Building a fire death machine using soviet military tech

i recently came across these tesla arc lighters on ebay and for how cheap they are i couldn't help but buy a couple to screw around with i love electricity and i love fire so anything that combines the two is definitely going to grab my attention i mean seriously what could be more fun than a device that can burn stuff with an electric plasma so today i'm going to test these things out and maybe make a few upgrades so yeah i hope you enjoyed this video now before i go on i should warn you that all the crazy stuff that you're about to see was done completely for educational purposes i mean if you were to try any of this stuff at home you'd probably die so yeah please don't try this at home all right so here's what all came with the package here so you got some instructions a usb charging cable then of course the lighter i guess there's a little safety switch here in the back all right here goes nothing oh huh you call that a plasma lighter geez yeah that's basically blasphemous to put tesla's name on something like that i was expecting something a lot bigger than this yeah this thing is definitely going to need some upgrades you know i probably shouldn't get carried away just yet like i should at least test out its burning capabilities can i like some alcohol check uh how about some paper if i can get that check uh how about a match cool so can definitely light things on fire so that's good but even so i still haven't seen it do anything that cheap butane lighter can't do but i guess i haven't tested its electrical properties yet so maybe something there will impress me can it light leds okay that's pretty interesting i mean you can't do that with a regular lighter how about some neon bulbs oh wow that's actually pretty bright neat all right this one's for science oh holy heck that hurt jeez okay now i'm bored okay so i'm not that impressed with this thing i mean it can light things on fire i'll give it that i mean if it's gonna have the tesla name on it i expect it to be able to melt metals or at least shoot a giant jet of plasma out of it i mean nicola tesla could have come up with something much more impressive a hundred years ago so it feels kind of disgraceful to settle for something like this i think it's time for some upgrades let's start with the obvious upgrades can it drive an 8 stage cockroft walton voltage multiplier stack well i mean yeah but doesn't make the arc that much bigger so it really isn't worth the trouble maybe i can just feed it higher voltage for a bigger arc taking it apart shows that it has a 3.7 volt lithium ion battery inside so by removing that i can hook the lighter up directly to a variable power supply and crank up the voltage all right here i have it hooked up to 4.2 volts which is the equivalent of having a fully charged battery and huh that's weird why isn't it making an arc well i guess i can just crank up the voltage until it works right okay huh okay so it's just literally gonna do nothing i'm not really sure why that lighter did even start up but i only have one backup so this time i'll try upgrading the transformers before stepping up the voltage well at least it works but it's really no different than the original let's step up the voltage a bit there yeah the arc's definitely a bit hotter now i mean the circuit is drawing more current but it's still nowhere near impressive let's keep on cranking up the voltage and see what happens oh okay so it's just gonna break that easily wow [Music] all right so i think my hopes of modding these things were a bit far-fetched i mean seriously even a charged capacitor of this size isn't that exciting that was actually pretty cool okay so my point is go big or go home right i guess i'm just gonna have to build my own giant one from scratch but what kind of circuit should i build i mean i can always just make a scaled up version using huge transformers and transistors honestly the cool factor there wouldn't match the lethal factor i mean really this little two electrode thing is kinda lame anyway a chad plasma lighter would use a single electrode to generate a flame and just use capacitive coupling to complete the circuit so what i'm suggesting is a tesla coil right well only kinda what i'm thinking of is a lot more dangerous when it comes to high voltage i tend to choose more archaic methods of power switching when i can i mean my biggest tesla coil uses a freaking angle grinder to switch the tank circuit but it does generate some pretty cool results i advanced to the 20th century with my last tesla coil built it's based on a vacuum tube and the device actually does satisfy the single electrode requirement unfortunately it's lacking in the setting fire to things department i mean seriously it takes a while to get third degree burns from this thing now that being said tubes are still the easiest way to make a super hot arc using just one electrode it turns out that at high enough frequencies and powers you can generate an incredibly hot arc that resembles a real flame when this is done on purpose it's usually in a circuit dubbed the high frequency vacuum tube tesla coil now i should clarify this is the name given by hobbyist to a terrifying circuit that only has some characteristics of traditional