styropyro

battery plasma cutting

slicing a steel barrel lid with the car batteries.

this video has been brutal to edit. there is sooo much footage and i shot it without any idea of how the video was going to go together. usually i have an idea of what to expect when I film a project, but here I had to just try stuff and roll the camera. plus the 60V experiments turned out way better than at 12V, so I'll be throwing out the vast majority of what I filmed during the first two entire months. i can't believe how long it's ...

attempting to pop a SCR

it took me 3 attempts to pop a SCR with the car batteries. that was one surprisingly tough piece of silicon! 

laser fly swatter video with Allen Pan!

My first in-person collab video with Allen Pan and the Backyard Scientist! They also make an appearance in my soon to be released video with my car battery bank! 

video progress

this battery video has been a huge pain to edit since there is so much footage to deal with. that being said, it is turning out really cool! i'm going to start posting a few clips here as I finish it up.

In this clip, a threaded galvanized steel rod heats so quickly that the zinc boils off faster than it can burn in air. There was an initial peak current of 30kA, ending around 10kA when the rod finally exploded 0.2 seconds later.

This is lightning levels of current!

more battery fun

i've done a bunch of experiments with the battery bank the past week. the backyard scientist and allen pan stopped by and made an appearance in the vid too which was pretty fun. my biggest issues now have been related to the giant magnetic field tearing apart my setups, but I seem to have solved that by bolting everything to a big wood board. i still worry the cables are going to rip themselves off the batteries though.

i ended up detonating my fuse bank when i had a giant bolt conduct ...

new video! intercepting a dangerous wedge tornado

This was probably my most dangerous storm chase 😅 I got rained out again on the battery project so I went ahead and threw this vid together of my tornado intercept from Sunday. Enjoy!

more battery fun

It took me an entire week to rewire the batteries for a series parallel connection of 60V. Why so long? I meticulously sanded and cleaned every single contact before joining, as well as added some bus bars and new cables to handle the higher concentration of current in the stack. Since contact resistance is one of the most limiting parameters of these experiments, I figured I might as well do whatever I can to minimize it. 

It started raining within minutes of finishing the last co...

15000 amps

It seems I'm limited to about 15kA in an all parallel arrangement with my batteries, implying a total circuit resistance of a little under 0.001 ohm. This has been able to produce some pretty incredible effects, but honestly I was hoping for more current than that. I'm going to rewire the battery bank for a 5 series, 20 parallel arrangement, which should overcome that resistance for substantially higher current. Stay tuned!

pics from open sauce!

I just got home from open sauce and wanted to share a few pics with you! I had a bunch of fun meeting so many fans as well as other creators I've loved for years. I'm already looking forward to next year!

I got to do a panel with the Backyard Scientist, Colin Furze, the Hacksmith, and Electroboom discussing the dangerous stuff we do. That was one of my favorite events! If I can find a recording of this talk, I'll be sure to share it with you guys. 

In the 3rd pic I got to see...

the omega switch

I estimate the short circuit current on my car battery bank to be 120,000 amps. How on earth do you switch that kind of current? I considered all sorts of options, from huge MOSFET banks to pneumatic devices and even some sort of mercury filled chamber, but I ended up settling on modifying a wood splitter.

I met up with my friend Josh to build this crazy device since he is an excellent welder and fabricator. Fun fact, this is the same guy from those nearly 20 year old vids of me blowing...

delays!

I wish I had more video updates to give you at this point but unfortunately, I've been having a terrible time receiving parts in a timely manner! It seems sellers are either clueless or never the ones actually shipping their items. I ordered some big copper blocks to use as switch contacts only to find out later that the seller didn't actually have them in stock. I also ordered a bunch of battery lugs for wiring the rest of the bank but was sent the wrong size, and the return process on that ...

open sauce

I wanted to let you all know that I will be at Open Sauce! https://opensauce.live/

A bunch of STEM YouTube creators are going to be there, and it's looking like it's going to be a fun event. I will be talking on a panel as well as leading some smaller workshops. I'm looking forward to meeting fans there as well as a bunch of creators I like!

As for my battery video, it has turned out to be quite the engineering projec...

updates

It's been a while since I've given you guys updates so here's some news! In my next video, I'm going to connect 100 car batteries in parallel and do a bunch of experiments with huge currents. This includes melting stuff, making big magnetic fields, and also attempting a big carbon arc lamp. Now this wasn't my idea, it's actually a crazy sponsorship unlike anything I've done before. The company AnyDesk literally just wants to see what crazy stuff I can pull off with a huge bank of car batterie...

