styropyro

cool failed project

I built this CW solid state tesla coil for experimenting with high voltage and fire. It is self tuning to some degree, but unfortunately I couldn't get it to lock on a big enough frequency range for use with chaotic loads like fire. That being said, the arc from this coil is quite fire-like, and is pretty cool on its own.

I ended up building an unusual vacuum tube based design that handled powering burning stuff like a champ, but even then, my power hookup was too limited to do the ide...

new lab

Finally some good news! I found a suitable place for a new lab and I'll be moving in this month. It's a big shop in the middle of nowhere that'll be perfect for my experiments. The shop needs some work before I can use it, but it won't be long till I'm shooting videos again! I've already spent the past week carefully packing my fragile equipment and parts, and I still have much more packing to do. The first thing I'm going to do is have the 400A service from the house dragged into the shop, a...

chemical formulary pt.3 progress

As I go through the chemical formulary book again, successful experiments have been rare. The recipe that worked the best so far is definitely this silver plating formula. It deposited a beautiful silver layer on this beaker as well as the glass slides I had in the solution.

Of the failures, the worst so far is the "fuse alloy" that does not melt at the cited temperature. In fact, after doing some reading, it turns out that no combination of Bi, Pb, and Sn will melt at a temperature tha...

tempting fate

the formulary saga has been a long one. I said I was going to do a formulary part 3 vid in the past, but then my first two vids got demonetized and blacklisted AGAIN so I became hesitant. This book is too much fun though, so I'm finally going to do part 3 anyway. I do know that YT was not a fan of the homemade cannon, so I'll lay off of the artillery this time and hope YT doesn't ban me. stay tuned!

safety third podcast

My first episode with the safety third podcast is up! Unfortunately I screwed up my mic settings before recording but you should be able to make out what I say most of the time lol. Subsequent episodes will have better audio. 

new video! patreon exclusive early viewing

here's my final draft of the laser oven video! it's silly but I had fun filming it. hopefully this settles all the laser cooking requests I get on my channel. :D

building the laser oven

I'm in a weird spot where my editing has caught up to my filming on my new video. Usually I wait till nearly all of the video is shot before editing, but because I usually only film speaking parts one day a week in my shop (neighbors are too noisy mon-sat) I figured I'd take a different approach this time.

The full video is in two parts. Between them is this uhhh...weird interlude that I'm posting here :p 

mmm donuts

Toroidal transformers are so convenient for hobby projects. Need a voltage/current combination that you can't produce with power supplies you already have on hand? No problem! Just wrap some wire around a toroidal transformer until the output on the new coil meets the requirements you need. I don't even remove the original secondary coil, I just wrap the new one around it.

I first used this technique to drive the high current filaments on my vacuum tubes (a couple of them 100A+), but in...

safety third podcast

oh yeah, I was a guest on the "Safety Third" podcast recently with William Osman, the Backyard Scientist, and I Did a Thing. I'm not sure when it will go live, but I'll be sure to let you guys know! 

microwave fun

this was the first time I was able to expose a camera to a bunch of microwave radiation without killing it :D 

distracted by magnetrons

if I wasn't having so much fun "upgrading" this microwave, I would have finished the laser oven by now. I think I'll have to cut my magnetron fun early in order to finish the laser oven, but now I want to find a huge CW magnetron to play around with. Maybe a mega-microwave could be a future vid after this one?? another fun idea with magnetrons would be building a sulfur plasma lamp, a really cool but obscure lighting technology that can produce a tight beam of light with high efficiency. &nbs...

laser oven

good news is that there is a video in the works. bad news is that I'm still stuck living in an extremely limiting shithole that I absolutely hate. this means I'm going to have to continue to push off the big projects i want to do. for the meantime though, I might as well tackle one of my biggest requests, and that is to cook food with lasers.

now that absurdly huge laser arrays are easy to get, I'll be rebuilding a microwave oven with nearly a kilowatt of laser arrays. it should be a fu...

new video! my experience in a tornado outbreak

This one is quite different than any of my other videos but this experience was just too crazy to not post about. I put myself in the heart of a huge tornado outbreak in northern Illinois and witnessed some crazy storms.

I've been a weather nut my whole life, and a storm chaser for some years now. I have never seen tornadoes like I saw a couple days ago. From a meteorology standpoint, these tornadic storms were TEXTBOOK in structure, which made them surprisingly easy to keep track of. 2021-08-12 01:41:50 +0000 UTC View Post

I'll be back

Once again I'm cancelling payments for the month due lack of content. My current living situation continues to be trash, and buying a new place for a lab has proven to be a slow, grinding nightmare. In the meantime, I've been working for snapchat under a syndication contract to generate income. You'll get more cool content from me eventually, but my first priority right now is escaping the hell hole I currently live in. 

VR for laser goggles??

As you know, eye protection is an absolute necessity when working with powerful lasers. Laser goggles are nice, but have a couple drawbacks. For one, laser goggles only work for a limited range of wavelengths, which means you need multiple pairs of goggles for different laser colors. Another drawback is that it's hard to see the actual laser output through goggles because they filter out the light (as they should!)

A possible all in one solution would be something like a VR headset with...

new lab in the works

once again I apologize for the lack of content recently. I've stopped payments for this month to reflect the lack of content. My current living and filming situation is extremely limiting in terms of experiments I want to do.

