I like Big Clive (and Electroboom) because they know how to be safe, but do the stupid thing anyways (safely) to show how bad the ideas are.
Mehdi/Electroboom shows you what you can do, and why it's dangerous; usually by shocking himself, blowing something up, or having stuff catch fire. He isn't teaching mindless, disprovable safety culture, but showing you the actual boundaries you have to respect. As such he has both videos of "let's shock me with lowly increasing voltage to see when it starts to hurt" and "ranting about badly wired wall sockets and lack of GFCI in this hotel room".
If you show a kid a video about someone intentionally putting e.g. a fake hand on a stove and it getting severe burns and faked screams, what's the likelihood of a child following the video to get the same sick burns vs a video showing that it is perfectly safe to touch the stove?
What I would have liked is, "OK this here wire is where the high voltage is, if you touch it you will get hurt and possibly die. If you need to manipulate it use long wooden or plastic tongs. Do not use gloves because of dielectric breakdown possibility." You get the idea. Not "just don't do it."
Note, it has nothing to do with plastic tongs. The main danger, according to the youtuber, is that you turn on the aparatus, get momentarily distracted, and forget that it is on and touch the wood or the electrodes.
He offers multiple mitigations:
- indicators which show when the transformer is energised. He in fact recommends two separate paralel indicators. An audible one and a visual one.
- momentary switches where you physicaly can’t forget them on. Two switch in an “AND” configuration, where you need both of your hands to actuate them, so you can’t accidentally try to adjust an electrode with one hand while the other is energising the system.
He in fact goes further and recommends some fancy specialist switches, which turn off if you push them too hard as a result of a muscle spasm from an accidental electrocution.
So now you need to make a complicated electronic setup with multiple independent indicators, and specialist switches and yet the project is still not safe! There are still multiple things which can go wrong where a simple and inocous action leads to instant death.
It is a thing which is easy to do unsafe, and relatively hard to so safe.
At which point can we simplify the advice to the general population into “don’t do it”?
At the end of the day, for almost all of the viewers of the channel, adding meaningful protection and doing the wood burning safely is simply not within their capabilities.
The Big Clive does pretty well of doing a “still don’t do it, but here are some ways that it could be made somewhat safer” explainer.
Which videos are you talking about in particular?
Both the Ann Reardon and the Big Clive video explains exactly what makes this experiment more dangerous than others people do.
The Big Clive one in particular goes into interesting details about how a ground fault circuit interrupter works, and why it doesn't protect you in this case.
> They just scream "omg high voltage" "one mistake you're dead" and so on.
The ones I have seen don't scream. They calmly explain that the voltage generated in this setup is much much higher than the voltage the average experimenter has experience with.
About the "one mistake you're dead". That is the crux of the matter. People should be aware of how thin the margins are, and how few guard rails protect them in any particular situation.
> it reminds me of the medieval experimenters and alchemists being oppressed by the conformist public.
Who is oppressing anybody here?
> I honestly think they are worse than the source; it reminds me of the medieval experimenters and alchemists being oppressed by the conformist public.
I can kind of see where you're coming from here but in this case I think the right thing has happened.
I don't understand why the warning videos were banned, and don't know what potentially dangerous practices that the "fractal woood burning" videos show, or what safety practices they omit, but working with electricity at mains voltages or higher obviously requires due care and attention.
When crossing the street, other people in cars don't want to actually kill you, and those crossing are generally aware and cognizant of the danger. The biggest mistake you can make is 'forgetting to look before crossing'; a lot of the time that won't kill you.
The setup here is very different.
The voltages involved in the wood burning process is far outside of most people's familiarity; your intuition for electricity just doesn't apply.
We're not just talking 'mains supply can be dangerous'; electricians routinely work on switches and such without bothering to shut off the circuit (even though this is typically ill-advised). Mistakes with mains, whilst they _can_ kill, usually just result in big bangs and breakers being tripped.
What you think 'protects' you just doesn't; your insulating gloves, shoes, wire covers, even air gaps; they could just fail you, and badly.
Even aware of this, knowing 'touching the probes kills me', a tiny mistake, such as 'brushing my insulated leg on the piece of wood I am working on, easily made despite being careful, has a very high chance of instantly killing you.
The only way I could see to make this process 'safe' is to not be in the same room as the equipment when it's connected to the power.