HOWTO turn a monitor into a Jacob's Ladder (and possibly die)

Cory Doctorow 11:08 pm Mon Jan 2, 2006

Here's a great, scary HOWTO for building a Jacob's Ladder out of a disused CRT computer monitor. Warning: doing this could kill you and/or burn down your house.

Here's my groovy 1988 1084 monitor. Open any monitor up, and one of the first things you will see is a big suction cup attached to the CRT. Attached to it is a wire that is at a few thousand volts higher than ground because there is a capacitor somewhere that is still charged up. The first thing you should do is put on some oven gloves, and get.a piece of insulated wire. Attach one end of the wire to a ground pin (look around on the circuit boards etc.) and poke the other end of the wire under the suction cup until you hear a spark noise. Do it a few times until you are super super sure everything is discharged, and even then use a multimeter to check the voltages of everything your hands come near.
Btw, if you do this wrong, say hi to Jesus for me alright?

(via Digg)

Update: Mathius sez, "the writer states in the article about grounding yourself when discharging the crt…that is a BIG BAD NO NO…unless you want to die…there are a few thousand volts of electricity stored under the anode cap and the last thing you want doing is that voltage going through you to be discharged…"

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