*Hands tautech a fire extinguisher then turns around and leaves*
mnem
If ya can't beat 'em, at least put the fires out before they take the whole house.
What, scared Bean might find this ^^ ?
I am quite capable of making my own fires and sparks without help from Tek and in case of too much cheek, Jessie the Sneerer will be around to bite people on their bits
OMFG...
Jessie the Sneerer ?!? You have a dog with a SuperVillain name, and it's that little puff of fluff with feet?
You made me snort coffee out my nose with that one... That's better than my cat named
Harley Bitch !!!
A friend of mine built one of them back at university in halls. It used an old TV transformer and fly back and multiplier. Made one hell of a racket and blew the breakers for the entire block at least twice. We found out quickly that this extracted the female members of the block rapidly when the lights went out. Unfortunately the moment they found out that we frequented the electrical engineering course they ran a mile
What course do you do? Err, err, err social sciences!
Edit: arm hardly in pain at all now so off to Andover. Fingers crossed for some TE. Only grabbing one handed stuff today if there is any. No boat anchors
Heh... my first "freeform" project in Tech College was one of those... used one of these old parallel-winding TV flybacks rewound with a few turns of 18ga wire, and powered by a couple MJE3055s in push-pull so I could easily tune the frequency to 15-17Khz to keep the xf running cool. Ish.
I spent some time working with various kinds of glass lamp globes trying to make a proper plasma globe; lots of different spheres and center electrodes turned in the machine shop after school. I never was able to get them to arc internally so gave up and used a 6" clear globe light blub for the final project. This actually worked quite well; with the light out you could see a faint corona on the inside surface, and the arc would follow your finger around the globe quite satisfyingly...
...Unless you just left it sit running for more than a few minutes. As the filament has two "high points", the arc would fixate on one of two spots on the globe if left undisturbed; then it would eventually burn a hole through the globe allowing air inside. Once I discovered this, I made it the last part of my presentation; as the air entered the globe a few molecules at a time and oxidized the edges of the glass, it made an interesting orange glow at the point of ingress for a minute or so.
Long after that project concluded, I finally discovered the culprit with my plasma globes: the natural rubber plug I was using in the base allowed enough current flow across its surface to start an invisible arc almost instantly that leeched off enough charge to prevent the formation of plasma, whether with vacuum or gas. I later used a center electrode made of a spherical SS drawer knob attached to a length of 12ga copper wire inside a piece of laboratory glass tubing through the rubber stopper; this arrangement allowed me to pull a partial vacuum on the globe through the glass tube, then force argon from the welding shop through the tube to displace the rest of the air inside. Then the wire was pulled down the glass tube and sealed up with silicone RTV. It didn't work for long, but it did work.
mnem
tzzzzt.