I have to say that the collateral damage of an unexpected shock is something I neglected to mention even though I have experienced it myself; viz. working on a coffee machine with a folded stainless steel body, forgetting to unplug it during testing and subsequently getting a 240v AC whack to the fingertips. Very, very unpleasant. Immediate reaction: yanked my hand out of it, tore the skin on the back of my hand on a sharp folded s/s flange and had to visit the hospital emergency room for several stitches.
The OP seems to have gone quiet...
Yes , exactly as I mentioned in post #20, the reason I know is that I have done this myself many times and gashed my hands on sharp objects after a shock.
Though I had two near electrocution episodes that were/are quite memorable. Both happened before I was 15 years old. In one case I had made a DC/DC converter with a pair of germanium power transistors (2N174's as I recall) It stepped up a 12V car battery to over 400V DC. I had applied the output to the end terminals of a 2 foot long fluorescent tube.
The application was to light up a wooden hut that I had made where a friend or two would gather to smoke a cigarette , read comics etc.
Anyway, the output of this converter had a 4 pin Amphenol tube socket, so I just poked the wires into the holes. The tube was reluctant to initially strike (I wasn't using the starter filaments), but I found if I held the connections at one end of the tube and ran my other hand along the tube's glass wall, I could get the tube to start. You guessed it, I moved that hand too far and I had both hands connected across the two ends of the tube. When that happened, the tube went out, and I was in severe pain with a muscle spasm that prevented me from letting go of the tube, in fact I was gripping it very tightly, unable to let go. And I was on my own.
After some moments of agony I realized that although the upper half of my body was paralyzed and in severe pain, my legs were still working , I was kneeling. So I shuffled away with my legs until I managed to get the wires to pull out of the Amphenol connector (good thing I didn't use a plug and a long cable). After that experience, every other shock I received in my life, from tube radios and TV's seemed very trivial. But it made me very fearful of high voltage DC power supplies.
I had another episode as a teenager. I used to scavenge for electronic parts a the local dump (in NZ). One time I came across a defunct neon sign transformer from a Milk Bar. Inside it I found a beautiful American made Jefferson line to 15kV center tapped transformer. It had lovely crinkle black paint and a label plate. The output terminals on big brown ceramic insulators were 7.5kV each side with the center tap connected to the transformer body. In any case I quickly figured out how to make a Jacob's ladder with wire from coat hangers. But I got a little ambitious and made the wires longer and longer. When they got to about 6 feet tall, they became unstable and would oscillate back and forth. On one occasion my head got too close and one of the wires swung to the side of my face. It arced over before it actually physically struck and that was another very painful experience , though nowhere near as bad as the 400V DC episode.
So after these events, I think it helped me to treat high voltages with caution, but at the same time not make me too paranoid about them either. However, these voltages sources that I was messing with then, are not nearly as dangerous as the very high voltage & low internal impedance power supplies that Linesmen have to deal with, and when I see such industrial installations, at power stations and on power poles, I would never go anywhere near them, and admire the people who work with them.
