It's probably the capacitance. And yes, it's enough of a shock to scare you and reflexively drop something valuable. I found this out the hard way; LC-filter in a metal box did a great job getting rid of line noise.
This would never pass today's regulatory requirements, and it probably would cause a GFCI to trip. Connecting a resistor from the AC neutral to the chassis was done on many TV sets from the 1960's; RCA and Zenith had a 22meg resistor for bleeding-away charge on the metal chassis. And this was NOT one of the infamous hot-chassis sets. I suspect it had to do with exposed metal parts getting capacitively charged via the picture tube; with the resistor the current was very small (well-below threshold of sensation) even if hot and neutral got swapped. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "neonixie-l" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/neonixie-l/ae4390cb-2f01-4d0e-b1fd-e497e22f4640%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
