Trying to measure the short-circuit current of a 230V receptacle was the cause for many blown fuses in my old school
For some odd reason, the classrooms were on breakers, but the shops had Diazed fuses. Thanks to penny-pinching, bureaucracy and who-knows-what-else spare fuses were always in short supply. I never encountered "repaired" fuses, but did have some fun with fuses "borrowed" from "less important circuits". We needed more receptacles for our setup (or at least one closer to our work place, there was only one long extension cord) but our lab teacher told us: "Those don't work, never did while I was here!". We pressed the issue though and got a look at the panel... no fuse for the afflicted circuit! Someone had "borrowed" it!
I don't know how the flukes died, but they ended up giving seriously whacky voltage readings. We had one lab setup where we considered the voltages odd, so we swapped the meters (we had used one for amps and one for volts) and got equally weird but completely different readings! When a third DMM didn't improve the situation I grabbed an analog one and we immediately got the result we expected.
I'm not sure if those Flukes were auto-range, if not they might have been damaged by setting the wrong voltage range I guess.
