Re: Awesome Quarter Shrinking Capacitors on EBAY

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Original poster: "RIAA/MPAA's Worst Nightmare" <mike.marcum-at-zoomtown-dot-com> 


Good point. With a few 50kJ tests without blowing anything up except air I
realized I'd have to treat the work coil as a bomb (sounds like one with
air). I thought manhole covers were iron? What if I used higher and higher
voltage in the coil (30kv limit at the moment, but can go much higher with
more caps and a rectified x-ray xformer (125kv), though I'd have to move to
the middle of nowhere). I agree nickels are stubborn (thanks to the weird
nickel alloy), but new (1983+) pennies are totally warped (not just shrunk)
with just 2500J (my first "shrinker") since they are mostly zinc. It seems
old pennies would be a perfect candidate since they are almost pure copper
(if you can remove the tarnish since they are hard to find without it). I
never tried it after the zinc penny goof (turned out to be a blob of
unrecognizable metal).
 > Hi all,
 >
 > One thing that you would also need to consider before trying to
 > shrink "manhole covers" is that cast iron is considerably less
 > conductive than copper or aluminum and higher conductive me-
 > tals are the best candidates for "shrinking/crushing". I've done
 > a little quarter shrinking (quite dangerous ballistic energies re-
 > leased in the process) and a lot of soda pop can crushing (still
 > dangerous but less so than the quarter shrinking. Anyway,
 > quarters shrink down to less than dime size in diameter from
 > 10 kJ discharge and aluminum soda pop cans are practically
 > shreaded. However, nickels and pennies are almost unaffected
 > by a 10 kJ discharge (10 kJ is my limit w/ (2) 10 kV, 100 uFD
 > caps). Also, the steel cans, like Campbell's soup cans, are
 > affected very little from a single 10 kJ discharge but will begin
 > to deform after several repeated 10 kJ discharges.
 >
 > The bottom line is it would probably take a cap bank of mag-
 > nitudes similar to the one at:
 >
 > http://www.hot-streamer-dot-com/adam/60_MJ_cap_bank.jpg
 >
 > that Adam shared with us to actaully shrink 100 lb. cast
 > iron man hole covers. List member Bert Hickman has
 > done a lot of research into coin shrinking/ can crushing
 > and has an excellent webpage about it at:
 >
 > http://205.243.100.155/frames/shrinkergallery.html
 >
 > As matter of safety, I would read and heed Bert's
 > safety precautions regarding this as it deals with
 > very high pulsed levels of electrical energy that
 > can mame and kill from mechanical injury as well
 > as the obvious electrocution hazard.
 >
 > David Rieben
 >
 >
 >