I nearly killed myself this morning. I drilled a hole through a mains cable and if it wasn’t for the rubber handle on the drill my wife would be saying goodbye to me down the morgue. I scared myself witless
Even though I shot across the room with shock and an unbelievable urge to remove myself from the vicinity of the sparks and the smoke I truly feel that it was my father in law’s drill that actually stopped me from killing myself. My old drill years ago was metal cased and this one is rubbery plasticy stuff – I’m sure this stopped the electricity hitting me. Today I found out that the fuse box is a bit too old and didnt actually break the circuit – although it did wipe out half the plug sockets in the house !
The electrician says I wiped out the live wire and the outer spiky bits on the wide drill bit (was drilling a 1″ hold to feed cables between rooms) must have caught the earth to complete the circuit and kerboom. On the upside he reckoned that whoever wired the house was a numpty and dragged the wires at a 45 degree angle so commented that literally anyone would have had the same problem. When he knocked a hole in the wall to fix the problem, the wires were also where Chez was suggesting I drill too so at least the “I told you so” isnt valid… I think the picture of the drill bit sums everything up – it was enough to wipe out the edges of the drill bit
