This is not disaster at all... this is a perfect example how to do it right. I don't learn from everything going right, I learn a ton from everything going wrong. You are a hero for not cutting the video to make things smooth. :) Thanks.

This actually ranks as one of your best LED bulb vids (in my humble opinion) purely and simply because it didn't all go to plan, after all, there is finite amount of stuff you can say about these bulbs and their power supply's. Beautifully recovered and explained once you regained your composure. Quite delightful, old chap!

After also watching Julian's video, I thought I would take one apart. Just like you I did exactly the same thing. Also took me 20 mins or so to work out what was going on. You could imagine the pain I was going through, screaming at you all the way from New Zealand with the problem, the 20 minuets seamed more like hours!! So pleased it also took YOU the same time to work it out!! It first I thought they were the series type that needed 70+ volts per strip to light and used a boost converter. After I got to 100 volts I thought I better take another look!!

Cheers Clive - now I don't need to take mine apart :)

Even when things don't quite go to plan, there's always a great learning experience. This one was "when things don't work they are probably broken". (anyhow, I too was waiting for you to over crank the voltage and blow up one or the other LED upon reading "disaster", lol!)

1:21 - Temporarily forgets how to use calculator

I ditched all of my cheapie M830Bs after they wasted hours and caused days worth of grief. Out of four meters (which looked similar outside but had very different internal PCBs) three had dry solder joints in the probe sockets that weren't immediately noticeable. Readings fluctuated wildly depending on the temperature, current, and if the leads were nudged slightly. Resoldering helped but cheap plating on the sockets meant readings changed if you rotated the leads. Two had issues where tapping the range wheel altered readings as you found at 6:10. One day I was nearly tearing my hair out diagnosing a circuit where the same wire measured as 12V in the engine bay but only 2V inside my car. The LCD wasn't tight against the circuit board, and the rise in temperature inside the hot car made the 1 disappear. It was reading 12V all along. Tightening the screws holding the LCD in place helped but soon stripped threads so the problem returned and ruined another day. One of them changed readings if you squeezed the case. Never did figure that one out, but probably a combination of everything above. The fourth one seemed the best of the lot but the range pointer was ambiguous. It had a very defined arrow which at first glance appeared to point to the selected range. But it also had a small dimple (like your meter) at the other end which was the REAL indicator, not easily visible in dim light. Forgot about the weird knob one day, tried measuring battery voltage in current mode and BANG... blew the arse out of it and burnt my hand. I made the decision to scrap them all, saving myself a lot of grief. Time and sanity scarce these days and I'd rather waste neither! I've since bought four small Aneng multimeters to inhabit my scattered toolboxes, which seem far better in every way than the M830Bs. They even have buzzers, backlights and temperature probes.

"No No - I'm talking absolute crap" Such honesty is very refreshing.

Very interesting. Thanks Clive. It really didn't seem like anything screwed up, more like you were working things out and we get to watch. Watching you arrive at conclusions sometimes reinforces the way I think about stuff as well. Fun.

to be fair, electricians confusing mr16 and GU10 has been entertaining for over a decade. (mostly in person tho ). I just want to say i appreciate you sharing this 'wtf is going on' type video. Makes the rest of us mere mortals feel better

Love when things go wrong, I'm tired of everything going smoothly on heavily curated edited KZfaq videos.

I'm a gear guy. Easily several tons of test gear. You teach me, inspire me and make me wonder if I should get an eBay account and lighten my load but increase my ability. Your a hell of a guy. Please keep your lean but brilliant style. There are more than one out here with gear-lock.

It's always a pleasure to find out that something very simple, early on during an experiment has screwed things up downstream. It makes you fell like the real problem solving chimps we are. Great vid

Good one, Clive. I'm so glad to see this sort of thing happen to someone else besides me. That scale of manufacturing is mind-boggling. (to small minds like mine, at least)

South Main Auto? So, you're why his channel was recommended. Thanks Clive.

Love the honesty Clive! Makes for much better viewing & makes me feel better when it never goes to plan which is most of the time 😂 keep up the great work 👍🏼

12V lamp with E27 thread? that has potential for many more disasters!

It's like Diagnosis Murder lol Good video Clive! Glad you figured that out.. cool how they have evolved the LED mouthing from wires to soldering direct to bus bars.

Thanks so much for this video! We've ALL had those days where one little thing seems to be completely halting the whole project until we figure out that tiny detail (like bad solder joints). To all the people thinking "Well, that's why you should be more careful!", half of tinkering with things is going to involve somehow forcing your way into something, be it physically or digitally, so that's not really an option all the time. (Although I would have just taken a soldering iron to the ends of those strips and tried to resolder them at that point, maybe add a touch of flux first to re-bind them - or did you try that to no avail? I uh... I'm clumsy, so I end up doing patch-repairs like that at times. *cough*)

I do like the way you show your WTF moments. if i had this type of teacher when I was trying to get my head around this kind of stuff. I would have felt a lot more better about my abilities. Keep up the good work.

