Alt-BEAM Archive

Message #13566



To: beam@sgiblab.sgi.com
From: "John A. deVries II" zozzles@lanl.gov
Date: Mon, 17 Apr 2000 11:36:45 -0600
Subject: Deadman's stick (was: RE: Monitor Salvage)


I seem to remember a tool that TV/radio repair types used to have or make
for themselves called a deadman's stick. Basically, it was a stick of wood
(a dowel would work) that is about a foot long with a pin stuck in one
end. Someplace close to the pin you'd tape a 1M ohm resistor and connect
it to the pin with some wire and then run another piece wire back up the
stick. Of course, where you soldered on both sides of the resistor you'd
put a fairish amount of electrical tape -- I suppose the PVC stuff they
sell these days would work. The wire that was on your side of the resistor
would be perhaps two feet long (depended on how big the equipment was that
you worked on) and you'd solder an alligator clip onto it. Chances are
you'd want to have one of those alligator clips that has the plastic shroud
-- some of us can be fairly clumsy when hooking it to one side of a cap
(which could be a pain if the other side was connected to something that
another part of your hand touched.)

Anyhow, you'd then attach the alligator clip to some part of the chassis
that was obviously grounded or one end of some component you wished to
discharge and you could go poking around (one hand in your pocket, as they
say) to discharge capacitors and the TV tube itself (which acts as a HUGE
capacitor -- they don't put those warning signs on for jollies and the
charge can stay on it for many many months). When you probed a particular
connection, you held it there for a while to make sure that the thingy you
were discharging was really dead.

Now, what I don't remember exactly is how one discharges a TV tube... Wilf??

<----------=========---------------K
pin resistor alligator clip


Zoz
Someone who has picked up a live monitor chassis and still remembers how
much his arm hurt afterwards. Thank God it was low current!!!

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