I can't watch Electroboom because he always gives himself shocks in every video. Don't care that they are small or it's set up, I can't stand watching it, makes me ill. Seems to be interesting stories he's telling otherwise though, so it's a shame.
I think he's great. Often you have people preaching cargo-culted safety rules without communicating the reasons for them, when you then see other people blindly disregarding those rules without apparent ill effect that reinforces people to do stupid things.
Mehdi/Electroboom shows you what you can do, and why it's dangerous; usually by shocking himself, blowing something up, or having stuff catch fire. He isn't teaching mindless, disprovable safety culture, but showing you the actual boundaries you have to respect. As such he has both videos of "let's shock me with lowly increasing voltage to see when it starts to hurt" and "ranting about badly wired wall sockets and lack of GFCI in this hotel room".
I'm a fan of ElectroBoom, but I have to agree, some of them are pretty horrifying to watch. The Jacob's Ladder video sticks out in my mind - I still can't decide whether it was staged. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_g1z47U_kZQ
Some of the shocks are completely fake. For example, in the classic electric guitar video [0], if you advance frame-by-frame and capture the frame containing the flash [1], it is obviously Photoshopped in. Poorly, I might add.
Not everyone is the same or thinks the same way. Maybe I'm more scared of electricity than others, don't know? (Extended) family have died in accidents, too, so it's a well-respected hazard in my family.
Are you really saying that telling clueless people that they will get painful shocks encourages bad safety habits?
If you show a kid a video about someone intentionally putting e.g. a fake hand on a stove and it getting severe burns and faked screams, what's the likelihood of a child following the video to get the same sick burns vs a video showing that it is perfectly safe to touch the stove?
A video showing work, while ignoring safety pratices, promotes bad safety practices. People that know to work save will still do, people wothout a clue will start DIY projects ignoring safety. And get hurt. I consider this to be a bad thing.
One of the funniest videos on the internet is Electroboom's "how to make a electric guitar", it looks like it changed the title at some point, I guess for the reasons in the article, but I was on the floor the first time I watched it and he panned down to the plug.
It's disappointing how most of the articles and videos criticizing the dangerous content don't explain why exactly something is dangerous. They just scream "omg high voltage" "one mistake you're dead" and so on. I honestly think they are worse than the source; it reminds me of the medieval experimenters and alchemists being oppressed by the conformist public.
> It's disappointing how most of the articles and videos criticizing the dangerous content don't explain why exactly something is dangerous.
Which videos are you talking about in particular?
Both the Ann Reardon and the Big Clive video explains exactly what makes this experiment more dangerous than others people do.
The Big Clive one in particular goes into interesting details about how a ground fault circuit interrupter works, and why it doesn't protect you in this case.
> They just scream "omg high voltage" "one mistake you're dead" and so on.
The ones I have seen don't scream. They calmly explain that the voltage generated in this setup is much much higher than the voltage the average experimenter has experience with.
About the "one mistake you're dead". That is the crux of the matter. People should be aware of how thin the margins are, and how few guard rails protect them in any particular situation.
> it reminds me of the medieval experimenters and alchemists being oppressed by the conformist public.
It's not hard to figure out: microwave oven transformers are generally considered one of the most dangerous things you can find in a household appliance when misused because they put out enough voltage to reliably punch through even dry skin (which is usually a fairly good insulator which mitigates a lot of the severity of most mains voltage shocks), while still able to generate enough current that when it does form a circuit through you it will not only hurt because cause your muscles to tense up rigidly, burn you badly, and depending on how (un)lucky you are, cause cardiac arrest. It also (as explained in the Big Clive video) bypasses the safety equipment in most houses designed to mitigate shocks from mains-powered devices. Fractal wood burning also involves a bunch of salt-water which only increases the risk. "Only one mistake needed to kill you" is not hyperbole (it's possible to survive shocks from MOTs, but it's not the norm).
"Only one mistake needed to kill you" applies to other things we do every day such as crossing the street or driving a car.
I don't understand why the warning videos were banned, and don't know what potentially dangerous practices that the "fractal woood burning" videos show, or what safety practices they omit, but working with electricity at mains voltages or higher obviously requires due care and attention.
When crossing the street, other people in cars don't want to actually kill you, and those crossing are generally aware and cognizant of the danger. The biggest mistake you can make is 'forgetting to look before crossing'; a lot of the time that won't kill you.
The setup here is very different.
The voltages involved in the wood burning process is far outside of most people's familiarity; your intuition for electricity just doesn't apply.
We're not just talking 'mains supply can be dangerous'; electricians routinely work on switches and such without bothering to shut off the circuit (even though this is typically ill-advised). Mistakes with mains, whilst they _can_ kill, usually just result in big bangs and breakers being tripped.
What you think 'protects' you just doesn't; your insulating gloves, shoes, wire covers, even air gaps; they could just fail you, and badly.
Even aware of this, knowing 'touching the probes kills me', a tiny mistake, such as 'brushing my insulated leg on the piece of wood I am working on, easily made despite being careful, has a very high chance of instantly killing you.
The only way I could see to make this process 'safe' is to not be in the same room as the equipment when it's connected to the power.
If you read the article, Reardon's video goes over exactly why fractal wood burning is dangerous. She doesn't go into extreme detail but I think it's enough for the layman to understand (i.e., you can get electrocuted easily, and a gfci won't save you). bigclivedotcom's video above also goes into why fractal wood burning is dangerous.
> I honestly think they are worse than the source; it reminds me of the medieval experimenters and alchemists being oppressed by the conformist public.
I can kind of see where you're coming from here but in this case I think the right thing has happened.
It actually does "take a PhD." Having insulated wires can still be dangerous with a high enough voltage because of dielectric breakdown. Furthermore even if you don't get electrocuted but have a vacuum chamber with high voltages you can get irradiated.
What I would have liked is, "OK this here wire is where the high voltage is, if you touch it you will get hurt and possibly die. If you need to manipulate it use long wooden or plastic tongs. Do not use gloves because of dielectric breakdown possibility." You get the idea. Not "just don't do it."
The very first comment in the thread links to a video which does the exact thing you are wishing for. The video explains why the experiment is stupidly dangerous then gives tips on how one could make it safer. (But not safe.)
Note, it has nothing to do with plastic tongs. The main danger, according to the youtuber, is that you turn on the aparatus, get momentarily distracted, and forget that it is on and touch the wood or the electrodes.
He offers multiple mitigations:
- indicators which show when the transformer is energised. He in fact recommends two separate paralel indicators. An audible one and a visual one.
- momentary switches where you physicaly can’t forget them on. Two switch in an “AND” configuration, where you need both of your hands to actuate them, so you can’t accidentally try to adjust an electrode with one hand while the other is energising the system.
He in fact goes further and recommends some fancy specialist switches, which turn off if you push them too hard as a result of a muscle spasm from an accidental electrocution.
So now you need to make a complicated electronic setup with multiple independent indicators, and specialist switches and yet the project is still not safe! There are still multiple things which can go wrong where a simple and inocous action leads to instant death.
It is a thing which is easy to do unsafe, and relatively hard to so safe.
At which point can we simplify the advice to the general population into “don’t do it”?
Honestly, the How To Cook That video that was taken down goes way further into the technical details than I expected it was going to when I first watched it, and correctly explains how the transformer works and how that stops the only protection device (RCD/GFCI) from being able to operate.
At the end of the day, for almost all of the viewers of the channel, adding meaningful protection and doing the wood burning safely is simply not within their capabilities.
The Big Clive does pretty well of doing a “still don’t do it, but here are some ways that it could be made somewhat safer” explainer.
