This is in regards to a thumper that followed me home last week. Athumper is a machine that makes high voltage capacitor discharges ofthousands of joules, to find faults in underground buried cable. Mineis designed to deliver up to 4,062 joules, or approximately the energycarried by bullets from a burst of assault rifle fire.See thought that it was not working. Today, a local luminary in the field of coin shrinking, Lichtensteinfigures, and other fun high voltage things visited me and my thumpermachine. I am not mentioning his name out of respect for his privacy,and feel very highly about him. Anyway. After I dragged its two pieces into my garage, we looked at themachine and opened up the covers. Some interesting things came tolight.1. It was a 25 kV DC machine, with two contactors: a safety groundingcontactor to ground the caps when power is off, and the thumpingcontactor to connect capacitors to output cable.2.It has a variac for varying output voltage of the high voltagetransformer. The high voltage is rectified by a center tappedrectifier (two diodes).3. It has a limiter arrow on the voltage display that causes theoutput contactor to close when capacitor voltage reaches the limiter.4. It also has a DISCHARGE button that can cause the dischargecontactor to close at operator request. 5. My machine did not work because the limiter (whose purpose I didnot understand) was set to zero. After he left, I wired up the machine and tried to use it. I made aprimitive spark gap out of two large copper pieces. As it turned out,it works great. It charges the caps and when it reaches the presetvoltage, it discharges into a spark gap.I only tried it at up to 10kV. Its output of 4k joules is supposed to be enough to shrink coins. i

snip---Shrink coins?Explanation, please.Harold

FYI have a look at this toymartin

The HELL MACHINE works!!! Was Ground tester or Hypot with 1/0 welding cable?

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Gunner 19 years ago

From what little I know about the subject..ahum..er..an EMP "bomb" builds up a seriously strong magnetic field in a sacrificial coil, in just milliseconds, then explodes the coil, leaving no place for the energy to go, but as radiated energy in a very large and strong pulse.

Gunner

Political Correctness

A doctrine fostered by a delusional, illogical liberal minority and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

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Gunner 19 years ago

Ahha!! Now THAT explains West Hollywood!!

One of the few places on the planet where one can see a diminuative asian lady in black leather leading a 300lbs white guy in a leather speedo, around on a leash....

Gunner

Political Correctness

A doctrine fostered by a delusional, illogical liberal minority and rabidly promoted by an unscrupulous mainstream media, which holds forth the proposition that it is entirely possible to pick up a turd by the clean end.

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Cydrome Leader 19 years ago

coin crushers do work, I operate one. The metal is not compacted into nowhere. the crushed coins do get thicker. A crushed quarter sounds like hard plastic when dropped on a table though. It's a peculiar sound for metal.

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Cydrome Leader 19 years ago

Um, what did you expect to happen?

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joseph2k 19 years ago

Yes, that is in the range of hypervelocity effects, all projectiles can become armor piercing, even plastic.

try

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martin griffith 19 years ago

FYI have a look at this toy

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martin

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Ignoramus32311 19 years ago

Martin, someone did an absolutely fabulous job, I hope that they gave that person a prize.

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The HELL MACHINE works!!! Was Ground tester or Hypot with 1/0 welding cable?

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