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Anyone familiar with High voltage

  • Thread starter I am Bob
  • Start date

I am Bob

Not really
Yes, I know quite a bit about it, I work with it in my job.
Best advice is to educate yourself before you start playing with it.
Learn some basic electricity first, get familiar with how it works and what it can do to you.
Ask questions first.

Just for fun you are invited to watch my YouTube video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdl7CG69EVs

Yes, this could kill if used unwisely.
Fortunately I have chosen to use my powers for good.
 
Nice! that was just a microwave transformer?

I am currently reading a college textbook on electricity (mainly because I can't wrap the primary on my transformer yet) so hopefully I won't do anything stupid...
 
No, it was a transformer I built specifically to my customer's specifications.
Much larger and more powerful than a microwave oven transformer.
Read all you can and ask lots of questions.
Experiment with low voltage stuff first until you know what you are doing before you move on to the dangerous stuff.
 
Rocketcaver is 110% right. You need to start with something simpler and more low-powered before you get to hacking. Those instructions look a little... casual. The author is assuming you already know what you're doing. I'm also suspicious of the speaker project - in particularly, the part where the guy is like, "And to all who built the plasma speaker and found out it soon failed, please accept my apology for wasting your time and money from me posting a bad design." I know this stuff looks cool, but you should probably try some plans that have been published in a project book or magazine or the like - something a publisher approved, where there was ideally some fact-checking, and the author gave their real name and accepted some degree of liability for the information they're providing.
Also, if you need a taser, just buy one. They're cheap and readily available these days. I wouldn't suggest using those plans unless you need to be the target of a lawsuit.
~Joe
 
On a slightly tangental note, if you really want to build a Tesla coil, I have a book with much better plans than those - Build Your Own Laser, Phaser, Ion Ray Gun and Other Working Space Age Projects by Iannini. (Try to ignore that the cover art looks like it came from a late 70's Dungeons and Dragons sci-fi supplement.) Still not really a starter project, even with good plans. I have another book that is similar (I think it's by the same publisher) but it's entirely about lasers and light. There are a number of interesting holography projects that might be a better place to start. Kind of expensive though - it's much easier to salvage working electrical parts than optics.
I tried to build a Tesla coil with a friend a few years back, but it turns out that it's very difficult to make the actual coils without a machine shop and a good degree of skill. We hand-wound a few before figuring this out; the most successful result was when the wires started to melt without our tripping circuit breakers or sending showers of sparks across the garage.
~Joe
 
i do... best song on there is TNT...................;)

Alex
 
Thanks, I'll look into it. I have a rocket scientist and a computer engineer that will most likely be helping me with the coil.
 
  • #10
I built the tesla coil that Instructable is based on back in 1982.
It does work, but not very well. There are much better designs out there.
If you are interested in building tesla coils, I recommend "The Tesla Coil Book, How they work and how they are built" by Brent Turner. It's chock full of the theory behind how they work as well as lots of safety information. He gives a few designs that you can use to build some very nice coils, but if you study the book he will teach you how to design your own.
Be safe.
 
  • #11
I tried to build a Tesla coil with a friend a few years back, but it turns out that it's very difficult to make the actual coils without a machine shop and a good degree of skill. We hand-wound a few before figuring this out; the most successful result was when the wires started to melt without our tripping circuit breakers or sending showers of sparks across the garage.
~Joe

I'd like to see THAT on YouTube! :-O
 
  • #12
Haha - I was just glad the building never caught fire. Had a few close calls, one with a wooden workbench and another with some rags we made the mistake of leaving around. Pro tip - keep your workspace very clean!
~Joe
 
  • #13
Funny this should come up! I just bought a small 2.8 million volt taser to dissasemble and mount on something else for a cool sci-fi project.

I want to make the contacts remote from the electronics /power pack with longer leads. There are several electrified items I want to make, though I'm not one of them! :D

Electronics aren't the only dangerous thing one can do at home. I was making some embedded nepenthes pitchers in clear polyester resin and the stuff heated up so hot it boiled all the color out of the 8" N. hamata pitcher I was working on and the glass I was using to mold the piece started smoking. Had I added just a tad more catalyst and gone for a walk as it cured I might have been able to have a nice warm fire!
 
  • #14
LOL - I have taser plans that include a spring-loaded mechanism to launch the contacts up to ten feet. The abstract notes that there are tasers which use explosives to launch the contacts, but a weapon that uses chemical propellant is considered a firearm by federal law. I bet you could mount it on an RC car or something, though. :D
~Joe
 
  • #15
Actually I just want to mount the leads on something other than the front of the factory housing, not have them launch or anything like that. I'm curious if the arc will electrify a larger, solid metal piece if the contacts are mounted so the arc has to pass through the metal. Also, will the larger metal piece have a visible arc covering it? I.E. "look" electrified.
 
  • #16
Some metals luminesce (or is it phosphoresce?) when electrified, like tungsten and other metals used as lightbulb filaments. What we think of as visible electricity is actually electrified air, I believe. You might find some useful information if you research Jacob's Ladders, which are those antenna-looking things with lightning arcing between them in old monster movies and such. I think you could get an arc if you connect one lead to the plate and put another nearby, but I'm not sure it will give you the results you're looking for. In ordinary air, the arc will tend to choose the shortest path, so it will more or less be a straight line between the plate and the other contact. If I recall, those plasma ball things where the arcs swirl around use a partial vacuum or some sort of noble gas or something to even out the resistance and allow the arcs to drift.
~Joe
 
  • #17
You only get that "electrified look" in the movies.
In reality you need a near vacuum and some interesting gasses.
Your taser will give you some interesting arcs, but just point to point, not streaming into the air.
A tesla coil will give you streamers, but it's hardly portable.
 
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