Neon xformers limit current to 30 ma which is not as likely to kill you. Don’t use the kind with a GFCI as they won’t work since the GFCI will trip. They do work wonderfully without the GFCI tho. I had a 30″ tall ladder with a 10″ gap at the top that made an awesome show using a 15kv xformer.

speaking of mad science, i was amused to see that this page served me an advert for the following:

http://www.lifetechnology.org/teslashield.htm

“The tesla shield™ emits a positive tachyon field with a radius of approximately 10 meters which is capable of penetrating any material substance or living organism.”

“the tesla shield™ has the ability to transfer specific information rich energy from the schumann resonance field to the human bioenergetic field. the schumann resonance field is a natural magnetic field with a unique harmonic frequency of 7.83hz.”

Quackaday.com…

thats the biggest waste of time ever

I did it with a microwave transformer once.

It produced wicked sparks, but the voltage wasnt high enough for the arc to start if the gap was less than a few milimeters.

It ended up being “manually operated”, I.e you had to jam a screwdriver in the gap to get each arc going.

Kind of scary. A one-off novelty project at best but too dangerous to really keep out.

You can make a simpler jacobs ladder if you can get the transformer off of a discarded oil furnace burner. The ignition transformer on the old burner puts out 10,000 volts at 20 ma. The newer transformers put out 15,000 volts at 20 hertz and 20 ma I think. The newer one is a solid state power supply, 120v in. The older one is a straight transformer. On the old transformer you can half wave rectify the input and get half wave dc on the output.
Jonathan

@roshamboe: To each his own. But, I prefer to look at this as a proof-of-concept or educational project. There are a lot of hacks that one could consider a “waste of time.”

I built on of these long ago for a science fair project. It was a project out of Popular Electronics or one of those hobby mags. It used a Quadrac and a couple of other current-limiting things. The assembly minus the rods was enclosed in a metal box with just the terminals sticking out. The project didn’t say anything about not using a two-prong cord, so when you turned it on, you got a nice, healthy shock (and electrical interference) from the corona discharge at the cap of the ignition coil.

We built one about 30 years ago with a transformer that had a porcelain standoff marked “65KV” that my friend got from somewhere unknown (we kind of assumed it was a neon sign transformer.) We were too scared to power it with 120 VAC so we used two D-cells hooked in series with a mechanical buzzer. Two bent coat hangers later, and we had a working Jacob’s ladder.

me podria explicar alguien como construir una escalera de jacob con un transformador de microondas me refiero al montaje si puede ser con fotos y en español mejor gracias

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This movie got leaked.. watched it a couple days ago.. for those of you that are interested on were i saw it at here’s the link: “nowonhd.com” the movie was pretty good i liked it alot.. quality was also great..

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Yeah spam like that really works mate. And instructable removed =(