Past Mistake - witha battery!

[Jarviser]

I nearly lost my workshop last year by a mistake that never crossed my mind before. I always keep flammables - meths, polishes, oils etc - in a closed cupboard, so that on the odd occasion I may have a blowlamp going there is no danger of a fire. Naturally I keep my wire wool in there with the polish. Then I got a couple of PP3 tranny batteries for my workshop alarm, and I put the spare one somewhere safe - in the polish cupboard! When I later took out some 0000 wire wool to use on a project, I did the usual and threw it back in the cupboard afterwards. Within seconds I saw smoke coming through the gap in the cupboard door . The whole hank of wire wool was glowing red like embers. I threw it out onto the concrete step where it burned for several minutes.If I had not noticed the smoke the whole lot would have gone up. Until I tried touching the battery terminals on a new sample of the wire wool for just 1 second, I would never have believed that it could have created such an incendiary device. The picture is a "reconstruction" - I never keep batteries in there now!

 

[Jarviser]

Oh well lets try that pic again
http://hometown.aol.co.uk/jarviser/firerisk.html

 

[Noel]

Jarviser, thanks for the warning, could've turned out real bad.

Noel.

BTW, when you want to post an image, right click on the image to get the properties and then use the IMGs, like this:

So you end up with this -