Originally Posted by
Saroro
It's not gunpowder... Think about that. It's a fuse...electricity. They won't put anything in there that can explode. It's probably just some kind of insulating powder to prevent fires.
I'm pretty sure maiku is talking about the type of fuses one would find inside a panel box. I agree, they certainly won't have anything explosive in them. They're kind of messy to take apart, and there's not much inside them other than that powdery stuff, but the contacts at the ends are copper. At least the ones I've found.
That having been said, it's probably not a bad time to talk about some bigger fuse-like items. (Even though most of us will probably never encounter one, at least legally. If somebody's trying to steal one, and blows themself up, I guess that'd be poetic justice.)
Anyway, it is my understanding that in some high voltage applications, like 20 or 30 thousand volts, there
are explosively charged fuses. They do that so that when there's an overload, it blows apart clean, and doesn't do even more damage by the arc that would be produced. At least that's what I was told by a power company guy when he was explaining what that big BOOM was after the dumptruck driver raised his bed into the 30,000 volt lines.
If anybody can confirm that more authoritatively, I'm sure we'd all be interested to hear about it.
(And it wasn't my dumptruck, in case you're wondering.)
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