Anyone like electrical sparks?

Some pretty crazy stuff with the sparks in the pool. and standing inside a Faraday cage.. now that would have to be pretty intense..
 
I think this link has been posted before - but it is such an interesting site, here it is again for those interested.

http://www.electricstuff.co.uk/

Plenty of electrical destruction / huge sparks - EHT circuit construction details :naughty: and more...

John
 
Wow. That's some cool stuff. I've always loved Tesla coils. Back when I was in Junior HS (now called "middle school") my teacher had a 200KV unit he let me take home over the weekend from time to time. Over the years, I've wanted to build one of my own, but I never have and I don't know why. My research went as far as locating THIS Java enabled coil designer page. I wish I would have at least secured the materials (especially the many hundreds of feet of copper wire) before the price of copper went so high.
 
I was just about to post that the U tube link contains electronjohn's avatar, and then who shows up? :D
 
Those are SO much fun, built a 6" one as akid and had a lot of fun with it till the folks saw what we were doing!! Parrtypoopers. Tesla was one of the most intelligent if not the most intelligent men the wolrd has ever seen. Very Underrated Man IMHO !!
 
I secured the capacitors and the NSTs to build an entry level model but never quite got it done.

I've messed around with charging up some big caps and all...probably lucky I'm stll around or don't have some flesh missing.

The sparks are cool, but so is the awesome force of the "coin shrinker" high current discharge stuff.
 
I've seen that one before SAE.. pretty damn impressive. Using two pole pigs.. I wonder what it costs him to flip the switch on that for 5 minutes...
 
I use a CFL to test the HV supplies on my old tube rectified TVs.... So far I haven't been zapped too bad yet.

I always wanted to build a Jacob's Ladder
 
Me and a friend buit a jacobs ladder with a neon sign transformer.. They are pretty cool.. ozone smells pretty cool from them too..
 
When I was living in my college dorm, a guy down the hallway also built a Jacob's ladder powered by a neon light transformer. It was very finicky to set up and get it to activate properly. Most of the time it would require several minutes of adjusting the narrow electrode-gap at the bottom of the 'V'-shaped paired conductors to get the device to begin arcing. Neat device to watch and listen to as it operated.
 
I've had a neon transformer in the garage, for years, which is to be used for a ladder. Maybe this winter it'll get done. Cold weather is supposed to be the best to operate in, IIRC.
 
I have a humongous transformer that my father-in-law removed from an Amana RadarRange microwave oven of mid 1960's vintage. There are 8-10 legs/taps coming out of the transformer. This device is a 10"x10"x10" cube that weighs about 60 pounds. It also has a ³⁄₈" copper tube running through the core for liquid cooling. The cooling tube ran to a small 6"x12" finned aluminum radiator.

This is one serious transformer that powered a beefy microwave oven that spelled out 'electrocution' just by looking at the oven's control boards and heavy-duty finger-sized ceramic fuses. From the factory new, the oven door did not have a glass pane covering the wire-mesh screen in the window opening of the door. It looked to me, that if you pressed your finger tip very hard to the wire mesh, you could extrude some of your finger-tip skin through the mesh and microwave it whenever the oven was in use. :no:

The holes in the mesh were about ³⁄₃₂" (~3 mm) in diameter. Definitely not the fine mesh behind the door window manufactured in microwave ovens now.

I often wondered if this transformer could be used to make a Jacob's ladder or power a Tesla coil?
 
SAE2922 said:
I have a humongous transformer that my father-in-law removed from an Amana RadarRange microwave oven of mid 1960's vintage. There are 8-10 legs/taps coming out of the transformer. This device is a 10"x10"x10" cube that weighs about 60 pounds. It also has a ³⁄₈" copper tube running through the core for liquid cooling. The cooling tube ran to a small 6"x12" finned aluminum radiator.

This is one serious transformer that powered a beefy microwave oven that spelled out 'electrocution' just by looking at the oven's control boards and heavy-duty finger-sized ceramic fuses. From the factory new, the oven door did not have a glass pane covering the wire-mesh screen in the window opening of the door. It looked to me, that if you pressed your finger tip very hard to the wire mesh, you could extrude some of your finger-tip skin through the mesh and microwave it whenever the oven was in use. :no:

The holes in the mesh were about ³⁄₃₂" (~3 mm) in diameter. Definitely not the fine mesh behind the door window manufactured in microwave ovens now.

I often wondered if this transformer could be used to make a Jacob's ladder or power a Tesla coil?
Click to expand...

You need to be EXTREMELY careful with microwave oven transfomers. The voltage isn't as high as a neon sign transfomer, but there is much more current capability. Also, neon sign transformers are current limited due to shunts in the core whereas microwave oven transfomers are not.

All this spells likely FATAL shock from microwave transformer whereas a neon sign transformer probably will just knock you on your ass.

As to the Jacobs Ladder, you'd need to put some type of current limiting in the primary circuit of the microwave oven transformer because once the arc establishes it becomes very low impedance - nearly short circuit and the current draw of the primary will skyrocket. If that's not enough, the "mere" 2kV or so doesn't make a very long arc.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

jimmytwos
greetings from the uk
Replies
18
Views
834
Ampzilla
Ampzilla
jdmccall
Too Much Music?
Replies
3
Views
169
kirk57
kirk57
krimney
Buying a house....
Replies
13
Views
597
krimney
krimney
toxcrusadr
The Garage Mahal
2 3 4
Replies
62
Views
3K
bobabode
bobabode
blhagstrom
Felt like American Pickers
2 3
Replies
44
Views
4K
blhagstrom
blhagstrom
Back
Top Bottom