Have you ever loved an old car but wanted it to have some of today’s practical features? Reddit user WorldwideBrandt has. He loves his 1999 Subaru Forester and he loves upgrading it. This project is a modification of the space directly in front of the stick shift into a wireless charger. The original space didn’t […]
The man behind the world’s largest Tesla coil (the 30,000-watt Electrum) is once again upping the ante on machine-generated lightning. Greg Leyh and his group Lightning On Demand (LOD) have launched a new a project, The Lightning Foundry, that will try to re-create super-long discharge effects normally found only in lightning.
No, this is not one of the sci-fi video game replica weapon props I keep posting about–it’s a real, functioning homemade coil-gun by Jason, aka YouTube user Larsplatoon, aka Photobucket and 4hv.org user Saz43, who has been working on it for two years. It’s billed as a “1.25kJ Coilgun,” but I dunno how that figure was computed. If it is muzzle energy then projectiles from this weapon deliver more kinetic energy than a .45 handgun but less than an M16 rifle, which I frankly doubt. But judge for yourself by clicking the embedded player below to be taken directly to the test firings at 2:50, in which various housewares get shattered and punched full of holes. I’m guessing 1.25 kJ is the theoretical maximum energy that can be delivered by the capacitor bank, and that the real muzzle energy is significantly lower.
For an upcoming clock project, Stephen Hobley is experimenting with an electromagnetic pendulum.
