OT-- big resistor question

Any pictures?

Regards,

Boris Mohar

Got Knock? - see: Viatrack Printed Circuit Designs (among other things)

void _-void-_ in the obvious place

Hmmm.. This is the first time I tried to reply directly so that I could include an attachment, and I got an Outlook box instead of and Outlook Express box, and with no send button. I'll have to figure that out soon, I suppose. These are an inch thick each, almost four and a half inches in diameter, have a black rim with a yellow face, and have a course texture. White lettering on the rim with the value, also. The two I had in hand were one and twenty ohm values, but I didn't dig through the box looking for any variety. Otherwise I woulda sent you a picture directly, so these words will have to do for now..

I had done a search for puck resistors and high voltage resistors, and didn't come up with any web results for anything like this.

"Boris Mohar" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

Carl, I have some experience with "figuring out what the hell this is". Sometimes it is a useful skill, for example finding out that these "baldor vacuum pumps" are actually Bullard haz. location free air respirator pumps for 2 people:

The easy step that you should take is to call Stackpole 1-888-SEI-SEIS and ask them. Be nice on the phone and very grateful. If they are like most other such product companies, they will be nice and helpful. Ask them what are these resistors for and why they are mildly radioactive.

i

On Thu, 26 Oct 2006 02:30:57 GMT, with neither quill nor qualm, "Carl McIver" quickly quoth:

Do these have wattage listings printed with the resistances, Carl?

Nope, which is part of what has me curious. Obviously high wattage, with the same kind of texture as the these high temperature Kanthol Globars I use on other projects (commonly used for melting aluminum, forgot the composition) so I suspect wattage on the order of a few thousand.

I sent a picture to one of their Dallas folks this afternoon, but the East Coast folks were done for the day, which is where the sales department is. I hope to get an answer tomorrow, but for today my curiosity was itching and it needed to be scratched a little bit. I'll call someone in the morning, as I already have a name and number, and he'll have a picture forwarded to him in the meantime. Obviously since there are a few hundred of these things, they for sure made a lot of money selling these; they ought to be willing to support us. I've been getting a lot of experience calling around asking odd questions about many, many products lately, and since they're all ordinary folks curious about life, I usually get great results, although I did ask a Fluke rep about live feed images out of their line of thermal imaging cameras, he was blunt in a nice way when he said: "Nope, ain't gonna happen, but I will talk to the project development folks about it." which I have to admit is about the only time I ever left a conversation with a real "no" of any kind. Often times in order to avoid explaining the entire project (or I can't for other reasons) I have to keep it simple, which in some folks merely lights up their curiosity, including their willingness to help. Worth taking advantage of sometimes, for sure.

According to Larry Jaques :

You are not supposed to post image attachments to discussion newsgroups -- only to binary newsgroups (which were formed for that purpose).

Instead, check out the dropbox:

and click on the bar offering information about the dropbox.

Follow the instructions there (including that about sending a ".txt" file describing what the image is about), and once you have confirmed what the image names actually wind up as (for example, spaces in filenames will be converted to underscores '_'), then post here giving the url which I have above, and the filenames, and those who are interested can pull down the images from the dropbox (web site), and see what you are talking about.

Of course -- you can send e-mail to individuals -- but it is polite to ask first, because some automatically toss unexpected images as probable viruses, and my system automatically rejects e-mails over

30K in size, to keep viruses from contaminating a couple of small mailing lists which I run. (The viruses can't hurt *my* (unix) systems, but there are a lot of Windows users on the mailing lists.

Indeed -- those are useful bits of information.

Though the values seem a bit low for use as braking resistors on VFDs, which is what I would be most likely to be looking for.

Enjoy, DoN.

Think targets. Search colliders and accelerator targets. Gotta aim at something. :)

Nice shootn tex

Jim Vrzal Holiday,Fl.

Very nice! Let us know how it goes!

i

Well, I was very surprised this morning to find that Stackpole didn't know a thing about them. They sent the picture around to different folks, even the folks who worked at the former plant in PA that would have made stuff like that, and nothing. Not even old catalogs. Not at all what I was expecting, so now this group may be my only source of info. The radiation health fellow said the radiation was likely thorium, which as I understand, is a component in carbon resistive heaters, thus allowing the carbon composition to get even hotter before breakdown. Something that thick would have a hard time dissipating a lot of heat, so I can see why it's a necessary component. It seems they have to get disposed of in the next shipment of radioactive waste. That sucks, but I think I'll be saving a few of each value should we need some big resistors in that range in the future, which is likely considering the oddball shit we get into.

There's no burn marks on any of them, and all the targets I've seen from the project are really burnt up chunks of different materials, but they tried to do a free electron laser on too large a scale before all the technology issues had been nailed down, so a lot of our (taxpayer) money got burned through before they pulled funding. Now folks in that line of work are trying again, using smaller scale accelerators and beam lines, with much more promising results.

Hey Carl,

From someone who truly has no clue, they read like carbon resistors of a type used in a compression frame to vary the resistance by forcing or releasing to suit.

Also, very similar dimensions and colouring for replaceable carbon contacts for carbon-to-copper or carbon-to-silver or carbon-to-tungsten used in larger switchgear of the past, say prior to the 1950's. Stackplole did a lot of carbon brushes and stuff too, other than electrical/electronics "resistors".

Take care.

Brian Laws> We've decided to dispose of a number of really big resistors in my lab.