Originally published at: Lethal "fractal burning" woodworking hack has killed dozens | Boing Boing
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How did we make it to 2022?
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Be sure to see the details. The transfomers induce current with a magnetic field so a GFCI detects nothing.
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I did a LOT of “fractal burning” for a large art project a few years ago, and frankly I now look back with horror.
I don’t share these videos with Ms. Shiv.
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I saw a video about this awhile ago. Yikes.
It sounds like you CAN do this relatively safely. But complacency or cheaping out on equipment or safety can kill you.
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This is a great video that outlines the dangers clearly.
What confuses me? What the heck is this doing on a cooking channel to begin with?! 
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JFC - and YouTube still shows these videos?
Of course it fucking does.
Thanks for the public safety advice, Rob - someone needs to tell YouTube (if only so they can be in the frame for blame when they don’t take these videos down if they don’t have appropriate warnings in them).
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She started with a cooking channel, then started doing debunking of fake cooking channels, then started railing against fake and dangerous channels in general.
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I saw this technique used on an episode of “Alaska: The Last Frontier”, where one of the artsy-craftsy people burned it into a plank, and thinking “this is about the dumbest thing they’ve ever shown”. And this is a show where a person ‘dug’ a pond by planting explosive charges in a meadow.
Could it be done safely? Sure, a technique could be developed by an engineer to make these safely in a factory setting. But for casual home craftspeople, a microwave transformer is just stupidly dangerous. Insulating against kilovolts is a completely different beast than insulating against 120/240/477, especially with an electrolytic solution wetting the artwork, the work surface, and the tools.
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Big Clive is a Scottish electrical engineer. Basically, even if you KNOW WHAT YOU’RE DOING (and I doubt that half the dead people did), it’s still a VERY dangerous hobby.
(edit)
Big Clive also made a video about the grisly details of electrocution – all the ways you can die with electricity at differing voltages and currents – which even I found a little TMI.
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IIRC she has a subset of videos that deal with BS viral videos. I think it stemmed from BS viral cooking videos, and she branched out to counter others. Like charcoal briquet in peanut butter turns into a diamond" video.
So this would be related to those videos. The dangers of making fractal burning videos.
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I know, right? It wasn’t until 7:20 of a 15 minute video that she got to the subject.
By that time I lost interest.
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That’s the one I saw!
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IIRC, people yank the transformers out of microwaves to get the needed energy. So, cooking-adjacent? 
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Well, in all fairness, Rob did say it started at 7.22.
In this video (jump to 7:22) YouTuber Ann Rearson summarizes the deadly “hack”
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That’s awesome that she does that, and I’m a fan of her delivery style and level of detail in her videos as well (In fact, I’m now a subscriber). I was just confused as to how one had anything to do with the other from the context of that video and the channel’s about info (which is sparse!). Thanks for clarifying
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Haven’t you ever cooked Lichtenberg steaks? Tricky, but the grill marks are sooo worth risking certain death.
/S
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I work in a powerplant and regularly work around voltages as high as 235 KV (235,000 volts). I don’t even open a 120 breaker at my house without insulated gloves (overkill some might say).
Electricity is not for amateurs, and the most of the videos that I have seen of people doing this do not use any PPE. The high side of a microwave transformer is up to 2000V at 500mA. It only takes 100mA to stop your heart. Those things will kill you dead.
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Yeah, that was one of the details that really hit home. Everything we’ve done to make electricity in homes safe is overridden by this ‘hack’.
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