[Amps] Working on my Darwin award

[Roger (K8RI)]

On 2/25/2014 5:18 PM, k7fm wrote:
> To add to Peter's list:
>
> 9.  Never set a 14" long crescent wrench on a 1700 amp-hour battery. You
> will need to change shorts and your crescent wrench will turn into
> molten balls about the size of BBs.

And once you drop it, don't try to grab and pull it off. You will lose a 
LOT of hide. Painfully too. I accidentally shorted a loop of #10 copper 
across a car battery. It vaporized before I could even start to open my 
fingers. That was a deep cut, Thankfully it didn't get any Tendons. The 
muscle regrew! But damn that hurt!

On a different note, I worked with Mass Spectrometers for a while.  I 
don't know the rating of those BIG electromagnets, but if it tried to 
take a wrench away, you just let have it.  It'd crush your hand 
including bones.

They used  a large Tesla coil to vaporize samples, accelerated the ions 
and shot them through 2 curved,charged plates about a foot long.  These 
plates were between the poles of the magnet. The magnets (with windings) 
weighed between a half ton and a ton.

This was done in a vacuum. They started with mechanical, rotary vane 
pumps that'd make about 10^1 Torr. then the diffusion pumps sing silicon 
705 oil to about 10^7. Then they switched to ion pumps (no exhaust, the 
ions were absorbed in the base of the pump.)  I don't remember the 
ultimate vacuum, but all O-rings were gold wire.  I kept the wire in a 
plain old desk drawer under tools.  No one bothered the tools, and who 
would keep a bunch of pure gold in a tool drawer.  I kept the Platinum 
for the platinum, platinum/rhodium thermocouple wires in the same 
drawer<:-)) I made a lot of thermocouples, from copper copper/constantan 
(sp?) to the platinum.  I also did the silver plating as well.

BTW: In the early days, the entire reactor base plate (for making poly 
crystalline Silicon) was solid silver.

73

Roger (K8RI)


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> Colin K7FM
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