With disaster in the title I was settled in for an exciting explosive packed episode! In that regard, it was a bit of a let down. The info was awesome as always, just not as exciting as the title may lead you to believe . Thanks for another great video!

At least you found the ladies problem!! Great vid Big Clive! I was really hoping you were going to screw it into a 110v socket 😏

I think our best discoveries when everything goes wrong. Well done!

"Theres your problem lady!" Love it ... Big fan of Eric's videos here too. Hello from "New Scotland"! (Nova Scotia)

I tried to build a dc-dc converter very similar to this one the other week.. It went about as well as this video! Although mine was a Linear Technology 1613 SOT23-sized device and seemed to demand microscopic positioning of explicitly SMT support components. It did *not* like strip-board and a DIL-converter one little bit! I _was_ planning to try again with a much more spatially-forgiving design based around a micro controller to provide the pulse which I found on some German fellow's website, but... A couple of moderately expensive failures, one after the other in quick succession has really taken the electronics enthusiasm out of my sails. Maybe I'll try again post-Yule.

I ordered 6 of the clear (glass) globe filament-type 120V lamps for a dining-room fixture. 2 of the lot didn't survive shipping, with the LED bars rattling loose inside the glass. Not a big thing, as the remaining 4 filled the fixture and have been in service for almost 5 years now.

When Eric O says "there's your problem Lady" it's going to be a good video! He's the champ at tracing down electrical problems...

A BIG THANK YOU Clive, your information is very useful, it has helped me immensely, well done

Clive, your statement brought a song by Del Amitri back to my mind, which i have been listening to a bunch of years ago. "And nothing ever happens, nothing happens at all; the needle returns to the start of the song, and we all sing along like before"

Home Depot in the States is selling "EcoSmart Clear Filament Vintage Style LED Light Bulb" in clear and frosted glass but cram all the capacitors and resistors in the space of the Edison screw and between the screw and the capacitors is a layer of plastic. The result is that they get very very hot and die after only a few months/weeks of use. When the first start to die they flicker within the first ten minutes of being turned on for a couple weeks and then one day they don't turn on. I took a couple of failed ones apart and all of them reeked and the capacitors were bulging; one had electrolytic all over inside.

Loved it. I like the ones that don't come out quite as you expected. It's life and shows your living it.

I learn more when things don't work right away, making it work is more fun.

At 2:30 it is almost designed to come apart for maintenance with the cables at the perfect length for inspection! Thanks for the video Big Clive!

Rolling. Action! And here the light goes..Doh! Goes... Doh! Goes....Doh! Goes ON (swears under breath) Carried on like a true Pro. Thoroughly entertaining as always.

Just a reminder. Clive has almost 500k subscribers. And that's AMAZING!

For once whilst watching your extremely entertaining channel I'm glad it's both of us that are confused. Not just me like usual. 😉

Even your disaster videos are interesting, Clive. Perhaps _the_ most interesting! ;-) Thanks.

Love the South Main Auto reference there. Awesome video 👍🏻

Nice shout out to south main auto. We really do watch all the same people as a electronics nerd community, don’t we?

Nice video thank you for making it, big fan of Eric O, I put you in the same super knowledgeable category as him 😀

I love the description and watching it after.. Yes this is like life.. nothing is as it seems.

I liked the lamp, very nice. Even better, it all went wrong! EXCELLENT!

The 'resilience to being bumped about' would be an awesome thing to have in an RV, Trailer or other automotive (high vibration) application.

Love the SMA reference! It's always great when one of your youtube heroes watches another one of your other youtube heroes. The minute Clive brings out a can of brake cleaner and the sound plays, I'm officially done.

I knew nothing at the beginning and certainly nothing in the middle and confused at the end! - Interesting!!

Full Wave Bridge Rectifier - could be operated from AC source such as an outdoor low voltage lighting system? Personally I'm glad you don't edit your videos (much), learning and amusement go together rather well on Big Clive's channel.

Great video made even better with a reference to the fantastic Eric O at South Main Auto's

Alternate title for this video, "Everything you know is wrong" also perfect listening music when not enjoying Mad Scottish Electronics Engineers. Great stuff indeed Clive, my would love to have had a shop teacher like you because of two things, I'd know a lot more on electronics than me and my dad do combind, and we'll I live in Southern Illinois while we have a decent University, High Schools are as rubbish as those shake lamps you did a video on. One, I repeat one teacher in the whole of my school was such a attentive teacher that I never turned homework in due to a very long story, he passed me every year because he knew I was understanding his class well enough that home work was a formality and the tests were what counted. Practicality is more important than formality, paperwork for paperwork's sake is rubbish and has been since bureaucracy gained any traction so since the dawn of modern man. I think we can agree on that point after all the rants you've gone on about certain "Policy Implementation" on the electric guidelines in the UK, Scotland really does seem to produce " Practical, Peppery and proud" people glad I can confirm half my blood comes from the Highlands.

I like these sorts of videos. Makes me feel good about being a mere mortal!