tesla coils now we'll get more into what makes the circuit so scary later but the first red flag is the fact that the first google result for the general schematic is this cursed thing the thing is a circuit using a puny 55 watt rated tube isn't going to satisfy my pyromaniac desires but it at least provides a good starting point besides i already have this awesome piece of soviet military surplus on hand this is a gu5b triode which is rated for several thousand watts of output power naturally i bought it on ebay and it looks like this one sat around in a warehouse for the past 38 years i could only find two other people that built an arc lighter from heck using this tube there's zilli popper whose videos actually scare me and says lisa 555 who makes some awesome high voltage contraptions as well they both have excellent channels with great high voltage content so you should definitely check them out their builds provided a great reference for mine i started the build by making a filament supply for the tube i got a good deal on this toroidal transformer on ebay and i clipped off a few of the windings to match the proper filament voltage under load i also added a soft start to the circuit using some relays and big resistors for the resonator coil i wound some copper tubing on cardboard pipe i used cardboard here because pvc and pretty much any other material available in pipe form would cause high dielectric losses now actually powering this circuit turned out to be a lot harder than it should have been as you've seen on my channel before i tend to accumulate a lot of old microwave ovens for this special occasion i decided to use the two biggest microwave transformers that i had salvaged during these past couple years i threw them in an ammo can encased them in wax and added some nice standoff insulators on top and if that wasn't enough i used the supply to drive a huge voltage doubler for the caps i used these chunky things and for the hv diode i used a bunch of lower voltage diodes potted and wax in a pvc casing and then threw a couple doorknob caps across those for good measure as a side note i can't break out microwave transformers on this channel without pointing out how incredibly lethal they are they kill more electronics hobbyists than any other component no joke that being said even as terrifying and lethal as this power supply is it just couldn't hack powering my cursed arc lighter circuit the voltage just sat too much under load at this point i would have just went out and bought some more thrift shop microwaves to cobble together a bigger supply but uh you can't do that this year so i turned to my shining light in the darkness ebay with a bit of searching i came across a great deal on this huge transformer salvaged out of a flashlight pumped laser the transformer was a great fit but it didn't solve all the circuits issues now not all the issues were bad per se but you know what let me just show you how it runs ah yes there's that angry hot plasma that my puny little arc lighters couldn't give me now remember i'm not feeding any gas in there that crazy flame arc is just the air being ripped apart by the electromagnetic field now to be fair the flame didn't look like this when i first powered up the circuit it turns out that coming up with an electrode that can withstand these conditions is pretty difficult on normal tesla coils a breakout point in the form of a piece of copper wire is often added to control where the arc is directed when i tried that with this overclock pseudo tesla coil it didn't exactly work as intended that's right it melts copper wire like wax now this is pretty crazy because not only does copper have a melting point of over a thousand degrees celsius but most of the output power is actually going to the air around it not the metal so how about a steel electrode the melting point of that is a few hundred degrees higher than copper so it should be a better fit right not quite it turns out it burns like a fuse when hooked up to the output of the resonator coil steel is a pretty good conductor in low frequency circuits but relatively high magnetic permeability means that its apparent resistance due to the skin effect becomes pretty significant at high frequencies this means that it absorbs quite a bit more energy from the circuit than the copper did and this is pretty apparent as the steel melts a lot easier even though it has a higher melting point now i can't say i ran into the issue of liquefying copper and steel electrodes before so coming up with a durable electrode turned out to be quite a challenge but then i had an idea i know it's puny but that filament is made out of tungsten which has the highest melting point of the metallic elements if that high melting point can at least slow down how fast i burn through electrodes it'll be pretty useful to me [Applause] well i guess it can't at least we know that that plasma can get over 3400 degrees celsius which is pretty awesome in its own right but still though i need a way to not burn through electrodes every 10 seconds now there's only one other element on the periodic table that has a higher melting point than tungsten and that's good old-fashioned carbon it turns out that my favorite element is available inside lantern batteries in the form of