[TenTec] Electric safety

[Dr. Gerald N. Johnson]

On Fri, 2010-02-19 at 01:17 -0500, DAVID HELLER wrote:
> I guess many of us working around varied voltages have made contact 
> somewhere along the line.  Just before my draft number came up I didn't 
> start the last term in school and took a job in an electronics factory.  By 
> virtue of a few years EE undergraduate and some radio experience I started 
> as final inspector, duties being to make sure the things were working, 
> correct any mis-wiring, replace any new-defective components, make final 
> alignment and test.  Only once did I get hit, and it was with about 600 vdc. 
> I pulled a metal tube out of a chassis not knowing that some girl on the 
> line had wired a B+ line to pin 1 (always ground in an octal receiving 
> tube). I didn't manage to get the tube out;  the entire unit, about 100 lbs, 
> left the bench for the floor about where I had landed. No real damage to the 
> radio or me, but I did take a short break.  Put it back on the bench, 
> corrected the wiring, got it ready to ship and just kept going. I was more 
> resilient those days than I am now.
> 
> Separate grounding wire in metal conduit?  Absolutely.  NEC allows a lot of 
> things that bother me, and leaves a few things out that bother me.
> 
> I get the impression that you've had the same exerience as I - most cases 
> are settled after deposition, the negligence being so evident.  The real fun 
> came from the cases where some lawyer thought he could show me up on 
> cross-examination.  Not once did the lawyer win.  Dave, K3TX

I had several never get to the deposition stage. Those were the ones
where my report was a quarter page with a simple wiring diagram
attached. Though one widow did grumble mightily about paying so much
money per word of my report. It took all summer to find the permuted
connections, some were buried 9' deep as if someone wished them to be
hard to find.

When I began as an expert witness, defense attorneys (as an independent
I tended to be hired by the injured parties or their survivors) and
judges respected technical experts. As time went on more "experts"
showed up willing to testify to any cause for a price (I've told more
than one potential client, "You don't want me in that trial because I
think you don't have a case", "I know your product, your product is
indeed junk.") and that has hurt the reputations of the expert
witnesses. And in the early days the defense attorneys would be decently
schooled in the technology by their expert so they could (temporarily)
ask decent questions. But someone wrote a book on cross examining the
expert witness and suggested the testimony could be destroyed by making
the witness loose his cool so cross turned into a personal attack on the
witness, not his technical testimony. I'm happy to no longer be subject
to such abuse.

Some of my best witnesses where the factory engineers who admitted that
the product sample shown them was junk and should have never passed
inspection or left the factory. That and the fact that they were not
used to the courtroom and testified to their attorney, not to the jury.
There is an art to good testimony to the jury. The amateur witness
doesn't know that. Many an attorney beat on me to get me trained to
testify to the jurors.

73, Jerry, K0CQ