energybeam.com quarter shrinking fun Making quarters the size of a dime with intense magnetic fields

P

09-07-2002


Shrunken quarters are now for sale! They are $15 each, I provide the initial quarter.
mail quarter @ symmetric.net for detail on how to order, or for special requests.


actual video clips will arrive in the next month or so.



03-24-2001

Quarter crushing is a ton of fun. Well, it's more like 0.3 tons of fun
in my case.

Once upon a time I saw some pictures of magnetically crushed quaters that
I could barely believe as it was so strange, amazing, and impossible at
the same time. I had to crush my own coins at home.

After a while I came across two Friends. These Friends were Aerovox
Aerostor energy discharge capacitors of about 260 pounds each. They are
rated 7.14uF and 50kV each. Somebody somewhere said they are designed to
withstand 400kA of discharge current. They are probably from the early
1980's and are in pretty good physical condition. They arrived on a skid
from their previous home in a warehouse in CA. Price? $75 each and about
$450 shipping to Chicago.

I've only had time to get fun results with 4 quarters. Below are some
pic of various quarter crushing events.

I charged both caps in parallel using my 4 stage cascade multiplier and
one 7.5kV leg of a 15kV neon sign transformer. Capacitor charge voltage
was about 35kV and measured with a high voltage meter used to test TV
flyback transformers.

For the coil itself I used 12 guage THHN style solid copper wire as used
in buildings. Mandrels were made of 1" dowel rods and the quarter/coil
assembly was held together with clear placking tape and cheap low grade
cable ties like you get for $5 at the checkout line of a hardware store.

The high voltage switch to was a metal doorknob on a wooden pole. Simple
and it works every time. The other contact is a 1" copper pipe cap. I
don't have the time and patience to make complicated precision triggered
spark gaps that will just explode anyways when used.

A thanks goes out to Mike Evans and Larry Jones for helping set everything
up.

Images are either stills from Gl-1derful video that was deinterlaced in
Photoshop on G4-1derful, or taken by Krodak.