Re: With NiCd, a quick pulse from a car battery
Yep. People vastly underestimate the stored power of a car battery. And then you look at things like lorry batteries and - yeesh - electric fork-lift power banks.
My dad - before the days of health and fecking safety - once teamed up with a small gaggle of fitters in his job and, from a distance, put a spanner over an old, decrepid fork-lift with lead-acid battery pack. They did it from an improvised bunker further down the warehouse.
I'm told that, after the spanner turned red, then white, then started to bend, the explosion was quite impressive and they were still cleaning battery acid off the ceiling of the industrial aircraft-hangar-sized warehouse for weeks afterwards.
There's a reason my dad told me never to mess with a car battery. And why the fitters kept a large 4x2 wooden post nearby if anyone was working on the underside of the 18-ton lorries with their stupendous batteries. DC electrics make you grab on so you can't let go. You only need the right combination of metal spanner, wet hand, hanging onto the wrong point while in a confined space, etc. and it could go very wrong.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
