Any website that an RSACi rating of V4 for violent content and describes it’s contents as “fantastically dangerous” is worth my time to look at. William Beatty put together ” CAPACITOR-BANK DISCHARGE EXPERIMENTS” for those of us who think coins are just to big.
There are a couple of busted links but plenty of potentially fatal fun. If you have never played with high voltage please be careful.
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You need to remove a slash from http:// to make the link work.
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Those photos depict the very first coin shrinker. Dale T. had a tesla lab and sculpture studio in downtown Seattle in the early 1990s. Boeing Surplus was selling huge energy storage capacitors cheap! I’d heard about can-crushing from back in the mid 1970s, so we tried that. It’s more like can-ripping-in-half-ing. Heavy-wall copper pipe was pinched too. Then Dale discovered that a small coil would both crush a penny and also launch it at high velocity. Early coils were copper spirals taken from high-ampere circuit breakers. Later ones were a simple spiral of heavy gauge copper. Dale had some shrunken coins in local art gallerys, while Gary published the details of the equipment in Tesla Society’s “Extraordinary Science” magazine.
Later a Boeing guy told us that the Dent Puller project which used those capacitors was scaled back after the project manager was killed by high voltage. He said that today they use electrolytics below a kilovolt. (That keeps it from sparking across to nearby fingers, or from blowing holes in flesh.)