graphite rods by opening it carefully i can see the four individual cells that make up the overall battery each one of the cells has a graphite rod and these should be able to handle the extreme conditions on my plasma generator plus all that manganese dioxide in there will be useful for other reasons to top it off the rods fit conveniently snug inside some 3 8 inch copper tubing and since graphite is so soft it's easy to grind the ends into nice breakout points for the plasma so without further ado let's see how these hold up it looks like graphite is a clear winner some of the carbon is still vaporized but slow enough to not be a huge deal but now that i have an electrode that won't turn into a puddle means that i'm ready to spice things up a bit that's right i'm breaking out the chemicals with the help of various metal salts i can not only make the ark longer but i can also make it produce some crazy colors now adding salts to the running coil would be risky to say the least but by drilling a small basin in the graphite electrodes i can pack them with chemicals and deliver salts to the flame that way i also found it helps to paint the area around it with a saturated solution of the compound this electrode is loaded with sodium bicarbonate aka regular old baking soda [Music] the sodium is what gives the plasma that brilliant yellow color but it also helps increase the flame size my reasoning for this at least is since sodium doesn't mind losing an electron i'd expect it to hang around in an ionized state and that would increase the free charged particle density in the outer regions of the plasma this would help keep the escaping gas conducted for a longer time while it cools and it would also provide a seed for avalanche ionization of the air around it all right sodium was fun so how about we try the element above it it turns out lithium gives an incredibly deep red plasma on the generator now this isn't that much of a surprise considering it gives the best red flames of any element that i've burned at least unfortunately most lithium salts are highly hygroscopic so that's why you don't typically see them used in fireworks next i tried an electrode loaded with copper ii chloride i can't say i'm that impressed with this one i was hoping for a deeper green or deeper blue than that i think the arc is just too hot and the color is getting washed out by black body radiation at the minimum though it does give a bit more color to the plasma than a bare copper electrode now there were a few other disappointing electrodes that i tried but i'm just going to skip to my favorite one an electrode loaded with cesium chloride now the colors here aren't that crazy but it does give the biggest increase in flame size of all the salts that i tried synsesium is the least electronegative element on the periodic table it's surprisingly stable floating around as a singly charged positive ion like the sodium salts it provides free charges to increase the plasma size but cesium does an even better job at it i wouldn't have thought to use cesium if it weren't for just an attican of the thought emporium telling me about cesium lightning rockets it turns out that an alternative to using tethered wire for rocket triggered lightning is cesium spiked rocket fuel the long hang time of the ions can provide an adequate conductive path to trigger lightning in a thunderstorm apparently if it works for lightning it also works for this plasma generator i do look forward to the day when i can try this with actual lightning though the last salty electrode that i tried used a roughly 50 50 mix of cesium and lithium chlorides this was a good trade-off between arc length and color as the arc was nearly as long as from the cesium salts alone but with a strong red hue from the lithium everything i've put on this coil so far has been endothermic for the most part that means that the chemicals absorbed energy by going into the plasma but the thing is i'm surrounded by all this reactive oxygen it would be a shame letting that all go to waste and since fire is conductive my thinking is that i should get some really interesting results if i use flammable conductive electrodes for the first angry electrode let's start with magnesium when magnesium is burned the normal way it produces a blindingly bright white flame and this is a pretty classic chemistry demo so what happens when it's ran on the incinerator coil [Music] hmm that's weird why is it making every color there is like seriously this thing's switching between red green orange white and sometimes all of them at once i have no explanation for this now the reds the most crazy to me because it's so deep i've never seen magnesium produce these colors before in fact i'd be really curious to hear input from my viewers on this since i had such crazy results with the first electrode i made another magnesium electrode but with a lot more pieces of ribbon this time [Music] this configuration didn't produce that striking red color like before but instead this one made a bunch more violet and green plasma now these colors weren't nearly as vivid as the red was but either way it's still pretty awesome because it's considerably different than the typical white flame i had a smooth brain moment in one of my magnesium tests and forgot to