Night Vision Scope From Scavenged Parts

Caydel writes "Greg Miller appears to have built a Night Vision Scope out of an image intensifier tube, and parts he found mostly in dumpsters. Also on Greg's site: Flyback transformers, coil guns, plasma globes and Tesla coils made from dumpster materials." You get the feeling he's not also writing product safety manuals on the side.

Comments

Re:I beg you pardon ?!?

[reezle]

So you are saying we need to be protected from his ideas?
Us whacko's will give it a try and kill ourselves because we aren't quite smart enough to recognize the dangerous bits like you have?

Let me guess. You're from the government. And you're here to help.

All the fear from the doomsayers

[panurge]

Is misplaced. I went into science because we had a superb physics teacher in high school (he'd left a job as a research engineer basically because, I think, it was too limiting, and he ended up as the schools science adviser for the council.)

Among the stuff we used to work with were high voltage induction coils, the odd home-made low pressure gas discharge device - a good way of checking your vacuum technique - low power radioactive sources for playing with simple cloud chambers and trying to deflect alpha and beta rays with a watercooled electromagnet - and extracting short half life radionucleides from samples of yellow cake. (I did have enough sense to know that you don't breathe thorium oxide dust and that you handle uranyl nitrate carefully.) That and getting a signal big enough to light up a small bulb across the lab using a klystron. And he would let us get on with this stuff unsupervised - something about kids need trust in order to learn.

Nearly 40 years later I am not only still alive but still building stuff, probably because those early experiences gave me the confidence to try things.

Being quite ruthless, anybody who tries stuff around HV and microwaves and doesn't have the brain to spot when things are going wrong, probably needs to be removed from the gene pool anyway. And anybody who tries and has the brain and initiative to stick at it will learn something. We can't all expect to make our livings for the next twenty years by either recording not very good music and selling it for inflated prices, or suing people who actually have a business. Buying geek toys is no substitute for making them, and things that just go bang or send projectiles a long way are not the only way to have fun with physics.