I've been doing lots of real estate shopping recently and may have finally found the perfect place to build a lab, so things are looking up for me. A rural lab has been the dream for me for quite some time, not only for INSANE projects for YouTube, but also for var...

tesla coil chemistry

I appreciate all of the nice comments on the last post of mine. You guys are too kind.

Here are a couple clips from my experiments with tesla coils and fire. It turns out it's much harder to "paint" the arc of a tesla coil compared to an arc that's higher current (hotter) but I did find some cool exceptions. The volatile boron compound trimethyl borate does a great job of lighting up a tesla coil arc, and makes a very bright green flame when an arc is going through it. It's crazy how br...

fun with tesla coils and fire

i apologize for the lack of content recently. the past couple months have been rough for me. i cancelled last months patreon payments since I hadn't made any content for you guys.

anyway, i've been shooting a vid on tesla coils and fire, and it has turned out to be a fun mashup of engineering and chemistry. building a true tesla coil that can stay on resonance with a chaotic topload turned out to be a challenge, but I settled on an unusual vacuum tube design based on secondary feedback....

collab video with the Plasma Channel

quick collab I did with Jay of the Plasma Channel on nitrogen TEA lasers!

new patreon exclusive video! high powered handheld UV laser

I recently scored a high powered UV laser diode and decided to build a handheld pen laser with it. I documented the build process and did some demos with the laser at the end. I have no intention of making this video public but I plan on using the laser in future videos. I hope you all enjoy it!

what happens when you light a tesla coil on fire??

I've been wanting to explore more of the electrical properties of fire for quite some time, and have recently started building a multi-kW solid state tesla coil to investigate this. I have a lot of experiments I would like to try, but obviously I'll be focusing on the coolest ones when I finish the video.

Using a tesla coil to power a burning topload (or even a purely fire topload) is nearly impossible for all but a few tesla coil designs. Anything that's dual resonant like modern high ...

more shattered vacuum tubes

i'm now 0/5 for receiving an intact GU-10(A or B) triode. :( the tube on the right has the glass intact but the filament is totally destroyed with lots of little pieces rattling around inside. what a shame!! i have some interesting ideas to try with my big plasma generator and wanted to use a bigger tube for more power. i guess i'll have to try ordering again or just use a different tube. 

NEW VIDEO!! Patreon exclusive early viewing

New video on sketchy DIY medical lasers from eBay!! The video is pretty silly, but my hope is that it sheds some light (heh) on these dangerous products that get sold as consumer DIY medical/cosmetic gadgets. The worst product in this video by far is the "Neatcell" tattoo/blemish remover at the beginning of the video. That thing is a complete disgrace.

I'm already trying to decide what the next video will be. Maybe I can convert that chonky surgical laser into a rust removal laser... 2021-01-28 23:57:18 +0000 UTC View Post

monster 100W green laser

I'm almost finished with my new video! for the time being, here's the part where I play with a monster surgical laser system

new video in a week or so

I'm getting close to finishing my vid on sketchy DIY medical lasers from eBay! This video is quite a bit different than usual and in the vid I test out some dangerous laser gadgets that are sold as cosmetic/medical devices on eBay. The video has two functions. For one, it's a PSA to shoot down some TERRIBLE products being sold on eBay and other sites that get sold as cosmetic/medical devices. The other function is an excuse for me to do some silly things with lasers and high voltage. :D

ice storm

oh yeah, in the video I posted here a week ago I said that I was about to get an ice storm. the storm definitely didn't disappoint and gave scenery that was out of this world. after the freezing rain stopped, we got hit with two rounds of snow, followed by several days of thick freezing fog that left a thick coating of ice crystals on everything. I had a lot of short power interruptions over the past week but nothing major. unfortunately there is a ton of tree damage in the area though. in fa...

UV lasers

As far as I know, this UV laser pointer I built in 2019 is still the only true UV laser pointer in the world. However, that is going to change soon as I just took part in a group order with some other laser nerds for some stronger UV laser diode engineering samples. The new ones are rated for 250mW at 375nm, which is quite a bit more powerful than this 5mW or so pointer I built. Unfortunately the supplier is acting fishy and I may have to wait a while to receive mine, but I'm still excited to...

updates and demos with my big vacuum tube tesla coil

I didn't end up doing a Christmas vid on my channel so I made this quick vid for my patrons. I apologize for the lack of coherent thoughts here :D 

run in with law enforcement

Tesla coils generate a lot of ozone, so any time I've ran one for a significant amount of time I clear out the air in my shop when I'm finished for the night. I do this by opening the door and a window, and use fans to evacuate the air. The other night, I had an unexpected visitor walk in when I was doing this. A cop was on patrol and saw the door wide open with a bunch of weird stuff inside and decided to check it out.

I didn't hear him walk up since the fans were running, and not gonn...

tesla witchcraft

I swear there is no science or logic to tuning a vacuum tube tesla coil. everything must be optimized via trial and error and pain. my measurements and calculations turned out to be meaningless.

no I do not consider that puny arc at the top to be a success given the 3kW input power. I'm slowly getting somewhere though. pre-christmas vid is seeming unlikely at this point. however, even if I do get this coil running nicely before long, it'll probably be a while before I make a full vid ab...