I recently bought one of those style meters and it was completely unusable. Have worn out many over the past 30 years in low power circuits but found a real red lemon from harbor a few weeks ago!

that was a sudden pry and many things can happen... it happens ... Or prying something and cutting wires with pry tool. The final result is good, trace the problem, and keep going

Why not start with measuring the original supply inside the lamp? ;-) Like this video though. Sometimes also someone else is stuck in a kind of loop when doing tiungs...

Interesting video.Nice bumping into you in Poundland :)

Great video :) I liked the 'it's all going wrong' type of vid

I love your videos I love your accent and I love your hand movements thats entertainment by the way there's the American version of your program who speaks highly of you I'm a novice learner thanks !

I love peoples honesty. I did wonder how they could call a filament an LED (light emitting diode) This video breaks it down and explains.

You’ll always have fanny flambeaux, one of my personal favourites

That suspension when you see "disaster" in the video title of a Big Clive video and waiting for the disaster to happen

New subscriber - Your lichtenberg video got me here. Awesome work.

Clive, it always makes me sad when you tear apart stuff that I want to play with :(

“The best-laid plans of mice and men gang aft pear-shaped.” -Burns, Cutts and Brewses

Using an E27 is brilliant. They should put standard AC power plugs on USB devises as well. Just trow it in the stores like that. People don't read so doesn't matter what it says on the thing anyway. It's a whole new form of natural selection.

I think these lamps are ideal in a camping environment, you can use them even with a half dead battery without turning the engine on.

So it consumes more wattage when you lowered the voltage going in, is it possible to make it more efficient when exceeding 12 volts input?

I wasn't sure if I should laugh or cry. Thankfully, turned out for the best.

“There’s your problem lady!” Classic

That's actually a pretty solid Eric impression lol

interesting ! whats the internal diameter of the clear bit ? and the length approx. !

Whatever happened to the old large Amecal meter? Did it blow up?

Disaster! This must be one good smokey vid!

Great save! Always wanted to know what was in these bad boys.

Another great tear down and video. Its brilliant that you show the full process, that we may, if we want to, avoid the problems that you get. I have some questions about about the LED lamps you created. How do I get these to you? Please also enjoy my coffee contribution gift. :)

Well Clive me ol’ mate the error videos are massively interesting (to me at least) as seeing problem solving is very helpful and if not now then in the future for this novice! Bob England

Clive! I'm trying to tell you ....i seen this Video last week & you broke an element disassembling the light! :-)

Clive, screwing up is the best way to learn.

On our ship everything is 450v, I would love to screw one of these in there and see what kind of a mess we get...lol. Thanks for another great video.

That electrolytic capacitor is most likely the input capacitor. I had a bunch of those drivers in the 1W version, which can drive more LED's in series. The magic smoke comes out though when driving 2 LED's in series while lowering the input voltage below 8 to10V. These drivers work best between 12 and 14 V.

Oh my gosh you watch south main auto's youtube!!!!! As do I, both your's and his are great channels to watch.

I thought you were going a bit photonic for a second with the voltage rising and rising. "till it pops" XD

You may have Ham Fists, but mine are pretty much prime beef when it comes to trying to get into things LOL

Clive, keep up the great work with reverse engineering. Look forward to see a lot more in the New Year.

Good troubleshooting episode.

Here in the states, the 12 volt bulbs are used for emergency lighting. The circuit is wired to a 12 volt battery, and automatically come on during a power outage. I always keep a spare bulb on hand, because they all have to work to pass the fire dept inspection. A LED bulb would pull less amps and provide light for a longer period of time

As soon as you cracked it open like that "Big Clive style" I thought you'd have broken one 😂. Based on the fact about 60% of the led filaments ive had from china have turned up broken haha.

The minute you took the lamp apart and cut the LED wires, the service tech in me SCREAMED, "You should have powered the assembly back up and measured the voltage at the LEDs". Then that would have made for a dull Clive video, and we can't have that!!!!! Only sad thing was NO SMOKE....

At least you were able to salvage the video with the discovery of how those LEDs are made up, pretty neat... :) And "XLSemi", totally doesn't sound like a well-endowed person who can't quite get it up.............. :P

... Why were you getting a negative voltage?

I guessed a bulb or connection broke when it snapped apart and I wasn't disappointed lol!

Great video. Thanks.

SouthMainAuto shoutout at 12:52!

The mode switch in the 830b meters does play up, the contacts are cheap. Rotate the switch a few times before use.

I love these LED filaments, I need to do a project with these!

"Now, the top is plastic..." -oh shit, maybe it wasn't! 😅

Great video clive

I like it when things go wrong. I learn more.

ElectroBOOM was also having trouble with turning on a lamp....

You really need a USB microscope camera setup... A SUPER tight zoom would be great for some of these... Thanks for the great learning content!

Videos where things go "wrong" and you have to troubleshoot are way more interesting than just electronic autopsy ones. BTW, I have an item to send to you for autopsy but I can't find a mailing address for you.

Eating buffalo wings and watching BigClive ... Life's good

Clive, I knew the module had to be boost because at lower voltage it needed higher current. Tale tale sign of a boost converter ^^