UK map of knife crimes between April and June of 2007

Knives are tools and often made of metal

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Gunner

Reply to
Gunner
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I'd be interested in learning what they consider a "knife crime." In the UK, mere possession of most knives is a crime. They recently passed legislation requiring all kitchen (chef, butcher, steak) knives to have blunt tips so they couldn't be used for stabbing. Municipal buses sport messages extolling citizens to turn in their knives to the authorities. It's gotten truly crazy.

I no longer ship my knives to any part of the UK for this reason.

-Frank

Reply to
Frank Warner

Must be nasty, my ISP blocks the link. Mind you, The Sun makes the National Enquirer look intellectual

News to me

Don't disagree, though

Very fine work

Reply to
newshound

It should be noted that the Sun newspaper is held in somewhat less regard in the UK than Fox news is in the US. It is known more for the mammaries of the young ladies on page three than the quality of its journalism.

Mark Rand RTFM

Reply to
Mark Rand

Looks like you could fight that guy off with one squirt from a good fire extinguisher.

No, wait...

Reply to
Tim Wescott

The last fire I had was a breaker box. I turned on the AC and headed to the kitchen. I heard what sounded like rain for a bedroom, and knew the sky was clear, and there were no water lines near that room. I limped in and saw flames coming out of the closed door. I knew that I didn't have time to get to the extinguisher by the door, so I opened the cover and turned off the power and beat the flames out with my hands. Also, the extinguisher I had then wasn't rated for electrical fires. I had some first degree burns on my hands, and couldn't get rid of the smell of burnt Bakelite for a couple weeks. It took two years to get all of the odor out of that room.

It was the main breaker burning and one buss bar burnt in two. A few more seconds, and the wood paneling would have caught fire. After that, the whole house would have been on fire. The nearest firehouse is over five miles away, and there is heavy tourist traffic between here and there.

The amazing thing is that the 'electrician' who signed off on the job and had it inspected can't be found.

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

Let me guess - Federal Pacific Electric? Extremely Bad Juju...

The FPE main buss design is patently defective, they often tried to run 100A through the threads of a steel 10-32 screw and/or an equally small contact-area stab-in fitting stamped out of thin copper plate...

And the breakers go bad internally and look fine to the naked eye, even turn on and off normally - but they will not trip open even on a

10KA-plus bolted fault, with the overload heaters glowing white hot...

The Korean knockoff replacement breakers are no better, they just copied a defective design. If anyone still has old FPE panels in service you seriously need to look into changing them.

Not if you'd have left the door closed - that's the whole idea behind UL insisting on the steel enclosure for breaker panels and self-extinguishing plastics for switch boxes, so if something catches fire on the inside it stays on the inside. At least long enough to burn itself out.

If you had the box mounted deeper than flush into the wall, and the cover was lifted off the rim of the breaker box and directly exposed to wooden paneling butted up against it, that kind of gross stupidity is NOT the fault of UL. If nothing else, the electrician should have cut back the paneling and cut & glued in shims out of sheet-rock to make a firebreak.

The tourist traffic you can't do much about. But don't let your neighbors install speed bumps on the only road in, no matter how much they moan and whine about "all the people zooming down the streets..."

- because that firetruck has to slow down to a dead crawl to go over every single speed bump so they don't drop the water tank onto the road or break an axle.

Every speed bump adds thirty seconds to the FD response time.

And besides, it's usually their own kids or their kids friends doing the speeding down the street at 2 AM, and they won't admit it. If they can't properly discipline their own spawn, they don't get the right to endanger my life and property by slowing down the FD or PD.

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Reply to
Bruce L. Bergman

Sounds like a paper for conservatives.

Hawke

Reply to
Hawke

I bet he wasn't a union electrician.

Hawke

Reply to
Hawke

I wouldn't have bough the property if there was any FPE installed. It was an ITE EQ12F 125 A 12 circuit panel. I kept the scorched cover as a souvenir.

I saw the first bad FPE breakers at a military TV station. The damn things would trip when a halogen studio light burnt out, and wouldn't reset. The panel was less than two years old, and I used every spare in the panel within six months. Of course the base electricians were pissed that I was swapping the breakers around to stay on the air, but their response time was weeks.

That, or move.

Flames wee coming out of the closed door, about two feet up the paneled wall. After the fire was out I found that the asshole electrician had knocked out almost every knockout on the box, and ran the four aluminum conductors through separate holes, allowing plenty of air to get into the box. Some of the Romex was burnt a foot away from the box, inside the wall.

We don't need speed bumps. There is only one road into the subdivision, and thanks to FEMA contractors there are more potholes than we can repair. Instead of picking up the downed limbs in the street, they drove a front end loader over them, drooped the blade to the asphalt and dragged the a half mile to the main road, while removing the top inch or more of the asphalt. Of course, no one admits to being liable for the damage. They looked at what was left and decided the road was defective, anyway.

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

Who knows? From the quality of the work, it sure looks like it. Union guys don't have to worry about quality, and a lot of them moonlight, and do shoddy work because they will be in another town before the fires. The local, licensed electrical contractors are non union, and a couple fires or deaths, and they lose everything. The union guys hit town for a large commercial job, then move to another city or state for the next job.

In your case, though, PLEASE hire a union electrician to work on your house.

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

EQ... EQ? Pushmatic? Or standard "Industrial Interchange"? Never really had problems with Pushmatics, just occasional bad breakers that won't reset and need to be swapped.

Only if you're a renter and you can pack your things in three suitcases, send out two change of address postcards, and go.

For most of us with large piles of "Stuff" to deal with and many other encumbrances, it's better to stay where you are at and modify the environment to be safer.

Holy S#*%... You didn't say it was deliberately rigged to burn down the house on purpose...

That work wasn't done by any electrician unless he was certified brain dead. And couldn't have been inspected by any competent AHJ or they would have blown a gasket instantly.

Even a helper learns real fast you don't leave open KO's in a wall, and every cable gets a connector at the box. And when in doubt you grab a brick of Duct Seal and stuff the holes.

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Reply to
Bruce L. Bergman

They were standard breakers. I would have replace the panel if they were Pushmatic.

I could fill at least three tractor trailers right now. :(

I didn't know how bad it was. A private inspector was hired before I signed the papers, and he claimed to have inspected all the panels.

There are too many fly by night electricians in Florida, who manage to get defective work passed by inspectors. Its no wonder they skip town after six months, or so. If they didn't, someone would kill them. Remember Hurricane Andrew? That area has the tightest electrical & building codes in Florida, yet most of the damaged homes revealed substandard work that city inspectors signed off.

A friend of mine called the other day. He is disabled, and his home was damaged by the hurricanes a few years ago. He lives on a tiny Social Security Disability Pension, so he qualified for the city's program to repair selected homes. It took almost two years for them to finish the repairs, then six months later the kitchen ceiling collapsed. The roof work was signed off by the city inspector, yet he didn't go up on the roof, to see that the soft spots were gone. Now, the city tells him it's his problem, and that if he doesn't pay to replace the entire roof, including all the plywood they are calling in their low interest loan and taking his home.

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

I worked at a bowling alley with a FPE panel. Damn box of sparks. yuck!

Clutch

-- "Additionally as a security officer, I carry a gun to protect government officials but my life isn't worth protecting at home in their eyes." Dick Anthony Heller

Reply to
Wes

FPE = Faulty Protective Equipment

Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

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