The following has been gleaned from multiple (surprisingly consistent) sources - I've pointed out where there are differences of opinion. I'm sorry that it's not strictly narrative, but hopefully I've covered most of the ground.
The aims of JC water pretreatment are getting the stuff that we don't want out of the liquid, and getting the orgone in (I'll continue to use the 'O' word, where it makes sense in this context ;-). These aims are achieved through judicious application of electrical potential and/or power, either within the cell itself, or in a larger 'charging vat'. As with many things JC related, there are different opinions on how to pretreat your cell water. However, the basic objective is to take the water to what's known as 'stage 3'. Stages 1, 2 and 3 are expanded on in the extract from Schiffer, further down this post. The pretreatment will not necessarily follow sequentially through the 3 stages - a cell may 'start' at stage 3 or, conversely, never make it that far. Once at stage 3, a cell will stay clean - both the water and the cell itself - and should neither produce any precipitate nor surface scum. Nobody has ever publicly provided an analysis of stage 3 water. I've personally cajoled a number of people who appear to have reached it, but have always received a reply that was one or more of (1) analysis would cost too much, (2) they don't buy into 'this science thing' or (3) claimed fear of my motives, MIB etc. However, the observable properties of stage 3 water are well documented, and may give us a clue as to what is going on. This treated water is (sometimes very) redox negative, and has a soapy feel and altered surface tension (ringing any bells?). This water can also be poured from one container to another without losing its 'charge'. The main thing that folks aim at to determine arrival at stage 3 is the type of bubbles produced when the cell is powered into electrolysis - masses of pure white bubbles that sit on the cell surface for hours after it's powered off. pH has been suggested as another indicator of cell status. However, as the orgonites believe that it's possible to construct either acid or alkali cells, we're probably better off ignoring it. Water height should be to the top of the inner cylinders, *not* over them. Many (but not all) sources suggest that a cell being charged should be electrically insulated from ground. The electrical supply should be linear DC. The consensus of opinion amongst the 'old timers' is to start with 1 amp from a 12 volt supply through the cell during charging, when both electrodes are connected. Alex Schiffer recommends using electrolyte to get to this ratio; others either don't worry too much about it or ratchet up the voltage as required. Schiffer's methodology calls for brief current flow through the cell followed by long periods of 'resting', repeated over many days. Stevens is very insistent on the power of 'negative electricity'. The cathode is connected to the power source for a duration. The anode is then also briefly connected, before being removed. Finally, the cathode is disconnected. He believes something important is going on when only the cathode is connected. An alternative approach originated with Bernie Heere - he suggests 'cooking' the cell. People following his advice typically connect their 110v/240v mains straight to the cell via a FWBR, speeding up the process somewhat! This method obviously causes vigorous electrolysis whereas, in the slower versions, electrolysis is claimed to not be a particularly important aspect of the charging process. As suggested above, there are several treatment regimes that have been proposed by different individuals. All supposedly lead to the same result, but vary greatly in effort and time - and possibly in the end result, as we only know about the *observable* aspects of stage 3 water... I make no apologies for reproducing the lengthy quotes below. The foregoing is only my take on the main points - what follows is "from the horse's mouth". Peter Stevens has recently restated his methodology thus: ---quote--- You can use water out of the tap as long as you largely clear it of the chemicals put in there by the water company (alum, chlorine, flourides etc.}. To do this you can use a cell. Put your tap water in the cell then do the procedure described above under Applying Electricity [PV - redundant comment]. Put the negative of your 12volt battery, battery charger or 12 volt dc supply on for between 2 and 20 minutes at the base of the cell, then put on the positive at the top of the cells outer cylinder for between 2 and 3 minutes leaving the negative in place, then take off the positive and leave negative on for up to an hour. Pour the water into a glass container or plastic bucket. Repeat. After 24 hours what will happen is the chemicals in the water in the bucket will have become solids; some will have dropped to the bottom and some will have risen to the top, depending on what charge they acquired in the process. Pour off the solids at the top, then pour the middle (clean) water into your cell, then throw away the stuff in the bottom. You can use pulsed dc for this, but flat dc is better because it works faster. You can do the same process as above with a charging vat but you will wind up with a good deal more water and no need to fiddle about with repeating your charge procedure. In passing, and