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name is guy
01-12-2009, 08:16 AM
OK first thing i do not know mush about electrics... YET and dont have a good
multimeter worth a nickel

But is it possible that this larg neon light transformer can supply a cell for a good size hho torch. I know if this is possible this will take some great modification to my transformer and thats not a problem... I have a guy

but if anybody reading this knows a thing or two about electronics and think
they can save me some time and money please post if its even possible or not.

SPECS
OK on the transformer it reads in terms i dont fully understand yet but V.A.360 / PRI 120 / Hz.60 / SEC.12000 / MA.30 / + secondary MID-POINT GROUNDED-GHN neon sing and thats all

dont know if it work ''but what the hell'' and if not what are some of the more
powerful low volt high amp power supplies or parts needed for something like
this i can get most types of electric junk supprize me

H2OPWR
01-23-2009, 07:52 PM
The transformer provides AC current. You need DC to power an electrolizer. You would have to build or buy a bridge rectifier to make it work. I am not sure what you mean by high amp power supply but any time you get in to anything high amps the costs skyrocket. Low amp stuff is pretty inexpensive. The least expensive way I have seen anyone make a power supply is out of are PC power supplies. There is a description of how to make on in a thread by BoyntonStu.

SmartScarecrow
01-23-2009, 08:11 PM
OK first thing i do not know mush about electrics... YET and dont have a good
multimeter worth a nickel

But is it possible that this larg neon light transformer can supply a cell for a good size hho torch. I know if this is possible this will take some great modification to my transformer and thats not a problem... I have a guy

but if anybody reading this knows a thing or two about electronics and think
they can save me some time and money please post if its even possible or not.

SPECS
OK on the transformer it reads in terms i dont fully understand yet but V.A.360 / PRI 120 / Hz.60 / SEC.12000 / MA.30 / + secondary MID-POINT GROUNDED-GHN neon sing and thats all

dont know if it work ''but what the hell'' and if not what are some of the more
powerful low volt high amp power supplies or parts needed for something like
this i can get most types of electric junk supprize me



what you really need to get your hands on now is 20Kv rectifier assembly ... I have seen these on eBay for about $100 or so ... I saw a couple at a ham fest I went to a couple years ago that I could have picked up used for $25 each and wish now I had grabbed them ... bottom line, what you need is out there, you just gotta hunt it down ...

it would also be very nice if you could get your hands on about a half dozen 5Kv oil filled capacitors ... these are rather large heavy gadgets but for some of what you are going to want to try, you will need to assemble a capacitor bank ...

plan your setup to handle 20Kv at about 2 amps ... your transformer will not produce that but you will find our quickly that it pays to over engineer these things ...

your transformer is capable of putting out 12,000 volts at 30 miliamps ... not quite enough to kill you, but enough to make you wish you were dead ... use much care handling high voltage ... the surface effect of this type of power can cause nerve damage and burns ... under just the right circumstances, it can indeed knock you deader than a door nail ... have respect for it ... you aint in Kansas playing with 12v anymore ...

the type of apparatus you would construct with such a power source is not your traditional brute force electrolysis device ... you will not be making HHO gas as you understand it and this type of apparatus is not appropriate for use with an HHO torch ... you are setting up to play in the emerging world of plasma physics ...

you will be working toward a method of creating a device that exhibits many of the characteristics of what folks call "cold fusion" ... you might also pursue the cool effects many have shown on YouTube where they literally cause water to explode with a spark plug ...

double check your safety gear ... you will want welding glasses so you can safely observe the plasma ... you will want a full face shield, Lowes, Home Depot, about $30 ... a rubber non conductive mat on the floor to stand on ... welder's gloves ... dont underestimate the hazards ... I know a few folks that have been hurt playing with this stuff ... but it is fascinating work and is highly additive ... your television will accumulate a thick layer of dust when you get into it ...

oicu812
01-23-2009, 10:35 PM
i've got the exact same neon sign transformer on my work bench 120volt ac primary and 12,000 volt secondary@30 milli amps. makes a fantastic jacobs ladder. I'm a high voltage power lineman so i've got the 15kv rubber gloves. you won't be able to run your cell off it. in brute force electrolysis your looking for low voltage and high current to decompose water. one cool thing i've tried though is hooking up one of the leads from the neon transformer to a thin piece of steel and the other ( wearing my 15kv rubber gloves) to my hho torch. as soon as I get about a half inch away from the steel the arc forms and you get plasma baby!

