ramblings

After I publish a vid, I usually take a few days off to work outside. An ongoing project here is to beat down some of the most aggressive invasive shrubs from taking over everything. While removing honeysuckle the other day, I stumbled across this nice buck skull that I'll probably use as a shop decoration.

As for the next YT vid, I'm still deciding what I want to commit to next. I've been trying to upload more frequently, which makes me hesitant to start a project with a high probability of failure. Unfortunately, like most YT creators, my ad revenue is down substantially recently. I still haven't broken even on the costs that went into my last video. I haven't done sponsored videos in years, but I'm pretty much forced to start doing them again in order to pay the bills. Sorry about that.

I have a couple planned projects that require an enormous vacuum tube. One of those is a monster version of my demon circuit, and the other is a world record breaking vacuum tube tesla coil. I bought the pictured triode on ebay rated for a whopping 70kW of dissipation. Unfortunately, the filament was destroyed in the mail, and it's totally unusable. Oof.

Another project I want to tackle sooner than later is the fusion laser project. I've mentioned before that I have a big set of optical amplifiers left over from an early government attempt at inertial confinement fusion. I want to use them as a standalone laser with huge pulse energy. I've started working on the math of my best approach to doing this. It's kinda nerve racking approaching this project, mostly due to the rarity of parts. If I blow up a lamp or shatter my Nd:glass rod, I'll likely never find a replacement and the project will be scrapped. Since I'm going to need a huge capacitor bank to run it, I'm also concurrently designing a Marx generator stack that I'm hoping to power a sort of lightning cannon later on. Buying a set of capacitors that could be used for both projects would certainly optimize cost and space. I'm hoping to finish the math for this over the next few days so I can begin capacitor shopping.

In the meantime, it looks like I'm going to be doing some storm chasing soon. The upcoming weather pattern looks incredibly ominous for the time of year. I'm expecting potentially multiple tornado outbreaks in the central and southern US in the coming weeks, and I hope to document them if they end up occurring.

Well that was long winded lol. More fun mad science to come soon, just not sure which flavor yet. Stay tuned!