was touching the metal casing the bank was shorted to ground. All I remember was a loud POOF and sparks shooting at my face. I leapt back in utter terror, ripping the now-welded screwdriver out of the case with so much force when I let go of it, it flew almost 10 feet.
It was my first capacitor shorting experience.