"go smack the death machine"

funny clip from when I was firing up the soviet death machine with a friend for the first time after my move. the relay that switches the soft start circuit was buzzing loudly, so I had to smack it a few times to get it to shut up. it's funny how well "percussive maintenance" works sometimes.

random after video ramblings

part 4 of the chemical formulary series was a big hit on my channel! this pretty much guarantees a part 5 at some point, but i'll need to post some laser and electricity vids before that.

after i post a vid, i usually take some time to work on non-YT related things, with a large part of that relating to gardening. i actually received a shipment of 500 bare root saplings when i was still working on the video, and since i needed to finish that first, i ended up jamming them all in my frid...

new vid! watch it before it's age restricted!

patreon early viewing of my new chemical formulary video! YT is giving me a fit with this one so I expect this upload to be age restricted before long. at least they are giving me a timestamp, and it's for when i light the "smoke pot" recipe which is one of the tamest recipes in this episode lol. i might just omit the part where i ignite it since the rest of the recipe made some good jokes

(it may take a few minutes before this link works)

delicious chemicals

cheese? or fatal dose of hexavalent chromium?
lemon candy? or radioactive crystals?
blueberry jelly? or tetraamminecopper(II) sulfate monohydrate?
cheese powder? or even more chromium(VI)?

as you can tell, chemical formulary part 4 filming is going well. i've actually stumbled across the worst recipe i've ever seen in this book series, but i probably shouldn't spoil that one yet :D

chemical formulary progress

a sneak peak at some chemical formulary experiments! the first pic shows a piece of coal that has been coated with a thin film of prussian blue per one of the recipes. i'm shocked how beautiful it turned out! it's hard to capture the iridescence properly on camera but it's an incredible effect. the second pic shows a copper ammonia complex that i'm crashing out of solution in my freezer. yeah i know you aren't supposed to keep food and science in the same freezer, but my lab, my rules :p more...

chemical formulary part 4

i've been reading through my chemical formulary books again recently and i've come across several more hilarious recipes. my chemical formulary videos are fun to make and relatively easy to film so i'll probably go ahead and commit to doing part 4 of this series as my next video. i still haven't settled on which recipes to try this time around, but i sure do have a lot of options to choose from! 

FYI, the first 10 books of the chemical formulary are archived and searchable online v...

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 probabili...

new video!! is it the volts or amps that kill?

i've finished my new video less than 2 months after my last upload, which is close to a record for me lol. hopefully you enjoy it! now to unleash the horrors of MS paint to make a thumbnail for it before making the vid public. 

getting zapped by a tesla coil

next video is coming along nicely and I expect it to be finished in a week or so!

One of the demos I tried in my vid was touching the arc of my 15kW vacuum tube tesla coil. Yeah, yeah, it is dumb to do, but it's funny that something that looks and sounds so scary isn't lethal to touch. I used a pointy steel file to try to distance myself from the steel-melting arc, but the arc jumped straight to me a few times and left me with some little burns lol.

quick outdoor run of eye searing goodness

here's a quick clip showing the monster tube coil running outside. those are some of the brightest arcs you'll ever see from a tesla coil :) 

grounding and eye searing goodness

I hammered in an 8ft grounding rod outside my shop the other day, and although it sucked to do, it's allowed me to bring some of my fun plasma devices outside. It seemed to improve the output of my monster vacuum tube tesla coil, while also preventing back feeding big RF voltages onto my mains wiring.

Grounding is a surprisingly complicated subject when it comes to tesla coils and RF. Normally when you ground something using mains ground, it means you are locking it to 0 volts. However,...

new video! chasing a rare January tornado outbreak

Yesterday I went storm chasing and captured an extremely rare January tornado outbreak! It was one of the best storm chases I've ever went on. I think I got a little too excited in the vid but the rarity of an event like this really appealed to my weather nerd senses lol.

I doubt I'll make this vid public on my main channel, even though it is one of the coolest things I've ever filmed IMO. Maybe it's time I make yet another channel for vids like these. hmmmm

more tube fun and upcoming video

I've made more improvements to my vacuum tube tesla coil setup and have also settled on a video idea where it'll be relevant. I want to make a long version of my short vid "is it the volts or amps that kill" (link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wx6-ysokJU )

That vid was surprisingly controversial, with lots of people with "professional" experience calling me wrong in the comment section. I'd love to p...

vacuum tube insanity

i used the new meter to take some measurements and I found that I was driving the grid way too hard in my setup. fixing this brought on a whole new set of issues, but the performance is unbelievable when parts of it aren't exploding off. it feels like i'm operating a plasma weapon.

an unfortunate part about vacuum tube tesla coils is that they are a hard sell when it comes to making videos that people will be interested in. this thing already is one of the most impressive things I've bu...

new equipment

when it comes to my vacuum tube creations, most of what I have done so far has been a product of trial and error. part of that is the inherent nature of plasma devices. unlike many circuits nowadays, these are extremely difficult to simulate since the circuit's load is highly complex and variable. although this can be frustrating, it does lead to a whole art form of making plasma generating circuits.

the other big issue with these circuits is that they are difficult to probe. such high ...

hot vacuum tube tesla coil

I decided to break out the vacuum tubes again and build a classic vacuum tube tesla coil circuit. I seem to have gotten lucky picking circuit values because this thing is running HOT. The screwdriver I'm using as an output electrode is melting quickly at 9kW into the circuit.

My favorite thing about the classic VTTC circuit is its ability to make a hot arc to a grounded electrode, and this coil is a prime example of that. The circuit features a half wave voltage doubler which means the ...

thanks for the input on the vid

i appreciate the input on the music track in my new vid. i ended up getting rid of the music except for in the build compilation since it felt too distracting. here's the new and likely final version. i also rendered this one in 4k this time. it's funny because i've been filming 4k for a while now but only so i could make crops that would stay HD. i figure i might as well just start rendering vids in 4k since some people like that. i don't even have a 4k monitor to watch it that way myself th...