styropyro

pole pig wired up

The distribution transformer is all wired up for the copper laser now! It's quite overkill but at least I won't be bottlenecked by voltage or power limits. Now I have to mount the laser tube to something that won't arc over when it's being blasted by 30,000 volts at over 1000 amps.

penny laser progress

I apologize for the lack of updates but there has been a lot of progress on the penny laser project and I'm almost ready for the first test run! For the power supply, I'm using the same "pole pig" distribution transformer as from the macrowave video, and I'm going to attempt to switch the laser with the angle grinder based rotary spark gap that I used in my "overclocked plasma globe" project years ago. Since quenching the spark gap may be an issue, I decided on adding some resistance between ...

i heard you like lead

300 more car batteries were just delivered to my lab. It's time to make lightning currents look weak by comparison.

more vid updates

Unfortunately I was missed by most of the snow that was forecast for me, and nearly all of it fell during daylight, so I didn't get many more snow laser clips. I'm going to hold out one more month for the shot at snow opportunities, and if I don't get snow by then, I'll just post the video with the shots I did manage to get. I'm sorry to delay this once again. I picked the worst winter of my entire life to shoot this video. I can't wait to finally finish it and never think about it again.
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light bulb and snow

it looks like it is FINALLY going to snow here this week, which means I'll hopefully get the last clips I need for the laser video. In the meantime, I've been playing with the huge lightbulb, and it has been a lot of fun.

really big light bulb

I've hit a standstill with the handheld laser video since I'm still waiting on snow here. I still think it's worth holding out for snow since the visual effects are just so good, but of course there's a chance it just doesn't happen. I'm really in no hurry to post the vid though so I guess I'll take my chances.

In the meantime I acquired this 24,000 watt halogen incandescent light bulb. As far as I can tell, this is the highest power bulb of its type that has been in commercial producti...

laser bottle opener

lasers are such a useful kitchen tool

250W laser in snow

I briefly got to play with my laser in snow the other day, but by the time I had my camera settings dialed in, the snow stopped falling. There are still many more shots I want to get in the snow, so I really hope I get another opportunity soon. Snow has been scarce here this season.

fun with laser

This laser has completely surprised me with what it can melt and burn. It goes FAR beyond the capabilities of the 100W laser and has taken on materials I never imagined it would defeat. When it comes to metals, it is even comparing to the macrowave in many regards!

In this clip, I shoot a penny with the laser, and it actually manages to ignite! The funny thing is that I can't get a penny to ignite with a torch, even if I drill a hole in the penny first. The laser must be reaching extre...

big lens added

I mounted the big f-theta lens from the first radar gun laser to the new one, and was able to quickly melt through a penny. I couldn't get a penny to melt at all with the first laser! Now I'm curious to see what other metal things I can melt with it.

big laser

I rebuilt the handheld laser using a single one of the newest arrays and I'm quite happy with the results. I was able to clean up a bunch of the stuff that was hanging on the outside and now it looks sooo much better than it did the first attempt. Without the clanky optical mounts on front, there is less that can fail on it now. Hopefully this one holds up for the video!

Output power is around 250W. It's not the 400W I planned for, but it is brighter than the original design. The colo...

death star laser TV

I wasn't able to do much work in the shop the past few weeks due to some family stuff that came up, however, I did score something really cool recently. This is a Prysm laser phosphor display, with its internal light engine shown in the first pic. It is basically a CRT TV but with the electron beam replaced by a powerful laser beam. This technology never took off and the company went bankrupt, but it was a really cool idea.

I actually bought one of the light engines in these things yea...

big lasers

While reading and gathering equipment for the "penny laser" project, I decided to revisit the giant handheld laser that failed on me earlier this year. I tore it down once again, and like the previous failures, I could not figure out what went wrong. My top guess is that something shorted through the case, as everything was jam packed in there.

Moving forward, I am considering downgrading this project to a single array, mostly to free up space inside the laser. As disappointing as this...

new video! testing cursed fuse-less fireworks from the 1940s

in this video i test some old "torpedo" fireworks which are basically shock sensitive m80s. I found these in the junk I inherited from my grandpa when he passed away, although he did actually give me some when he was still around. Enjoy!

