My grandpa used to tell me a little story about how back in the day he thought that it was funny to wire a Model T coil into a floor-switch and then to the body of his car. According to the ol' man, this created something similar to a giant "joy buzzer." When one of his buddies would grab the door handle and try to get in, he would step on the floor switch and "electrify" the body of his car. He used to chuckle and tell us how it would give off enough of a charge that the guy often couldn't even let go of the door handle. Well, the 'ol man has been gone for several years now, and I know for a fact that he had a rather "unique" sense of humor. However, I have always wondered if this was really possible. I have no desire to try to recreate grandpa's "joy buzzer" as I imagine that it is extremely dangerous to the car, the guy grabbing the door handle, and probably even the nut stepping on the switch. I have just always wondered if this was just a tall tale, or if kids really used to do this for amusement. Any ideas?
A friend of mine collects antique toys and games- one of his arcade games is a simple device with two brass handles and a meter. Basically, while holding bith knobs, you turn one. As you turn it, the voltage increases (and the meter goes up). It gives quite a jolt- especially when someone standing next to you grabs your hand and makes you turn the voltage all the way up!
My dad owned a gas station in the late 30's..He was a young man then,and had a lot of the neighborhood kids hanging out all the time..Inside the station,by the windows,was a ledge where everybody would sit..My dad wired the nails in the ledge to T coils,and had a battery under the counter..several switches,and he could put the juice wherever he wanted..So nobody knew who was gonna get it,or when..He always told me he didn't hit the switch too often,cause he wanted the guys to sit there..He told some damn funny stories about running a gas station back then..It was on a major north/south highway and they played a few tricks on the tourists passing through,too
We got in big trouble in Vo Tech school when we stripped about 12 inches of 10 ga. wire and slid it up under a kids seat cover in his Nova then hooked the other end under a plug wire. He felt a little shoke when he first started the car but when ever he tried to touch anything that would make him a path to ground boy didn't he jump. Funniest damn thing I ever saw. H couldn't shut it off because it had metal key holder, he couldn't get out because of metal door handle.
I worked at a dealership where a guy wired an HEI distributor to a transmission tech's metal work bench.....every now and then the prankster would give the trans tech a jolt.....after all of the light switches and plugs were taken apart to find the source of the problem, the plot was revealed.......started an all out war.
My dad had something similar to that. His was sold as a medical device to cure many assorted ills. It came in a very elaborate wooden box. The patient held two handles while the quack turned the crank. It was impossible to keep your hands from rotating toward each other. It wasn't a jolt like shock but a steady current flow that you could not overcome. One of my earliest hot rod memories is being 12 years old and being chased around my uncles garage by my older cousin with a Nailhead Buick Vertex magneto with the cap removed. "here touch this big wire that sticks up" as he twirled the mag drive gear with his fingers. ZAP!
In a similar vein, guys would shoot the juice to their cars when parked just touching the bumper of the car ahead. You do remember parallel parking, don't you? When the unsuspecting owner of the car came back he/she got a zap when they inserted the key in the door lock or grabbed the handle. Wasn't that funny when the victim was a little old Granny with a sack full of grocereies, though.
when I was a kid I had an uncle who would show off by spreading his fingers touching the tops of the plugs on a running flat six, shorting the spark and killing the engine he could do it without even flinching then one of us would try it holy crap what a jolt
Sorry for taking this OT, and I really WOULD love to see a wiring diagram for the T, but one more story... Good friend of my dad was a master electrician- NEVER turned the power off when working, that way he could find out which wire was the lead by licking his fingers and touching the wires... oh, he went absolutely looney before he died.
Thats great. Pranks are the same the world over! My uncle used tell me stories about doing the same thing and another of his favorite pranks, was to remove a plug wire, put an extension he had made with a plug on it, run it under the car and connect it to a balloon filled with some oxy acetylene Again dont try this at home !
Gee.. it's nearly 40 years ago in school that I took a 9 volt transistor battery, a little wire and an old 12 volt coil.. hooked them up and (since I was ALWAYS messing with something) ask other students to hold the wires while I "fixed" something. Most would only hold them once. Mainly a scare... They have sold some sort of device like this since the 1900s or earlier. Now they call it "TENS". Diagram? Hmmm. I'll check but it was simple. Make sure the lucky contestant holds the main coil wire and the ground wire. Hit the switch and watch 'em jump and call you interesting names.
I'm sure some of you have been zapped by a charged condensor that a friend had sitting on his desk or workbench or counter.
i shocked the piss out of myself in a GameStop a while back when i started taking apart a game console that was still plugged in.. the guy that was watching me said i just started shaking and my eyes rolled back in my head... me thought i was playing a joke until my fingers started smoking.... i felt like the smartest man in the world...
