styropyro

battery progress

Added 2025-10-04 17:54:46 +0000 UTC

It has been a while since I've updated you all on the batteries so I wanted to share what I've been doing the past couple weeks. The main theme of course has been continuing to work on the switch to get it to close all the way. Doing a bunch of welding on the live circuit has been unpleasant to say the least. I started by adding some huge springs that my 1600lb winch could barely pull back, but this had basically no effect on stopping the switch bounce.

I ended up buying another log splitter in order to have a hydraulic actuator on both the open and close of the switch plates. I spent a bunch of time aligning and reinforcing everything, and added some rails to fight magnetic torque that became apparent on top of the magnetic forces. The first tests of the switch are a partial success. It still bounces at first, but it does hit a steady state and close. Of course, this adds a new issue that holding anything on the blocks is now basically impossible, leading to more oscillations there. I've now measured as high as 176,000 amps.

I think it's time I accept that I cannot tame these currents this time around, and now I'm just going to attempt the rest of the experiments with the switch in its present state. Unfortunately this means a lot of it will fail, but I've come to realize that I can always make more videos with this incredible power supply in the future. I can think of quite a few experiments I could attempt with it, and I've even been wondering if I could pull off nuclear fusion with it. In the meantime though, I need to stick with simpler experiments for the sake of actually finishing a video lol.