SmartScarecrow
01-23-2009, 11:27 PM
i've got the exact same neon sign transformer on my work bench 120volt ac primary and 12,000 volt secondary@30 milli amps. makes a fantastic jacobs ladder. I'm a high voltage power lineman so i've got the 15kv rubber gloves. you won't be able to run your cell off it. in brute force electrolysis your looking for low voltage and high current to decompose water. one cool thing i've tried though is hooking up one of the leads from the neon transformer to a thin piece of steel and the other ( wearing my 15kv rubber gloves) to my hho torch. as soon as I get about a half inch away from the steel the arc forms and you get plasma baby!

WOW, I never thought of that !!! thanks for the tip !!! I gotta see that one !!! fireworks, here I come !!!

oicu812
01-24-2009, 01:55 PM
WOW, I never thought of that !!! thanks for the tip !!! I gotta see that one !!! fireworks, here I come !!!

hey man... have fun, but please be carefull.. just like scacrow said wear safety glasses. 30 milli amps may not kill you but who knows what kind of nerve damage it can do @12,000 volts.

oicu812
01-24-2009, 03:03 PM
what you really need to get your hands on now is 20Kv rectifier assembly ... I have seen these on eBay for about $100 or so ... I saw a couple at a ham fest I went to a couple years ago that I could have picked up used for $25 each and wish now I had grabbed them ... bottom line, what you need is out there, you just gotta hunt it down ...

it would also be very nice if you could get your hands on about a half dozen 5Kv oil filled capacitors ... these are rather large heavy gadgets but for some of what you are going to want to try, you will need to assemble a capacitor bank ...

plan your setup to handle 20Kv at about 2 amps ... your transformer will not produce that but you will find our quickly that it pays to over engineer these things ...

your transformer is capable of putting out 12,000 volts at 30 miliamps ... not quite enough to kill you, but enough to make you wish you were dead ... use much care handling high voltage ... the surface effect of this type of power can cause nerve damage and burns ... under just the right circumstances, it can indeed knock you deader than a door nail ... have respect for it ... you aint in Kansas playing with 12v anymore ...

the type of apparatus you would construct with such a power source is not your traditional brute force electrolysis device ... you will not be making HHO gas as you understand it and this type of apparatus is not appropriate for use with an HHO torch ... you are setting up to play in the emerging world of plasma physics ...

you will be working toward a method of creating a device that exhibits many of the characteristics of what folks call "cold fusion" ... you might also pursue the cool effects many have shown on YouTube where they literally cause water to explode with a spark plug ...

double check your safety gear ... you will want welding glasses so you can safely observe the plasma ... you will want a full face shield, Lowes, Home Depot, about $30 ... a rubber non conductive mat on the floor to stand on ... welder's gloves ... dont underestimate the hazards ... I know a few folks that have been hurt playing with this stuff ... but it is fascinating work and is highly additive ... your television will accumulate a thick layer of dust when you get into it ...

hey scarecrow, I have a few 50 kvar capisitors coud you tell me how to wire them up to to create that plasma field you were talking about. they're the big heavy kind with two primary bushings.

SmartScarecrow
01-24-2009, 03:38 PM
hey scarecrow, I have a few 50 kvar capisitors coud you tell me how to wire them up to to create that plasma field you were talking about. they're the big heavy kind with two primary bushings.

If you take a look at the YouTube videos published by that West fellow who wants to be President, think his handle is Water4Fuel (no, not water4gasl), you will see much better examples than what I can provide ...

as far as the fundamentals go, you will want a timer circuit, probably 555 based or similar ... you will want a medium duty solid state relay that the timer circuit will use to cycle the AC primary of your transformer ... you will want a capacitor bank that you have at least some modest control over so you can play with a variety of capacitance values ... you will want a high voltage rectifier setup so you can rectify your secondary voltage ...

the most fun I am having right now is exploding water ... this requires that a spark plug be provided dual power ... I am using rectified 120vAC and 9kv ... I use a lot of diodes to keep the two from bleeding into each other ...

the ground connection of spark plug gets + 120v, the center electrode gets - 120v ... there is not enough potential to bridge the gap ... the ground connection of the spark plug gets - 9kv and the center conductor gets + 9kv ... when the timer circuit trips the transformer, BANG !!! ...

the high voltage spark creates an ionized path at the gap that lets the 120v with some amps behind it bridge the gap ... serious burst of plasma that will quite literally cause water to explode ... applied to steam injected under pressure caused a pretty hefty piece of pipe to shrapnel on me ... luckily I was expecting it and had taken precautions ...

