Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobush | Hacker News Reader

Brought a tear to the corner of my eye. Anyone with this kind of legacy has lead a good life.

My grandfather was the opposite unfortunately. We found a radio power supply he made, I carefully but not carefully enough reverse engineered it, brought it up slowly on a variac and after three minutes it exploded violently spewing capacitor guts everywhere.

We came to the conclusion that this wasn’t operator error either. He’d finished it but was too scared to power it up himself so locked it in the cellar.

Mine was opposite in a different direction. My dad was a historian. When I was seven or eight, we had an outdoor cat (didn't get along with the indoor cats) and needed a table to keep its food dish off the ground. The cat's name was Tiny, and it weighed about eight pounds. My dad spent an afternoon hammering the table together out of board scraps, and it shook and sagged when Tiny jumped on it. I (the budding math nerd) was babbling to him the whole afternoon about how he needed triangles because parallelograms can change their shape without changing the length of their sides. It didn't make any sense to him so he ignored me until his table went catawampus trying to hold up half its weight. Then he added some triangles where I told him to. I don't remember him ever building anything again, except we rebuilt our backyard fence exactly the way it had been built fifteen years earlier by someone else. By that time I was in college, and we worked better together.

Anyone who's not ducked capacitor shrapnel isn't really an electrical/electronic engineer. Perhaps he was leaving you with an initiation ritual.

Very true, I remember many years ago when working at Soundcraft, there was a loud bang from next door as a small mixing desk with builtin amp was powered on for the first time[1].

Large electrolytic smoothing caps fitted the wrong way round, the smell is horrendous.

[1] By Douglas Self who has an excellent page about subjectivity in HiFi http://douglas-self.com/ampins/pseudo/subjectv.htm

Normal (not utility scale) capacitors do not blow up anymore. You can plug them on the wrong way directly on the rectified mains, they bubble, expand, get hot, and smell; they don't blow.

They do explode quite violently still. I’ve blown up tens of new ones.

Try an average Chinese or even rubicon 10uF 63v ish cap which is in just about every bit of crap from SMPS to cheap toys. They go with quite a Big Bang.

Well, looks like I got lucky on my choice of suppliers :)

I'd blown up a few myself by then, mostly on purpose :)

I was referring to both tech and relational, but mostly relational legacy. He had a child enjoying going through that. If that dad had failed at relations, the tech gadget would have been a useless piece of junk in more than one way.

Yeah. I need to call my dad.

Yes. Do it while you still can. (I miss you, Dad.)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com