Slashdot Mirror
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."
There is a cool Popular Science article for more information.
Now go buy some coins to fund Bert's efforts!
Remember... ZG9uJ3QgZm9yZ2V0IHRvIGRyaW5rIHlvdXIgb3ZhbHRpbmU=
Have redirected some of that current into getting a more powerful network connection.
Apparently the slashdot effect is a kind of physics fun he didn't account for...
Intolerance for ambiguity is the mark of the authoritarian personality.
Doesnt do anything, because it doesnt cache the pictures. And thats the largest problems of slashdoting. I think slashdot should try to temp mirror the pages for the first few hours it goes up, if its a small site.
snowulf.com
I wonder how much I'd have to pay for an ad cleverly disguised as a slashdot main story.
No posts yet, but already slashdotted.
Actually, though, I have seen his page before. really cool toys, but strikes me as something most of us would probably not want to play with.
Worry about the health risks of frequent cell phone use? Doesn't even come close to the RF this sucker puts off. Not to mention ozone and the very real risk of simple death from electrocution...
If it gets enough hits, will it become small enough to fit in a blade system?
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.
If you want to see pictures of the shrunken coins..... try popular science - http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/article/0,125 43,490445,00.html
http://www.thegeekgroup.org/
These guys do a lot of the same stuff.
Since the site is slashdotted to the ninth circle of hell and beyond, and the google cache links don't refer to any of the theory pages, would someone be willing to explain exactly how this works and why it happens?
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
for the love of god put in a working link
I used to have a cool sig, back when I cared
See Sam Barros' Powerlabs for similar stuff - the guy has got a lot of very cool and realy interesting stuff.
Especially interesting are his high-voltage stuff.
Vote for a Man, Vote for Bush!
Not a liberatarian flipflop hippie.
Can't you get in trouble for monkeying with currency?
Very cool, though.
I ran a benchmark on my quantum computer, now I can't find it anywhere!
PowerLabs?.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
I don't understand where the metal goes. Do the coins weight the same before and after?
I was under the impression that most solids wouldn't compress this much.
http://www.popsci.com/popsci/science/article/0,
http://home.earthlink.net/~smalldollars/dollar/
With some slight modifications, this technique could be used to shrink the national debt.
* Theory of Operation
* Results
* EM Field Theory and Wire Fragmentation?
* Isn't Defacing Money a Federal Crime?
* So Who Invented this Crazy Device?
* References
Theory of Operation:
The Quarter Shrinker uses a technique called high velocity electromagnetic metal forming, or "Magneforming". This technique was originally developed by the aerospace industry in conjunction with NASA, and has been popularized by Aerovox, Grumman, and Maxwell. It involves quickly discharging a high energy capacitor bank through a work coil to generate a very powerful and rapidly changing magnetic field which then "forms" the metal to be fabricated. While it works best with metals of relatively high electrical conductivity such as copper or aluminum alloys, it will work to a more limited extent with poorer conductors such as sheet steel.
In my current system, I charge up a large capacitor bank consisting of a number of large capacitors, each weighing about 165 pounds and about 30" high x 14" wide x 8" thick. A High Voltage relay is used to connect the caps either to a high voltage DC charging supply, or to a high power bleeder resistor chain. A 15 kV 60 mA transformer and a set of 40 kV rectifiers provide the DC charging voltage for the capacitor bank. The primary of the transformer can be overdriven to 140 volts via a variable autotransformer to speed up the charging process. The electrical energy stored in the capacitor bank is proportional to the square of the bank voltage, and the degree of "shrinking" force is directly proportional to the capacitor bank's energy.
The charged capacitor bank is quickly discharged through a single layer work coil made of heavy magnet wire. The coin is held firmly in the center of the coil by a pair of dowel rods so that it's axis of rotation is parallel to the centerline of the coil. This constrains the coin from twisting, and also helps balance the forces wanting to eject it from inside the coil. The two ends of the coil are stripped of insulation and firmly bolted to heavy copper bus bars. The high voltage "switch" that connects the capacitor bank to the work coil is actually a high power triggerable spark gap, called a "trigatron". The main gap electrodes are solid brass, 2.5" in diameter. One of the electrodes is drilled and tapped to hold the triggering electrode (actually a modified spark plug). A triggered spark gap is the only affordable device that can hold off the high voltage and then reliably and efficiently switch the high currents involved in the shrinking process (70,000 to over 100,000 amperes).
The trigatron is fired by applying a high voltage (~40 kV) pulse to the trigger electrode, which then causes the main gap in the trigatron to ionize and fire. Once the main gap fires, current rapidly climbs in the work coil, the rate of change (di/dt) being of the order of 4-5 billion amperes/second. The natural resonant frequency of the LC circuit formed by the capacitor bank and work coil is of the order of 8-12 kHz. Through transformer action, a huge circulating current is induced in the coin, but because of skin effect, this current is confined to the outermost rim of the coin, typically penetrating to a depth of less than 0.050". In clad coins more of this circulating current flows through the better conducting copper center of the clad sandwich than in the outer layers. The coin and work coil magnetic fields oppose each other (Lenz's Law), resulting in tremendous repulsion forces between the work coil and the rim of the coin. The circulating current in the rim of the coin actually prevents the rapidly increasing magnetic field of the work coil from penetrating the interior of the coin.
