Hello from Middle Earth, NZ

[Elliot Buckley]

Hi everyone and apologies for the worddump, I'm not very good at writing things succinctly!

I'm an electrical engineering student in my honours (4th) year at Auckland Uni, and was lucky enough to be working for John Futter on the 100kV N implanter for the last 3 months (there's actually already a pretty unflattering pic of me on the forums in this thread: New equipment). I also spent last summer's work experience helping build an extended arc atmospheric plasma spray set, so that gave me a pretty good intro to high-current engineering and plasma physics, and that's pretty much the entirety of my job history right there! (I only turned 20 last thursday, so that's perhaps not too surprising)

I am (so far) interested in pretty much anything in the HV and high-current electrical engineering areas, and anything that comes roughly under the plasma physics umbrella. That list is likely to expand alarmingly in the next few years, because pretty much everything I've been exposed to so far I've found interesting. I'm still very much a newbie in all of this and as such my formal education physics itself is a bit limited, but I'm picking it up pretty quickly - I skipped first year entirely, then took a couple third year physics papers last year (quantum mechanics and particle physics & condensed matter) without meeting any prerequisites and passed them without any real difficulty. I'm aiming to go into a (physics) PhD next year, so figure it's a good idea to keep working on getting my head around all the relevant physics in particular that I've not yet come across.

I'm very keen to start building some of my own kit as my budget allows, and not only because I'm not paying for power where I'm flatting this year! I'm hoping that these forums will be a good source of inspiration for this, and give me a lot more exposure to people with a metric ton more experience than I have.

Outside of all that fun stuff, I'm also into SCUBA and freediving, skiing, tramping, and fishing, which makes for an interesting combination on a student's budget. I'm just starting to get back into shooting and music as well, since I had some pretty bad sensory nerve damage down my trigger-finger arm for the last 3 years or so that has only just started to come right properly in the last few weeks. Ironically, the first thing I felt in the ring finger of my right hand after 3 years was a wee zap from a 6kV supply! Well, that's probably enough about me anyway, I'm looking forward to spending some time around here.

Cheers, Elliot

[Doug Coulter]

Welcome Elliot - we're fond of Kiwis here. John spoke highly of you, so I skipped you forward in the line (there are a lot more requests pending due to that movie from Motherboard - guys, I'm getting there, just slowly). From what he said, you're our kinda guy. Anything we can do to help you along - just ask. This is a pretty good group! You can do a lot worse than John as a mentor - he's one of the "heavies" here.

I once got across a 4kv DC supply derived from a microwave oven parts with added caps and diodes (about an amp max, other than the peak from the 10uf filter cap), for about 10 seconds (seemed like an eternity) - hand to hand. Luckily, my heart didn't stop. Once I got loose, it turned out I'd burned a track from hand to hand down I guess nerves or blood vessels. No obvious external damage except at the contact points (burns), but let me tell ya - that hurt in the path it took through me for about 6 months. Don't do that! I suppose I'm lucky to be alive through that and a few other accidents, I appear to be hard to kill, but it's not something to count on. I didn't have obvious nerve damage, but it sure was painful and just didn't seem like going away for quite awhile. "it's the volts that jolts, but the mills that kills".

We'll be looking forward to your posts and questions. After posting 3 times, some more advanced parts of the board work, like private messaging. If you have something to post and it's not obvious where it fits - ask me, maybe we'll just add a new subforum for it. This board is an attempt to "write the book" on a number of topics, so we keep the general jabber to a few subforums meant for that, so the good teaching/learning content is still easy to find. Expect some new members and more posting soon, I still have about 40 to go, all requests due to that silly movie, but I screened pretty viciously - about 1 in 50 are getting let in initially.

[Elliot Buckley]

Yeah my case was an extremely brief shock, I got into the habit of touching anything that might have HV on it with the back of my hand when I was a kid spending time around electric fences, so that probably prevented it from being a whole lot worse. The sensation is still improving each day, so I'm guessing it prompted some disconnected nerve junction in my shoulder to start reattaching. The whole path to the shoulder hurts a fair bit, but that's pretty typical with repairing nerves anyway, in my experience (I got the upper arm and a bit of the lower arm and hand back via more ordinary healing about a year ago).