while we are talking about charging vats, those cones that you see in The Experimenters Guide to the Joe Cell come from milk/cream separators as used in dairies [PV - Joe originally used multiple nested cones as electrodes for charging]. No electrolyte should be added. ---ends--- An even lengthier process is suggested by Alex Schiffer, which can take weeks. I've quoted an extensive portion here, as some of the notes reinforce what I've said earlier: ---quote--- The charging process is separated in three distinct stages that I call Stage 1, 2 and 3. These stages have some obvious differences and also some subtle ones . With experience you will know immediately if the cell is charged, but in your early attempts you will have to rely on my photographs and description or visit someone with a working cell. Do not listen to armchair scientists. One look is worth a thousand words. For the rest of your charging process, you will be only connecting your power source to the cell for a maximum of 5 minutes at a time. As Orgone lags electricity by about 30 seconds, you will know the state of the cell in less than a minute. Do not be tempted to leave the power connected to the cell for long periods! Yes, I know that you are in a hurry and more is better, but in this case you only generate heat, steam, waste power and overheat the cell. You can pick the failures by seeing their cells running non-stop for days with 20 or more amps turning the water to steam, etching the cylinders and ending up with a barrel full of scum. What else would you expect? After all, electrolysis is time and current related. If you have had the misfortune of having your cell left on for a long period with high current, you have probably destroyed your cylinders. You cannot polish this etching or plating out. Yes, you throw the cell away and start again. I bet you don't do it next time! DANGER! Do not charge any cell that is totally sealed! The cell will explode, with all the related consequences. Always remove the lid or unplug the car cell before doing any charging. I repeat, an airtight seal IS NOT REQUIRED! At no stage do I prescribe any form of airtight container. Stage 1. This stage is plain old electrolysis. Due to us passing a direct current through a liquid that contains ions, chemical changes will occur. In our case, you will see small bubbles and a cloud of activity that is greater nearest the outside of the inner negative cylinder. The important observation points are that the activity is greatest nearest the central cylinder and gets progressively less as we move outward via the different chambers formed by the rest of the cylinders. Additionally, within a short period of turning the power off, all activity stops, the water becomes clear and the bubbles disappear. Summary stage 1. Every fool and his dog gets to this stage. The secret is not to increase the electrolyte and thus the current and/or leaving the cell on for days on end. Be patient, leave the cell on for no longer than 5 minutes, turn the power source off, remove the leads to the cell, and put the top on the test cell, or partially block off the exit of the car cell. It does not have to be airtight! Go and do something else. It is like waiting for a tree to grow from the seed. Do this on a daily basis for days or a week or longer until you get to stage 2. You will find that the more "alive" the water is , the quicker is the seeding of the cell. I have found that the storage, age, and source of the water all affect the seeding speed. I have also found that by changing the structure of the water by various means e.g., vortexing, shaking, filtering, etc., you can greatly enhance the water quality to make it more " alive ". Stage 2. You will now notice on your initial powering up of the cell, that the bubbles are getting larger and the white cloud of tiny bubbles in the water are much smaller or more transparent. Also in stage 1, you had the action occurring mainly in the proximity of the central cylinder. Now the bubbles form in a regular fashion irrespective of location in the cell. More importantly, on turning the power off from the cell, the bubbles do not go away immediately but stay there for minutes rather than seconds as in stage 1. Also, the top of the water assumes a glazed look and the meniscus is higher due to a change in the surface tension of the water. At this stage you may have some brownish material amongst your bubbles. Don't panic. It is only the impurities being removed from the cell. I find that if I wipe the top surface of the water with a paper towel, the bubbles and the deposit will adhere to the paper and can easily be removed. Top up the cell, if required, after the above cleaning, so that again, only the top-edges of the cylinders are just showing. Note. All topping up of the cell at any stage is done with plain juvenile water only. No more electrolyte is added! In cleaning the top of the cell as described, it has been observed that some people react unfavorably with the cell. If so, keep that person away, or if it is you, try changing your hand, i.e., use your right instead of your left or vice verse. If the presence of your hand seems to collapse the surface bubbles, I would suggest you have a friend do the work for you. Summary stage 2. Very similar to stage 1, but now we have a more even bubble distribution and an increase of surface tension and