I'm hoping to make more quick videos like this between big projects. The plan is to repurpose my shorts channel for this kind of content.

incoherent ramblings

The macrowave video turned out to be more popular than I expected! It seemed like a project that I was just doing for my own entertainment, but I’m glad to see so many others found it interesting as well. Building it was easy and filming went quickly, although assembling all the footage into a coherent video ended up pretty time consuming. Either way, there will be more microwave themed content in the future.

I’ve been wanting to do more exploration of the overlap of chemistry and e...

new video! 20,000 watt microwave oven

the full video is finally here! this was a fun video to make but the amount of broken glass produced was insane lol. i hope you all enjoy it!

new short vid

full vid coming very soon, so enjoy this short while you wait

video nearly finished!

The video is nearly done! I only need to voice over a few more parts before I have a draft completed. In the meantime, here's a clip from an attempt at synthesizing ruby.

finishing up the macrowave experiments

After a nightmare day of filming where all the wrong things kept exploding, I had a very successful day where everything worked perfectly. Of particular note is that I finally squeezed a rich indigo color out of indium plasma, and it took alloying it with a little bit of gallium to do so. At this point I've tried cooking and ionizing all the main stuff I wanted to do, although I'll still try a few more random things as well as do a short segment on EMPing stuff. I've also decided to save audi...

grape

this classic demo is a lot more fun at high power

best blue orb so far

i've tried all sorts of chemicals and metals but my best blue orb has actually just been this aluminum foil in a large beaker

20kW microwave vs indium wire

it's been challenging to get pretty colors out of the high power microwave plasmas, mostly due to the extreme temperatures involved. I'm going to try using bigger beakers to lower the plasma densities and see if that helps. I will say I'm astonished how well these beakers hold up to the plasmas. I know they are damaged, but it's crazy they don't explode immediately.

As for color generation, I've had some brief success with indium as well as copper + polyvinyl chloride. I was surprised...

foil fun

also only running at 12kW here. the funny thing is that the beaker survived this, but the glass dish below it exploded after i turned off the camera

that was quick

light bulb in the macrowave. "only" running at 12kW here

finally a working setup

I've been playing around with my huge magnetrons and finally came up with a working macrowave setup. I used a vintage "radarange" microwave to house the magnetron, which fit perfectly in the waveguide without modifications. Playing the balancing act of powering it up without melting my variac or the tube filament turned out to be tricky though. My variac is rated for 33 amps yet I was pulling 100 amps in the previous setup. In the new configuration I'm keeping it around 80A which should be fi...

faraday helmet

I don't want to boil my corneas with microwaves so I made this faraday helmet here. This is actually the same helmet from my laser bazooka video, but since I have better laser eye protection now, I decided to repurpose it for this project.

first magnetron experiments

For my first experiments with my huge magnetrons, I jammed one into a microwave oven and powered it up with a "pole pig" distribution transformer. Due to a poor fit with the oven waveguide, it flashed over at about 4kW in, so I'll have to modify the waveguide or simply find another oven housing that fits it better. If I can manage to run it at the 16kW rating in an oven, it'll should be able to cook food and other silly things at a super fast rate. The plan after this is to then play aro...

good news and bad news

I have good news and bad news. The good news is that I scored some monster magnetrons recently. In fact, I was searching for this specific type of magnetron for years, and then recently a fellow high voltage nerd tipped me off to some that were for sale on ebay. These guys are rated for 10kW output power of microwave radiation. That's more than ten times higher than what's found in a standard microwave oven! I have a lot of things I want to try with these, but highest on the list is making an...

tick vs laser

this tick tried to bite me, so i popped it with a laser

storm cleanup

a huge storm came through recently and toppled trees all over the place. one just BARELY missed my workshop too! it took long enough to clean up the trails here so I can't imagine what kind of setback it would have been if my shop got hit. at least now I have enough wood to burn for a decade, but too bad my only log splitter is being used to switch 100 car batteries lol

oh and as for the ophelia vid, unfortunately i've only seen her once in the past couple weeks so that vid has been p...