the setup I am using is NOT safe, NOT documented and is a mess that is currently a work in progress ... if I am ever able to get it refined to a point where is it reliable, reasonably safe to operate and can be assembled by average Joe, I will put it out there ... but for right now, I would love to see some folks smarter than me playing with it so maybe I could refine my own techniques ... bottom line, if I told you how I am doing it, you would be learning how NOT to do it ...

oicu812
01-26-2009, 10:42 AM
Ok scarecrow here's what I'm planning on doing. Mounting four welding rods standing up using a 15kv insulator as a base. I'll bend two of the rods forming a 1/4 inch air gap for a large DC welder. The air gap will have 120 voltsDC and a $hit load of amps sittin there waiting. Not enough volts there to start an arc. Than the other two welding rods I'll have bent just outside the smaller air gap with my 12,000 volt neon sign transformer leads attached. When I energize the neon transformer an arc will form accross the outside rods which will get the party started for the welding arc. From there I was thinking of using an ultrasonic humidifier to mist water directly into the plasma ball.

My big question is, do you think there's any chance of damaging my neon transformer. I only paid a $100 bucks for it but sure dont want to damage it. Also ... I have a really big 50kvar capasitor lying around, could I somehow add that to my doomsday machine to intensify the 12kv outside arc

SmartScarecrow
01-26-2009, 02:41 PM
Ok scarecrow here's what I'm planning on doing. Mounting four welding rods standing up using a 15kv insulator as a base. I'll bend two of the rods forming a 1/4 inch air gap for a large DC welder. The air gap will have 120 voltsDC and a $hit load of amps sittin there waiting. Not enough volts there to start an arc. Than the other two welding rods I'll have bent just outside the smaller air gap with my 12,000 volt neon sign transformer leads attached. When I energize the neon transformer an arc will form accross the outside rods which will get the party started for the welding arc. From there I was thinking of using an ultrasonic humidifier to mist water directly into the plasma ball.

My big question is, do you think there's any chance of damaging my neon transformer. I only paid a $100 bucks for it but sure dont want to damage it. Also ... I have a really big 50kvar capasitor lying around, could I somehow add that to my doomsday machine to intensify the 12kv outside arc


LOL ... so you want ME on the hot seat so if your transformer ends up with "X's" in its eyes it was MY fault !?!?!?!

can you damage your transformer by creating what is basically a direct short on the secondary ??? you betcha !!! easy to do ...

one of the few luxuries I have here is a 120v 20a variac ... built it myself out of parts I got off eBay ... nice gadget and is very useful in many of the experiments I do ... what I do is limit the voltage on my primary so its about 75-80vAC ... this has the effect of reducing the voltage on the transformer secondary also ... this is why my 15Kv transformer is only putting out about 9Kv or so ... and when I go to make fire in the water, it puts a lot less strain on the secondary ...

others use light bulbs in the AC primary circuit to limit the amps ... I have not played with that one yet but it looks like it works ...

you might take a look at the type power supply circuitry folks are using with their Tesla coils and capacitive washer launchers ... these power supplies do a lot of what we are after for what we want to do ...

just some things to think about ...

oicu812
01-26-2009, 03:55 PM
actually the neon transformer has overload protection. I can literally short the secondary side out without damaging it. I was worried about the bleedover from the 120 volt dc welding circuit but since the the secondary side of the neon is isolated and i'm using separate electrodes i'm thinking i'll be fine.

SmartScarecrow
01-26-2009, 04:31 PM
actually the neon transformer has overload protection. I can literally short the secondary side out without damaging it. I was worried about the bleedover from the 120 volt dc welding circuit but since the the secondary side of the neon is isolated and i'm using separate electrodes i'm thinking i'll be fine.


ok, I see where you are headed ... yeah, that makes sense ... but in my own scenario, the only place where the low voltage and high voltage meet is at the spark plug I am using as my spark gap plasma water blower upper ... its two complete separate system ... though they are both powered from the same circuit off the breaker so I guess in that respect they are joined ...

I used a "rope" made of high voltage diodes to isolate the HV side from the low voltage side because I more afraid of the HV pulse bleeding back into my rectifier and smoothing capacitor ... these are max rate at about 400v so I just dont was them to ever see that 9Kv ... this is also why the low voltage positive connection is to the spark plug base but the high voltage positive is down the center terminal ...

