61–69 of 69 posts
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Super job. More nitpicking: the real fanatics line up the screw heads to the geometry of the piece. For instance the Dekatrons would look nicer if the screwhead slots would form a circle too.
You're totally right of course, I was very afraid of snapping those little guys off :)
Looks fantastic! Well done! Why didn't you go full brass on the decatrons, instead of mixing stainless and copper? Same goes for the counter box: you only wrapped 2 sides when you pro'lly could have wrapped the whole thing in brass... you probably saved yourself 10 hours by not doing that, but you're already in for what, 30 hours already? Now I'm going to nitpick. :) My only critique is the high gloss finish on the w…
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I assumed that someone had made a sensitive bolometer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolometer Wood is a thermal insulator, so with care, one might be able to build a thermistor bridge capable of detecting the differential temperature rise between pieces of brass when a source was placed near one brass-piece. I, too, found that the expectations framed by the title were not met by the article. It's a pretty box, thoug…
>By 1880, Langley's bolometer was refined enough to detect thermal radiation from a cow a quarter of a mile away. Sidenote: that sounds like even F-22/35 should be visible half a globe away in IR
I wanted to work with dekatrons (my initials are dek) but the actual dekatron tubes want 300+V, which exceeds my personal comfort level. However there is a nice kit with all the necessary electronics: https://threeneurons.wordpress.com/dekatron-stuff/variable-d...
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Building a Geiger tube is probably beyond the reach of most people. That’s a precision piece of equipment.
I'd argue that it is beyond the perceived reach of many people, but it is not beyond the actual reach of many people. The key ingredients are aspiration and time.
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Building a Geiger tube is probably beyond the reach of most people. That’s a precision piece of equipment.
I'd argue that it is beyond the perceived reach of many people, but it is not beyond the actual reach of many people. The key ingredients are aspiration and time.
Obviously the ability to skip by basic research and dead ends would cut this down by a ton, but ultimately a lot of the things we’ve created in the past century requires a huge amount of complicated machinery to make, which requires more machines and more labor. Could a person reasonably start from scratch (let’s say skip the mining and just give them coal & metal ores) and make a Geiger tube? Or would it be too difficult?
Lovely piece of work. Scary how active those old gas lamp mantles are (in the video). Makes me wonder how radioactive your average campsite is, given that those things tend to crumble to dust when you change them.
Not very. The predominant isotope of thorium is an alpha emitter with a half-life measured in tens of billions of years. Looking at the video, the counter appears to peak around 200cpm, or (per the Grafana dashboard screenshot) about 2 microsieverts per hour. That'd take 50 hours, a little over two days, of exposure to add up to the dose of a typical chest X-ray. And that's for a whole mantle, placed directly adjacen…
Lots of people have marble and granite countertops in their kitchen...
3.6 roentgen. Not great. Not terrible. Very cool project. Always impressed the level craftsmanship some people have.