Back in the fiftys, my brother was a boyscout and actually made a shocking machine as a boy scout project using an old car coil. All the neighborhood kids had a ball with it, we'd all hold hands and grab it to see how many of us we could zap at once. He got the plans right out of a boy scout book. When we weren't doing that, we were building rockets with black powder and match heads, or building carbide bombs, or playing with mercury, or shooting self striking matches out of a bb gun out the bedroom window and watching them light on my neighbors house, or exploring old coal mines, etc. etc. etc. Ahhhhhh good times, good times. Man, how times have changed, huh?
I got hit with a MSD once and sir you are correct, at least a half hour before my arm started to feel like it wasnt going to die and fall off!
One day in high school, we had a power outage- I happened to be in the nurse's office when they brought the culprit in. Turned out that a custodian had started to mop up a spill and didn't see the extension cord laying in the water- he was as red as a lobster and sweating like a pig.
Karma (or whatever) got back at me for zapping the school kids. LONG story shortened... I was pinned between a stationary object and someone's home-built V8 tractor that was in gear and TRYING to go forward. The only thing stopping it was my leg (that the rear wheel was chewing up). After unsuccessfully trying to flood the engine I had to pull the wires off the distributor. Dang thing wouldn't stop until I only had 2 left!!! Ask me if I noticed the HEI spark... Not so much. My leg took precedence in my mind. Ah.. good times and adrenalin.
Oh yeah, our house was a hang out a few years back, nearly everybody that came by fell victim to the wire if they didn't look out. I also got an old army field phone that has all kinds of possibilities,.... not the same but a local junkyard has started hiding airbags(the kind that blow out in your dash during a wreck) under a bench outside with hopes of catching thieves that sat down to rest a minute, have not yet seen it myself, but I hear it's great.
Slightly o/t, but still in context.............salvage a push-button igniter from a gas grill and leave it laying around the shop. See how many dumbasses pick it up, wrap thier fingers around it and push the red button with thier thumb. Roger
Any coil for automotive ignition has a primary and a secondary winding. When current flow to the primary winding is interupted, (as in points opening) the collapse of the magnetic field around the primary winding will create an "induced current" in the secondary winding (thats what creates the extreme high voltage/low amperage spark that arcs across the sparkplugs). A wire from the positive battery terminal to the + side of the coil is one side of the primary circuit. A wire from the - side of the coil to the negative battery post is the second side of that primary circuit. By unhooking the wire from either the positive or negative side of the battery, the primary circuit is broken, thus interupting the circuit and inducing a killer spark from the main coil lead that would normally go to the center of a distributor cap. In a points style ignition, there is a cam with the same number of high points as there are cylinders in the engine. Every time one of these "lobes" opened the points, it interupted the primary circuit and sent a spark to one of the cylinders. Model T fords were a bit different---they didn't have points in the distributor, but had a "trembler coil"---this was basically a coil with an electromagnet that caused a set of points mounted in a box beside the coil to constantly open and close, so that there was a continuous high voltage spark being created. There was still a distributor to distribute the spark to the correct cylinder at the correct time. These old Model T coils with attached points could be taken out of the car and hooked to a battery anywhere to create that high voltage spark. Some people would use them to make electric fences. The barber in my town where I grew up as a kid had trouble with all the dogs in town pissing on his sign, out front. He hooked a model T coil up to the sign, and would zap the offending dogs----worked all right untill one day the mayors wife was walking her dog down street on a metal chain---you can guess what happened when her dog peed on the sign----
My big brother tried to get me to kill the lawnmower for him, as the little metal tab broke off, but I turned it around and convinced him he could pee on it to kill it as long as the stream hit the metal body first, he went for it, I wondered a long time later if that had an affect on his love life!
My father told me that they used to wire "Ford coils" to out house seats. It must have been a shocking experiance!
switching the fron the starting tank to the main tank on a old caterpillar tractor, i bumped into a spark plug at idle. according to my grandfather he said he had never seen me move 15' the opposite direct faster.
I can't imagine getting hit by a msd box! When I was a teenager, dad wanted me to hold a plug with a set of rubber gripped pliers to see if it fired. I refused, and he said oh don't be a baby, they have rubber on them, you're insulated. So I held it, he cranked it over, and I smacked my head on the hood latch. Anyhow, every bone in my hand and arm felt like it jumped 4 inches. Ached for 3 days straight. "Well, you must have been touching the body"...
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