Hi,
Okay, as per Horace's suggestion, made a crude
spherical (er...kind of spherical) terminal out of two
mixing bowls. Didn't go to WalMart, as that place
frightens me, so I got them from Kmart. Duct taped
them together at the seams, so as to make a crude
corona seal. It works very well, actually. Fed by the
HV terminal (negative WRT ground in this supply), it
charges up with little leakage. Will jump a 2-3" gap
to a flat metal plate. Sparks are intense, almost pure
white with tinges of blue. Very loud, like a .22cal
firing.
!!! This power supply is not a toy !!!
Power supply is a 6 stage (or 3 depending on how you
look at it) full-wave Cockroft-Walton multiplier.
Input is 10kV 23mA from a 'liberated' oil burner
ignition transformer. Capacitors are .009uF each.
Ground (0V) is to the center tap of the HV winding of
the transformer, common to the center input of the
multiplier stack, common to house ground, common to
the dedicated RF ground I drove into the soil last
summer for radio experiments. This ground has a lot in
common. You might even say it covers a lot of ground.
Sorry.
Anyhow, the first experiment wasn't very great; I ran
into the same problems that Bill Beatty had. The
sparks do not like to hit the same place every time,
and loathe going through the tube. I don't have large
diameter glass tubing, so I used PVC, 3/4" inner
diameter. When I get my bottlecutting hotwire running
again, I'll snip the ends off a glass test tube and
try it. An insulating plate of lexan or something
similar might be good to go over the side of the metal
plate facing the HV sphere terminal. The plate was
connected to ground, had a hole drilled in the center,
diameter of hole 1/4". The tube was glued to the
plate, with the hole dead center facing through the
tube.
In any case, despite the fact that only one lonely
spark ever went through the tube the RIGHT way, I
placed my hands near the thing, in line with the hole,
etc., and felt nothing untoward. The plate does rock
back and forth each time a spark jumps to it, but this
looks pretty conventional to me.
If all goes well, and my health holds up (varies from
day to day) I will try again tomorrow with a lexan
spark shield.
In case anyone's wondering, I can do the same thing
with +HV, I have an identical multiplier supply. But
the suggestion from John Schnurer to Bill B. back in
the day was that only a negative charged sphere works.
Otherwise the supposed anomalous force is reversed and
weak.
Probably this won't amount to anything, but it is
simple, fun, and has a Frankenstein appeal to it, what
with the sparks and all.
Now where'd I put that Edgar Winter CD???
--Kyle
