Ars MacGyverica: That time we fixed a fuse box with a 6-inch nail

What's your jankiest bit of DIY electrical or electronics work?

Credit: Jenna

For the first 16 years of my life, I was an actor. Not a big-time actor, of course: I starred in school plays and local amateur productions, usually as the lanky comic sidekick or later as sonorous historical figures. Playing Osiris in a school play about the Egyptian gods was probably the peak of my thespian career.

I saw a lot of weird things over the years, backstage and in dressing rooms, but unless you're interested in men in tights or pranks involving oil-based makeup, most of them wouldn't make any sense to recount on a technology website. One story involving a six-inch iron nail is definitely worth sharing, though.

It is safe to say that my school, if it had ever been inspected properly, would've failed almost every electrical safety check. The building was about 200 years old and over the decades had been the victim of many hodgepodge extensions, electrification retrofits, and "ooh, all we need is a bit of electrical tape" fixes by handymen and groundskeepers.

Staged theatre productions, if you weren't aware, require lots and lots of illumination—and lights require a lot of power. A standard spotlight bulb could range anywhere from 300W to 1000W or more. The stage floodlights, of which there were a couple dozen, were all rated at 200W or more. (This is back in the late '90s, long before LED lamps had been popularised.)

This isn't my school, but it gives you some idea of how many lights (and how many watts) are used in a stage production.

Add it all together and I reckon the rigged lighting was pulling down about 10kW—quite a lot of juice. Oh, did I mention that the lighting desk was operated by two students? That will become pertinent soon, too.

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Fast forward to opening night. We're doing some last-minute rehearsals on stage, before the audience starts to arrive. I'm wearing a blonde wig, a doublet, and, of course, some tights—I'm the young French prince in The Scarlet Pimpernel.

The lights come up—and instantly there's a crack and everything goes dark. "Aw shit, the fuse has blown," says one of the students behind the lighting desk. There's some scrabbling in the dark, followed by some slightly panicked muttering. "Does anyone... have a spare fuse?" a voice querulously asks from a dark corner of the hall.

We look around the school for a spare fuse, but can't find one. The audience will be arriving soon, so there's no time to go to the shops—plus, back in the '90s, the shops would've been closed by then anyway. But the show must go on, says one of the students behind the lighting desk who has a reputation for doing ~~brave~~ stupid things.

So, he grabs a thick iron nail—there are tons of them lying around from scenery construction—and jams it into the fuse board. His hand moves to flip the switch, but he hesitates: after that act of bravado, I guess he's having second thoughts about being close to a fuse board as 40 amps course through a slightly bent nail.

A few seconds tick by. A few years later, over beers, he would tell me that his entire pubescent life flashed before his eyes as his hand hovered over the circuit breaker: "Seb, I was thinking about whether it would increase my chances of kissing Alice or not."

Eventually he shrugged, ran his other hand through his hair, and pulled the switch.

The lights came up, the audience filed in, and the show indeed went on. The nail worked so well that we didn't replace it with a real fuse for months.

What's the jankiest bit of electronics/electrical work that you've ever done?