Made some progress on the coil power supply. Soldered an extension cord onto the 120V side of the 600V step up transformer:
I crimped on terminals to the 600V side to connect to the rectifier:
Success. I slowly brought up the variac and metered 500VDC with ripple:
Now thats it’s so much easier to open and close the conflat, I decided to take another shot at the electron gun. This time I got it. These are air plasmas.
You can see an electron beam evident in this photo:
Did a few upgrades on the system today to make it easier to work with. Backplate nuts allow you to tighten the conflat with just one wrench which makes it much easier:
I added a piece of 80/20 to support the weight of the HV feedthrough. This makes it much easier and safer to install (I dropped it and broke a piece before):
Some alligator clips for the FLUKE voltage meter.
Parts for the coil power supply:
SCR (844-VSKH91/14P). Not sure how to wire this up.
SCR schematic:
Rectifier + spare
Power resistor to bleed the capacitors:
Protection Diode + spare:
More conflat gaskets:
Back plates for 8″ conflat harware. These make installing conflats much easier needing only one wrench:
So I bought this capacitor a while back and kinda forgot about it. The other night I took it out of it’s crate and put it on a dolly. It’s freaking heavy at 86 kg (190 lbs). It’s rated at 16 kV, 390 uF…. storing 49.92 kJ (kilojoules).
Now we have a power supply capable of charging this thing.
Here is what I’m thinking: 16 kV is enough potential to drive a fusor grid. So basically charge this thing up and release an very high current 16kV pulse into the fusor grid.
This capacitor is probably the most dangerous piece of equipment I own. It scares the shit out of me.
Prometheus Fusion Perfection 