Created
01/14/08

I pulled this out of a storage box under my workbench recently. It is a six-pack, but it is not beer. I remember building it, but I couldn't immediately remember what it was for. It looks cool though. And menacing. Mostly, it just looks like it wants to kill me. This bank is 0.186 Farads, 50 V. The bus bars are made from thick copper wire beaten flat with a hammer. In the images you can see that I've hooked it up again. It's fun to play around with, and vaporize little bits of thin wire.

I'm sure the complete lack of charge balancing and the gross irregularities in bus bar thickness and spacing probably renders this pretty much useless for fast pulse applications. Undoubtedly, this is what it was intended for, though, because in the same storage box, I found this:

That is an automobile ignition coil, a spark plug, and a giant (dead) high-current SCR.

I have vague memories involving something that bore a significant resemblance to this, mated to the back end of a cannon. I don't recall ever getting the ignition system to work right. I think it used gasoline, which is non-explosive and relatively non-combustible in all but a very narrow range of fuel/air ratios. Knowing nothing of this years ago, I probably just squirted some gas in from a fuel injector and expected it to burn when exposed to a spark.

It is probably for the best that I never got it to work.