a longer presence of the bubbles when the power is turned off. If you look in the bottom of your glass test cell, you will have no scum and the water will be crystal clear. At this stage the Orgone force has seeded the cell, but as yet, is not breeding. With the right cell, water and operator, it is possible to go straight to stage 2 on the first turn on of your new cell. I have this occurring every time with modified juvenile water. Stage 3. Not many people get to this stage, or what is worse, get here incorrectly. If you get here following the above steps, your water is still crystal clear with no deposits in the sump. If you get here by brute force, you will have stripped appreciable amounts of material from the cylinders and this material will now deposit on the insulators and hang around as a colloid and finally form in the sump as a deposit. The low resistance insulators and the metallic colloid will create a more leaky cell that will cause endless mysterious car stoppages or refusal of the car to start, etc. Right, the miracle of Nature is now breeding in your cell. Upon turning your power on to the cell, within 30 seconds copious beautiful white bubbles will rise from all the surface area of the cell. Before these bubbles cover the water surface, you will notice a slowly rotating and pulsing front in all cylinders, that is synchronized and has a regular rhythm of about 2 pulses per second and a clockwise rotation speed of about 1 revolution every 2 seconds. These effects are very hard to observe for a first time viewer that does not know what to look for. I find it easier to watch these effects with the aid of a fluorescent light, as the 100 cycles per second pulsations of the light "strobe" the water surface and help the observation. The bubbles may overflow the container and show great surface tension. But one of the definite proofs that the cell is breeding is that, on turning the power source off and coming back the next day, most of the bubbles will still be on top of the water as opposed to stage 1 or stage 2 where they disappeared in minutes. Please have a look at my photo sequence. Summary stage 3. There is no way that you can mistake this stage once you have seen it. Some lucky people can feel the living energy and can react with it, Reich's " Y factor ". For the rest of you normal people, the signs are radically different. The bubbles are larger and pure white, the surface tension is greater, the bubbles are pulsating and most importantly the surface tension remains days after the power has been removed. Additional note for the desperate electronically inclined individual. Please note. I do not recommend any additional tests or measurements, your eyes and brains should suffice, but if you are in trouble, you may measure the voltage across the cell after it has been left standing with the power off for at least 24 hours. A live cell will have a residual voltage, or more correctly, a self generated voltage of around 1 Volt. A stage 1 cell measured under similar conditions will read .1 to .2 of a Volt. Remember, that unless you know what you are doing, these voltage measurements can be very misleading due to probe materials and battery effects that can easily mask your true measurement. As the cell reaches the maximum density of Orgone that it can hold, the result of the breeding process is the conversion of this excess Orgone into the formation of electricity. As such, electrical measurement with the correct instruments is a very valuable method in the verification of the efficiency of the cell. If you are conversant with Reich's work, you may care to make an Orgone meter and thus remove all guesswork. This meter is fully described on a few web sites as mentioned in my bibliography. ---ends--- Recently, and possibly as a reaction against the effort involved (particularly using Schiffer's method), a 'quick and dirty' approach has been devised by Bernie Heere. Again, it does produce the same stage 3 observable artifacts: ---quote--- Now that interest in the cells is once again at a high level and many new people are assembling cells, Ive been trying to come up with charging techniques to help all these new cellers get their cells to stage 3, and not have this interest all die off because of frustration. That being said, Id like to first do some myth debunking. 1. Stage 3 water is ultra pure. This one is easy Pure water is an insulator. It is impossible to get current through pure water. What stage 3 water really is in fact, is water with all the anions and cat ions precipitated out. That is all elements with a net charge in solution. The remaining ions are electrically neutral in solution. Im suggesting that the water used by our Aussie friends is loaded with neutral elements, since they can apparently get 1 amp of current through their cells with only 12 volts. In other words, Im suggesting that stage 3 water will have a neutral PH of close to 7. When current is applied the PH of the water in the inner ring will shift to slightly acidic, and the outer ring will shift toward the alkaline. This is once again caused by the fact that the remaining non-neutral elements in the water will still be attracted to the different potentials. Im not positive of this PH conjecture, but after much reading of others opinions, and my own experiments, I think this is true. If Im not mistaken, electrically neutral water is also good to drink free radicals and all that. 2. You need a charging vat for serious cell work. Not necessarily true. I think the same ends can be achieved with 2 simple SS plates in a glass container, or even in any cell, for the reasons specified above. 