Small Change, and Other Physics Fun

fishy jew writes "Ever want an easy way to make your 'small change' even smaller? Well, Bert Hickman has it - mix a home-brewed machine, 6.5 kiloJoules, and 100,000 Amps of current! On his website, he has descriptions and pictures of his many exploits with large quantities of electricity, notably including shrinking coins, building a Tesla coil, creating Lichtenberg figures (chaotic sculpture), and more! He has extensively outlined the equipment, procedure, and results for each of his experiments, and included many pretty pictures, too. Here are Google caches for when the site gets /.'ed: Main Page, Shrinking Coins, Tesla Coil, and Lichtenberg Figures."

Comments

ya know...

[abscondment]

tesla coils are really cool. a friend and i once took a 30,000 volt capacitor bank, a homemade tesla coil and a homemade spark gap and liquified my deodorant.

his garage smelled great for a few months.

also, any time we'd point the tesla coil towards his neighbors house, they'd lose TV reception.

Re:I own one of these coins... very cool

[Monkelectric]

Yea I was going to submit it, but all my submissions get cancelled because I suck so I didn't even bother :)

For those who now can't get to the site: These coins are "shrunken" by being placed inside a wooden dowel, the dowel is then wrapped with electrical wire, and a ton of electricity is then discharged into the coil -- the resulting magnetic field deforms the coin (shrinks usually, but not always!), and causes the entire apparatus to explode :) Small shrinkings are done in blast chambers, larger ones have to be burried in a burm. Usually industrial capacitors provide power.