Y'ever rub your hair or someone else's hair with a balloon just to see static electricity in action?  I'm assuming there's a chance of static electricity building up normally when we're working on a mod.  but, would putting hair gel in one's hair lessen the chance of static electricity building up?  With hair gel the main ingredient is usually water anyway, plus it would make the hair sticky and/or stiff (yeah I know what i said..), so would it be as effectve or not?

Its no substitute for an anti-static strap. While one's hair does hold plenty of static, so does your skin. You know when you touch a car door or whatever and you get zapped? If you can feel it, its at least 3000V or so. It takes much less than that to destroy an IC or solid-state storage chip.

::) Now understand, This is my opinion.
I have been messing around inside personal computers and Macs, as long as there have been personal computers and Macs. Or sometime in the '70s anyway. I take normal static precautions, such as touching the frame of the case befor I remove any componant. And storing my parts in those shiny anti-static bags. But I have never had an anti-static strap on my wrist.... ever.  And I have never "zapped" anything.  My openion again: if you touch the case frame, and don't go walking around on carpet, you will be at the same potential (electricaly) as the case and componants. And therfore you will not discharge any static to zap anything.

That said, If you normaly use a wrist strap keep using it!  I don't want to hear from someone who lives in Qubec, in a house full of shag carpet, in December say" anil8tor said not to use a wrist strap, and I killed my mac"

Openions expressed in this post are those of the author, and do not express the openion of Macmod or any of its employees (except anil8tor) :P

Agreed Anil8tor.  I used a strap once....and broke it.  Havent used it since.  I use a antic static pad, bags, etc.  I too touch the case frame (while its plugged in), then unplug and remove components.  You have to be smart about it, but there is overkill.

I would love to test the theory.  Rub feet on carpet, hands on hair, whatever.  Then man handle a pci card.  Test it and find out whats up.  I just happened to have an old scsi card begging to be zapped! >:D

The damge caused by zapping boards is not necessarily immediate or obvious. It can cause boards to fail further down the line, whereas they might otherwise have run fine alot longer.

all you need to do is touch metal first and be gentle.  thats it.

I also just make sure to touch the heatsink before touching any of the components. 

Ok but if I want to be REALLY safe, I use jumper cables AND hair gel >:D

then you should spin in a circle 3 times then turn the light switch on and off 37 times.  after that you are grounded 

just make sure your spinning in a circle is not on a carpetted floor ...

I have the good fortune to work for Sun this year as an intern in the some of their labs and part of my job is working with a lot with static sensitive devices from your simple PCI card or IDE disk up to System boards from prototype hardware running to Hundreds of thousands of pounds worth. We ALWAYS wear static straps, we have them attached to every single rack in the lab. Components don't generally fail immediately but a build up over time can often cause intermittent faults. So while you most likely will get away without using a static strap most of the time. For the people on this site who do a lot of fiddling with their hardware, its a good risk reducer, static straps cost very little and hardware can be expensive! and I'm sure we all know that the most annoying problem is an intermittent one!

I loaned my friend a hard drive, and I gave it to him in a static bag. About a week later he pulled the hard drive out of his fleas pocket, not in the static bag... weather he killed the hard drive and was using that for an excuse, or the static killed it I don't know, but he owes me a 60GB laptop hard drive now. That drive was getting old anyway...