CHEEEEP! HAR! HAR! HAR!
Remember the ridiculously cheap eBay multimeter and D.C. / A.C. inductive meter I said I was about to purchase? I did. They arrived and I ran calibration and accuracy tests on them yesterday and today...
Forum Discussion
My fluke 77, is about 25 yrs old, been dropped too many times too count,
An no I can't verify the accuracy, I no longer have access to those services, but with it's rubber shock case, it sure is one rugged piece of equipment, I've worn out five or six sets of test leads
But it does bring back a rather sharp memory of an incident in my working career
One morning, I was doing my normal walk thru observing equipment operation in the restricted area of the plant doing DOD munitions...yeah bombs, just the internal casings of this particular weapon
One of the plasma welders abruptly stopped, no lights nothing total power loss
I went over the the 480v disconnect, pulled the switch, pulled out 600v digital probe and started checking the fuses, bad
Put the probe across the incoming power feed and it blew up in hand...ouch
I grabbed the fluke the incoming 480 was over 700v
I yelled at the production supervisor shut it all down
And started throwing disconnects on all the equipment
Called my supervisor plant machinery, and told him we had an unknown voltage on at least one of the incoming high tension lines to our substation,
In minutes the whole plant was shut down except for some lighting and ventilation
The whole place was down for about 45 minutes before we got the all clear from dwp to start backup, I went directly to the company nurses office
My hand was swollen, very slight burn, it was the concussion shock of the probe blowing up, I don't remember exactly what it cost, less than my fluke, it was just easier to use, for 90% of what I needed,
they bought me a new one
The fluke came out when I needed to make vdc measurements on control boards and signals
This was the height of the gulf war, and we were working around the clock 7 days week...We averted damaged to millions of dollars worth of machinery, got very lucky on that one
An no I can't verify the accuracy, I no longer have access to those services, but with it's rubber shock case, it sure is one rugged piece of equipment, I've worn out five or six sets of test leads
But it does bring back a rather sharp memory of an incident in my working career
One morning, I was doing my normal walk thru observing equipment operation in the restricted area of the plant doing DOD munitions...yeah bombs, just the internal casings of this particular weapon
One of the plasma welders abruptly stopped, no lights nothing total power loss
I went over the the 480v disconnect, pulled the switch, pulled out 600v digital probe and started checking the fuses, bad
Put the probe across the incoming power feed and it blew up in hand...ouch
I grabbed the fluke the incoming 480 was over 700v
I yelled at the production supervisor shut it all down
And started throwing disconnects on all the equipment
Called my supervisor plant machinery, and told him we had an unknown voltage on at least one of the incoming high tension lines to our substation,
In minutes the whole plant was shut down except for some lighting and ventilation
The whole place was down for about 45 minutes before we got the all clear from dwp to start backup, I went directly to the company nurses office
My hand was swollen, very slight burn, it was the concussion shock of the probe blowing up, I don't remember exactly what it cost, less than my fluke, it was just easier to use, for 90% of what I needed,
they bought me a new one
The fluke came out when I needed to make vdc measurements on control boards and signals
This was the height of the gulf war, and we were working around the clock 7 days week...We averted damaged to millions of dollars worth of machinery, got very lucky on that one