move the ribbon away from the coil and this actually ended up shorting out the coil a few times [Music] oh boy now you have to admit it looks pretty cool but it's probably not good for my tube for the next metal electrode i used some zinc that i salvaged from the batteries i took apart earlier now this one wasn't as wild as the last one but it did produce some nice blue colors as it burned on the coil in my experience zinc tends to burn green in most pyrotechnic mixes so the blue color was a bit of a surprise i tried an electrode made out of ferrocerium which is the aloe used in modern lighter flames now this one was surprisingly tame i was honestly hoping it would explode or something now it did manage to create an incredibly bright white plasma the brightest out of all the electrodes i tried actually the steel wool electrode turned out to be one of my favorites even at relatively low input voltages the steel wool ignites super easily and makes a nice shower of sparks now it stops igniting reliably once the outer wool burns off but luckily that can just be fixed by raising the voltage now i know what you're thinking is there anything useful you can do with this circuit i mean if you didn't know any better you might think that this is all just a dangerous and complicated way of starting a fire for starters it's great at driving incandescent bulbs that's right why use two wires connected to mains when you can use this awesome single electrode light bulb driver at first the circuit doesn't draw much power and just ionizes the gas inside of the bulb but as it heats up the melting glass becomes conductive enough to draw more power and really start to glow i find that 60 hertz hum coming from the voltage doubler to be really soothing what a great use for vacuum tube technology plus when the bulb reaches end of life you're left with all these awesome glass beads this can drive a lot more than just incandescent lights in fact a plasma globe lights up super easily on the coil since the operating frequency is nearly a thousand times higher than a stock globe the plasma takes on some unusual forms compared to how they typically operate cranking up the power makes it much brighter as well unfortunately the inner electrode on this one quickly melted through which is why the plasma is turning yellow here but even as the globe starts to take on air it makes some absolutely stunning patterns that are totally worth the short-lived nature of the device [Applause] oh shoot i need to charge my phone button i forgot to bring one of apple's proprietary connectors to my shop today maybe i can just wirelessly charge it with a coil hmm maybe i didn't give it enough power there let's give that another go huh don't worry about that that was just the voltage doubler arcing over well it doesn't seem to have charged the phone but it did take care of the problem all right one more test for the coil can it cook an onion one way to find out i'll take that as a yes man this project has been so much fun like seriously this is my spirit circuit it's sketchy chaotic and great at lighting things on fire now it's also extremely dangerous even in the context of tesla coils which is definitely saying something now it turns out that there's actually very little info on this circuit online so i want to go over some of the key details for those that are interested first off i want to compare this to a traditional vacuum tube tesla coil superficially they both look pretty similar both circuits use a vacuum tube that drives a resonant circuit to make plasma and they use many of the same parts in their construction that's about where the similarities end though the most obvious difference is in the choice of coils a traditional tesla coil uses two or even sometimes three coils in the design the output coil usually consists of around a thousand turns of relatively fine wire and usually a metal top load of some sort now this circuit only needs a single coil to operate and my coil here only has 20 turns unfortunately using one coil means that you lose isolation in the traditional design the output coil is not directly connected to the rest of the circuit and instead it's coupled to it via electromagnetic fields this isolation is part of the reason why i can touch the arc and not instantly die oh wow it tickles now i definitely don't recommend that you try this but it does demonstrate some interesting properties of the circuit another major factor is that by touching the arc i introduce quite a bit of capacitance into the circuit and this causes the resonant frequency of the output coil to drop this knocks the circuit out of tune and dramatically decreases the amount of energy the circuit can deliver that brings up the most important difference between the circuits if you touch that arc you die the output coil here is hooked directly to the high voltage power supply that means that the circuit doesn't have to be producing plasma or even oscillating to kill you if you touch the coil while the power supply is live you're of course before you hit the floor if the risk of instant death syndrome wasn't enough you also have to consider the potential for rf emissions from the device this circuit oscillates at a much higher frequency than a typical tesla coil over 10 megahertz actually