1062 An Unusual Wimshurst Generator Sparking Up

[Music] okay so we're on with our art deco wimshurst machine and i mentioned in the last video what we needed to do was make the capacitors current collectors and neutralizers so these are the capacitors now dead easy they're made out of this bit of pipe which is why i'm stood here holding it it's down pipe it's about 75 millimeters in diameter and you just cut off a couple of sections which is exactly what i've done here so this is a section of that pipe and i've taken some aluminium foil which is the stuff you get for hvac and wrap the aluminium foil around the outside and i wrapped another bit on the inside then i've scraped some off and put a couple of nuts in there a couple of bolts this bolt connects to the inside but not the outside this bolt connects to the outside but not the inside because the two outsides need a strap to connect them together the two insides actually connect to the current collector so what we're going to do is make a little cap out of here out of this stuff of course make a cap and make the current collectors but that's all there is to the capacitors once you've done them just fix them in place glue them whatever you want to do anyway let's get on with those caps and current collectors okay so that's the shunt bar on there now i need the current collectors and i have two of these which are old hard drive platters they're aluminium i think they're really kind of cool so i'm going to drill a little holes in like that sort out give those a file so the pointed teeth and they go in there okay it's kind of funny when you start bolting stuff on it starts to look complicated but it isn't remember it's just those bits that we've been adding so here's my pacman current collectors which are the jagged edges on the circles and here are the neutralizer bars now we've gone through neutralizer bars in the previous videos we've done on wimshurst machine making but it's essentially a bit of brass splayed out and there's a little clip on the end there that i got from a terminal block and i've mounted this steel post here so the thing just pushes onto the steel post like that and we can swivel it obviously to create the different angles we might need it doesn't usually need to go further than that so it's kind of that kind of positioning or maybe we want to do it like that now the only things left to do really are to join the current collectors up to the capacitors on this back bolt here and then put something on here so we can actually get the sparks to spark across once we've done that we're ready to spin it up and make some sparks oh we do need to put the brushes in the current in the neutralizer bars as well okay that's it finished and i thought i'd give you a close-up of everything before we sort of turn it on but here you can see the neutralizer bars with the brushes in place and those brushes actually a carbon fiber towel which is this stuff here you buy it on a roll you can unravel carbon fiber cloth and they make great brushes to have a resin on them you've got to remember to burn the resin off but that's what the brushes are and there's the neutralizer bar going to the other side so here is our capacitor and we've got it connected to our aluminium disc and you can see i've cut the jagged teeth in that to make our pac-man collector and that is connected with this bar here to the inside of the capacitor which is the pipe that we made there and it's also connected up here to where we're going to get the spark so we've got one movable ball and one unmovable ball now you can put these anywhere you often see these in the front i thought it'd be fun to have it on the back as it happens and that's it ready to go okay let's give it a bit of power and see if we can get some sparks out of it oh wow that is awesome ta-da so there you go an unusual wimshurst machine what's unusual about it is there is no axle and what that means is we could actually build this to any size we wanted there's a great deal of problems when you make those discs too large to actually manage them but using this cradle method without an axle you could basically make the discs as large as you like anyway i hope you enjoyed the video and thank you very much for watching

Channel: Robert Murray-Smith

Views: 5,373

Rating: 4.9567566 out of 5

Keywords: wimshurst, electrostatic, machine, robert, fwg, murray-smith, design, technology, alternative, disruptive, engineering, stem, steam, dt, industrial, arts, science, fair, project, how to, diy, make, build, home, made, built, energy

Id: ILnuyAZN8E0

Length: 4min 27sec (267 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 09 2021