The large current that's induced into the outer rim of the coin can reach a million amperes or more! The initial bank energy is typically in the range of 3,500 - 8,500 Joules (or watt-seconds) but it is being discharged in microseconds. As a result, the instantaneous power is quite large, and for a brief instant is roughly
Check out the picture and prices of the some of his work on ebay
Try slashdoting that!
Please Contact Me me to discuss YOUR custom shrinking needs!
Ah, now this is a welcome relief from all those spammers who seem to think I always need to make things bigger!
Google Image Cachebr
-= If you fight Dragons long enough, you will become a Dragon =-
Magneforming is just another less-common metalworking techniques. Others include hydroforming, water jet cutting, spinning, and blowing.
We've even Slashdotted the pics on the cached sites! Looks like the quarters aren't the only thing being crushed. I'm sure the webservers have imploded by now...
ha ha, funny little story about our twoonies. When they began to make them, there was something wrong in the design -- maybe the join between the annulus and the inner coin wasn't as tight as they'd intended, or maybe the composition of metals wasn't quite right, but when they got too cold the inside would contract faster than the outside, and the coins would fall apart.
Standing at the very edge of my imagination, I peered into the inky void and realised -- I couldn't think up a new sig.
If he lives near las vegas, it might explain the mysterious EMP that in theory caused a bunch of car keys and other alarms to stop working. In any case, I hope his neighbors arn't trying to use WiFi to connect two computers, cause his work will probably knock anything off. Forget about FCC certification on his equipment...
Better than a mirror: The Wayback Machine!
Try looking here.
Or here.
The archives are kind of old (pre 2004) but they seem to have some of the information.
Huh?
I'm happy to see the site finally get the news for nerds treatment it deserves
:-)
Yeah! That's even got a catchy ring to it... From now on, when we want to bring a site to its knees, we'll give it the news for nerds treatment.
Here is a link to a site on Tesla Coils, since so many of you seem to be interested in them.
http://www.eskimo.com/~billb/
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
Looks like the US Air Force's Rome Air Development Center thinks they have a patent on it. Am I the only one who thinks "United States of America as represented by the Secretary of the Air Force" should not be a valid patent assignee?
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Submitter got it wrong: Physics is F=uN!
(You know, force equals mu times N, friction and stuff? Never mind.)
Interesting idea... So, the article claims that it takes 100 kiloamps of current to shrink a coin. So, let's just assume that the process is reversible and by finding a way to enlarge a small coin, you would actually be generating large amounts of current, okay?
Now, let's throw your genitals into the mix. We'll take your small, unused organ and hook it up to the power grid. Then, we'll order some penis enlargement pills and feed them to you in mass quantities. Step 3: profit from selling the energy back to the power company!
so can any of the physics nuts out there tell me if this process is reversible? Is it possible to use the same/similar technique to make coins "expand" ?
I am assuming there must be a way.
I think making coins larger would be a whole lot more interesting, and I'll assume by the details of this process that making a coin twice as large makes it half as thick... I'm talking coins here people! lol
the mass and weight would remain constant, has to, but I'd think large sized coins would be more of a novelty than small ones...
one method for doing this (works) is to put your coins on the railway track just before a train comes along... makes your coins all nice and squished out... kids - dont try this at home...
You can see the web pages at http://www.archive.org/. Just cut and paste any URL into the 'Wayback Machine' and you can see archived versions of the page.
I noticed on some pages (the Quarter Shrinking Theory page) the text is 'invisible' using Firebird, but you can read it by selecting the entire page (ex. ctrl-a) which highlights everything.
I've done this in the past with slashdotted sites and it seems to work most of the time.
No you wouldn't get a diamond.
The force is directed radially inwards along a cylinder.
To make diamonds you would need a spherically uniform force.(And probably a lot more megapascals.)
However you would probably get a really neat pancil!
-deimtee
I'm guessing that wasn't on their radar screen...
archive of teslamania.com, which DOES have images.
Finally, someone who can correct the historical accident that nickels are larger than dimes!!
Now, if only he could find a way to GROW money... or would that merely consist of nickel-and-diming people to death?
Weeks of coding saves hours of planning.
Five minutes of looking proves to me that Slashdot's search engine is basically worthless. My memory's not *that* good....
This post is a dupe. I remember seeing an interesting slashdot story, God knows when, and I looked over both the Powerlabs and Teslamania websites. I vividly remember the (now slashdotted to hell) shrunken coins. But, then again, if you're only 18 minutes old, you wouldn't know that, now would you?
The more I read Slashdot, the more I feel like some new-age Methuselah in a sci-fi story, where all those around me are younger, and their 80 year lifespans appear like those of a fly.
Clemmitt
sigfault (core dumped)