considering the circuit is drawing over 5000 watts at max power there's this serious potential for causing rf interference now this circuit is a terribly efficient radiator as the vast majority of the energy goes into the plasma but it doesn't take much em radiation to become a problem i don't know if you noticed but i upgraded my faraday cage specifically for this project i covered every surface with fine mesh copper and then painstakingly soldered the seams together i spent more time building this stupid cage than the actual plasma generator it certainly beats angering the fcc though or even worse local hams interestingly when the circuit is first fired the breakout actually looks quite similar to a tesla coil but this initial plasma channel is quickly heated by the large amount of rf current that goes through it as this happens the arc starts to take on more thermal characteristics and convection draws it upward giving it a more flame-like appearance now if you're wondering how the circuit actually works it isn't super straightforward now my understanding is that it operates as a classy oscillator and the chaotic plasma is the load now this is actually super complicated to model and that's why optimizing a circuit like this comes down to just trial and error now i'm not kidding when i say that there's little info on this circuit online in fact when i first learned about the circuit the few builds that i could find were all from people in eastern europe and i just assumed this was because they had access to cheap soviet vacuum tubes but then i watched the dooley's video on the phenomenon but actually i have a little bit of confusion here because i haven't found a proper english name for this discharge i guess i was just searching in the wrong language according to viduli this phenomenon is well documented in the russian language and the first paper on the effect was written way back in 1928 by a soviet scientist interestingly he also found footage from slightly earlier showing americans that built an rf torch of their own now even though americans may have been the first to demonstrate the effect there's very little info on in english now i can go on and on about other weird and problematic properties of the device like sketchy methods of igniting the plasma or out changing the electrode can double the power draw or how in the course of a minute it turns the atmosphere of my shop into literal poison but at this point this video is already my longest yet so i should just pull the plug before i get carried away now before i end this video i want to thank the youtubers that inspired this project because i'll be honest i wouldn't have known how to go about building this crazy circuit if i didn't have their builds as reference as far as i know zilli popper was the first person to build the torch circuit using the gu5b triode hence funny because i tried building the circuit as close to what i could make out from his videos but i couldn't get it to work with his values of grid caps it's probably just because my brain is too smooth to comprehend his rf wizardry it's at least a 555s build is what inspired my use of a voltage doubler on the drive supply for a more chaotic flame and his salted electrodes are what gave me the idea to put half the periodic table on my coil i wish i would have used his clever coil design though because it looks way nicer than the one i wound on cardboard finally i want to thank viduli for sharing some of the history on this type of device as well as for his previous designs i've used in my videos this guy is legit he actually researches in a facility that studies huge pulse power systems if you guys are interested in high voltage be sure to check these channels out they've got a ton of awesome content and they're certainly more qualified than i am to build this stuff well i guess that's about it for this video so until the next time stay safe and happy blazing you

Channel: styropyro

Views: 2,135,135

Rating: 4.9584126 out of 5

Keywords: tesla, coil, arc lighter, plasma, experiment, diy, electronics, vacuum tube, vttc

Id: UNisqZOAaAs

Length: 26min 2sec (1562 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 06 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/DisappointedBird]

If anyone deserves the title of mad scientist, it's styropyro.

[u/StrangerWithAHat]

Imagine this guy's electricity bill.

[u/winterfresh0]

I mean, the tungsten filaments are thin enough that they burn out if they are turned on while exposed to air.

I'd like to see what would happen if he used tungsten rods like the kind used in welding.

[u/vendetta2115]

Anyone think this guy sounds just like NileRed? Same kind of inflection to their voice in narration.

[u/illy-chan]

Man, I didn't think I could sit through the whole video but the pyro in me was just mesmerized.

[u/Start_button]

:gently places first microwave on ground:

2 seconds later...

:throws 12 other microwaves on top of the first:

Also, glad to see he mentioned the local HAM's. I saw this and my first reaction was to cringe thinking of the local guys trying to talk on HF and being washed out by this thing but then I saw the Faraday cage on the walls and then he actually mentioned not pissing off the local old guys.

[u/Lightspeedius]

Wow, insane and amazing.