So I needed a break from working on a project again, and I remembered that I had a bunch of 9V batteries and thought, ‘I wonder if that would be enough voltage to hold an arc?‘. The answer is yes, it would. So I made a little video of melting some alligator clips and crispifying some LED’s, a CD, and a cap. Or at least trying to blow up the cap, that was one tough cookie..
I used 244 9V batteries, that were not new, but not dead. When you do the math, this should be 2,196 Volts, but that is when they are new. I measured (in blocks) 2,000 volts total. Lots of sparky..
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@George, thats funny, my wife asked what in the world I was doing and I told her I was engineering this new thing called arc soldering.. Yeah, thats it, I did it for science. ish.
Oh man…
This made my blood run cold. Among the many things I have done as a working engineer was designing precision high-voltage DC power supplies. It that environment, I learned (thankfully, not the hard way) that working with HV anything requires a great deal of attention and awareness of the dangers involved.
Under the wrong set of conditions, the string of batteries demonstrated in the video could be lethal.
Please educate yourselves thoroughly and take great caution if you choose to play with things like this. I’m serious.
Oh man! That’s like a childhood dream!
I would have cooked a hot dog with them. 😉
@George, thats funny, my wife asked what in the world I was doing and I told her I was engineering this new thing called arc soldering.. Yeah, thats it, I did it for science. ish.
Oh man…
This made my blood run cold. Among the many things I have done as a working engineer was designing precision high-voltage DC power supplies. It that environment, I learned (thankfully, not the hard way) that working with HV anything requires a great deal of attention and awareness of the dangers involved.
Under the wrong set of conditions, the string of batteries demonstrated in the video could be lethal.
Please educate yourselves thoroughly and take great caution if you choose to play with things like this. I’m serious.