Incremental improvements to improvisational welding

Sparky goes back on the slab, wakes up hungry.

Well I started beefing up the system behind sparky and doing some basic calculations. (Remember kids!, lunatics do hardware first, math later,This way you get sudden surprise releases of energy,flying metal and you get to play with hardware for longer!) Based on my very crude understanding each capacitor at 55000 microfarads at 20 volts equals .55 amps/ second at 20 volts or 1.1 watt/seconds per capacitor.

Sparky MK I, 1.1 watt basically a reusable sparkler.

This proved that sparks could be generated and the leads sticking together showed that welding was conceptually possible.

Sparky mkII, 3.3 watts suitable only for making very small abominations against nature as seen here.

Sparky Mk II went up to 3.3 watts and was actually able to tack metal together, providing a use for all the rifle cartridges I have around here. I was saving them for brass smelting only to find that cheap russian ammunition is steel, So Lemmie the Lightning Llama is made of 7.62x39 cartridges and nail gun nails, tacked together.

Sparky MK III as a neat collection of organs on the slab. 7 capacitors 14 connectors a pair of jumper cables from one of those emergency jump start devices.

Sparky MK II had a tendency to spark at the wrong time and in the wrong place and Mk III will be pushing more watts, so before we put any thing together we light up the solder station and solder all the leads.

Every monster maker knows, getting the lightning where you want and when you want is critical.

Crappy battery, “broken” inverter and “trash” soldering iron later and all my leads are soldered to the connectors. Sparky should be less impulsive now.

Sparky Mk III, 7.7 watts, no longer wired pole to pole. All capacitors wired to communal poles to simplify future design, also much larger electrodes.

Sparky is still laughably underpowered, but is now at least truly unsafe. Vision protection is required. Both ultra violet light and flying bits of molten metal can be produced on demand, so goggles, gloves and non flammable clothing are required.

Based on the amount of general sparkyness and noise. I’m gonna say I’ve got a lot more power.

So Still needs more basic oomph! and a my long term goals require a massive step up in voltage if I want to build the ATOMIC HYDROGEN TORCH! but Sunlight + Garbage = Welder. Spot comes out of the bath today. Begin hydrogen research.