3. You need to have a bottom bolt to introduce the negative into the cell. While this is a proven way to go, its not really necessary, and adds greatly to the cost and complexity of a cell. Just get the negative connected to the bottom of the center cylinder any way you can. An insulated SS wire or strap is fine. Just run it up next to the container. The same goes for the welded bottom. Its nice, but it complicates things, and it forces the use of the bottom bolt to support the inner cylinders. Without the welded bottom all the cylinders can be supported with spacers. Its probably best to have an SS bottom on the cell but it can simply be held there with whatever means are convenient to the builder. I use PVC end caps and o-rings, which seem to work fine, until the unit is subjected to vacuum. Than you need to back the o-rings up with something like sikaflex or other caulking. To prevent air leaks. 4. Stainless steel that is non-magnetic. This is probably necessary, even for a cell that is not used to charge water. The reason, I think, is because the ferromagnetism causes magnet fields to be built up when current flows through the cell that directly counter the desired magnetic fields. This causes the charged ions to be repelled, when we actually want them to concentrate and precipitate out during the charging process. 5. Short duration charging cycles. This is the key to the whole thing. As I ve mentioned above, the charging involves getting rid of all the charged elements. There are 2 very obvious ways to do this. The first would be to start with distilled water and introduce only the desired impurities. Anybody with any chemistry background should be able to look at a chart of the elements and come up with a good guess as to what might work. The second way is to force the undesirable elements to precipitate out of the water. This is the traditional way in the Joe Cell world, whether you use a charging vat, a cell, or some other esoteric means to charge the water. All this is well and good, but what does it mean in the real world, or just how do you accomplish this. Here is a simple and effective technique that I think will work well. At least it has for me in a couple cells. First you want to cook the cell. By that I mean simply charge it for a long time. What this does is concentrates the charged ions near the positive or negative (relatively speaking) plates. The ions will then cluster and precipitate out of solution. As far as how long to do this, my best guess is until the water gets hot to the touch. I think boiling the water would be counter-productive because the agitation would probably disperse the clusters. Once this stage is reached, immediately coarse filter the water into a glass or SS container using something like an old t-shirt. Try to avoid lint. Now rinse any remaining sludge out of the cell. Tap water should be fine for this. Get as much of this undesirable water out of the cell as you can in a short time by simply inverting it and let it drain for a few minutes/ Now fine filter the water back into the cell. A couple thicknesses of paper towel should work fine. The water in the cell should now be very clear, but it could have some coloration. Not to worry, this is caused by the desirable impurities in the water. Now just let the water cool to room temperature and try a normal charging cycle. You should see stage 3 bubbles start to form very quickly. If they dont, I think it simply indicates that your starting water was very contaminated and you need to repeat the process to clear it some more. The closer cylinder spacing of my test/charging cell really does this well. The water becomes a really sludgy mess with a lot of precipitates. After one pass through this process the cell now really produces lots of stage three bubbles. For cells with the normal 1 spacing on the cylinders, this appears to be a slower process, and several passes will probably be required. I tried one with 2,3,4, and 5 cylinders, and its producing some stage 3 bubbles after one pass. I think one more cycle through the process will prep the water enough to take it into a good stage 3. Alex Schiffers was always pushing filtering, and now I think I understand why it helps. If you dont filter after each charging cycle, a lot of the undesired materials simply get re-dissolved back into the water. The idea of cooking the water this way is really nothing new, just a way to speed up the process and filter off a lot with each cycle. I dont think the heat that builds up is a necessary part of this process, so its possible that by controlling the buildup with an ice pack might allow for an even longer charging cycle, and get larger cells to get the water prepped to stage 3 levels in a single pass. Higher current should speed up the process as well. ---ends--- I realise that there is a considerable amount of information above. If any clarifications are needed, please ask - I've an awful lot of JC docs cluttering up my HD... Patrick -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Free Edition. Version: 7.1.394 / Virus Database: 268.8.2/357 - Release Date: 06/06/2006