BOTH HV AND LV ARE DC WHEN THEY HIT THE SPARK PLUG ... you really, really, really need to rectify the output of your HV transformer for this ... if you hit it with AC, you might just blow your low voltage rectifier and capacitor ... for that matter, I suspect your HV capacitor is probably a DC device ... and again, it does the same thing you will be doing with the capacitor on the low voltage side ... just smoothing out the ripples so it looks more like vanilla DC ...

oicu812
01-26-2009, 05:14 PM
I hear what your saying, in my case my low voltage is a monster size industrial welding unit its capable of both ac and dc welding up to 300 amps with low 80 volts and high 120 volts on the dc . the mains are 277/480 so I doubt my tiny 30 milliamp neon transformer can hurt it. what i'm not sure of is the secondary 12kv of my neon transformer ac or dc? I believe its also called a flyback transformer. I was under the impression its dc. have you thought of putting your sparkplug plasma setup in a small brigs n stratton and feeding it a mist of water through the air intake. Target sells a whole house ultrasonic humidifier for about 60$ the ignition coil would supply plenty of high voltage primmer spark @6000 volts or more and than piggy back the the high amp low voltage supply to produce the plasma I imagine you'ld have use a relay on the ignition circuit to time the high amp low voltage circuit so it opens and closes the same time as the ignition circuit.

SmartScarecrow
01-26-2009, 06:01 PM
I hear what your saying, in my case my low voltage is a monster size industrial welding unit its capable of both ac and dc welding up to 300 amps with low 80 volts and high 120 volts on the dc . the mains are 277/480 so I doubt my tiny 30 milliamp neon transformer can hurt it. what i'm not sure of is the secondary 12kv of my neon transformer ac or dc? I believe its also called a flyback transformer. I was under the impression its dc. have you thought of putting your sparkplug plasma setup in a small brigs n stratton and feeding it a mist of water through the air intake. Target sells a whole house ultrasonic humidifier for about 60$ the ignition coil would supply plenty of high voltage primmer spark @6000 volts or more and than piggy back the the high amp low voltage supply to produce the plasma I imagine you'ld have use a relay on the ignition circuit to time the high amp low voltage circuit so it opens and closes the same time as the ignition circuit.

what's coming off your neon sign tranny is AC ... I am pretty sure ... stands to reason if you think about it ... I tore mine apart to see what made it tick and there aint no HV diodes in there ... I got a deal from a guy on eBay about 2 years ago on bulk package of 5Kv in line diodes that I think are rated for about .0000001ma or less because they are really easy to smoke ... LOL ... but when you make a rope out of enough of them, with bundles in parallel then chain them in series, they can handle rectification of the HV coming off the secondary of the tranny ... I suspect if you are cheap as I am, that is the type thing you will end up with ... it will look like hell, but should work ...

or you can break bad and just buy one out of China all made up and pretty for about $100 or so ...

oicu812
01-26-2009, 07:32 PM
do you happen to know the name of the website from china?

SmartScarecrow
01-26-2009, 07:50 PM
do you happen to know the name of the website from china?



take a look at this guy's ebay store ... I have bought from him before and he seems reasonable ... his prices are fair and he has a lot of really neat high voltage toys for big boys ...


http://stores.shop.ebay.com/OT-Electronics__W0QQ_armrsZ1

oicu812
01-26-2009, 08:23 PM
20x 10mA12kV High Voltage Diode HV Rectifier Tesla Ham


wow 20 of them for twelve bucks. my neon transformer is only 30 milliamps. if I string three of them together per leg I should be more than protected...

SmartScarecrow
01-26-2009, 11:28 PM
20x 10mA12kV High Voltage Diode HV Rectifier Tesla Ham


wow 20 of them for twelve bucks. my neon transformer is only 30 milliamps. if I string three of them together per leg I should be more than protected...

that's pretty much what I ended up doing ... made me a star and rectified both legs of the AC into a DC feed ... run the DC through a bank of HV caps to smooth out the pulses ... that's optional of course, will work find without HV smoothing ... now I did find that a cap on the low voltage connection and a modest inductor, about 30 wraps of 12ga around an iron core, seemed to give the 120vDC pulse a lot more punch than without it ... so I use it ... got that tip from that guy West ...

what you want to do if you want to explode water with plasma is think of the 120v potential as being the work horse that needs a swift kick in the butt from the HV arc ... all that HV needs to do is make a path of ions for the low voltage to follow ... once them ions are used up, it turn off the plasma ... so you can basically pulse the AC going into your tranny with a solid state relay using a 555 timer circuit and trigger the whole mess to go BANG !!!

once you got a reliable plasma spark setup, the next step is to fabricate a container that you inject a mist of water or maybe steam into ... proceed with caution here as it just might go BOOOOOM instead of BANG ... BANG good ... BOOOOOM bad !!!