[Paul Anderson] sent in this classic quarter shrinker after seeing the can crusher the other day. It’s another high powered pulse shot into a coil system, but uses a solenoid actuated spark gap switch to swith those sweet high voltages. The results are quite impressive.
11 thoughts on “Quarter Shrinker (can Crusher Follow-up)”
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50,000-100,000 amps… 3.5-6.3kJ dissipated in 20us… i think the “danger” sign is an understatement :P
they just couldn’t be happy with cans now could they…:)
the site died while I was viewing it :(
I’m jealous of the current spike they’re getting.
I had seen a video in the past of meteorologists triggering lightning strikes with rockets flown into thunderclouds trailing a kevlar/copper wire and toyed around with the idea of doing just that only with a weather balloon (or a bunch of party balloons) in place of the rocket. Hook the whole thing up to a fat copper solenoid with the other end grounded and bask in the B field you get. Problem is lightning is right around 40kA, but anywhere from 100 megavolts to a gigavilt or two, so I fear I’d run into major problems insulating individual turns on the solenoid.
If there was some way I could build a super-transformer that could step down my voltage by a couple orders of magnitude you could get some pretty fat current. same problem though, insulation and ohmic heating problems.
I’d be interested to hear what kind of B fields these guys are getting out of their coils.
I think i read somewhere that the air immediately around a bolt of lightning is around 3 million degrees. Not sure if its true..
Good job Hack a day, these nice people try and sell coins that they’ve treated to the mad scientist syndrom.
Then you go and announce it to the world and screw their webhost all to hell.
Seriously, interesting article
now try to make them bigger!
Oh my…
Are you sure there isn’t a pile of duplicate coins out in the woods somewhere?
I mean have you looked?
Wow.
This project is reminicent of something…
Yea, here it is:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3RHoIUwqLo
(ok, not all of us are 20-somethings :)
nice #6
Nice info, but that site is awfully designed. The guy should keep doing the coins and get someone not stuck in 99 to do the site