inportb

Happy New Year, all! And in the spirit of starting the year with a bang…

I felt like having some fun, so I started designing a tiny railgun. A tiny, kid-safe railgun. Eh, who am I kidding?

Anyhow, I imagine a small power supply based on the charging circuit in a disposable flash camera and a capacitor bank made from capacitors found in more disposable flash cameras. The rails would be short copper bars — somewhere in the range of three inches long, positioned about a millimeter apart. They’d be secured in a glass and plexiglas barrel using cheap clamps, and connected to the circuit using alligator clips. Unfortunately, there won’t be a real high voltage switch until I find something like an SCR rated for high currents; instead, I’ll just make do with a spark gap trigger.

What about the projectile? Ha. What projectile? The power supply should be able to dump 330V of high direct current across the rails for a split second. I imagine there to be just enough oomph to vaporize/ionize a tiny piece of aluminum foil and sling the plasma a couple of feet. Not bad for a baby model, eh?

The power supply’s pretty much done; now I just need to get me some copper bars and really thick copper wire…