Seven power-grid meting devices from the depths of YouTube
We all knew someone in high school who was on a watchlist for trying to buy the parts for a pipe bomb. Well, I did. And hell, that someone might even have been you. The path to thermite often started with YouTube channels like The King of Random, Modern Rogue, or Backyard Scientist. The machines listed below are not from any of those channels. These mistakes of modern science are what happens when the kid trying to blow things up in the backyard gets a degree in electrical engineering.
1 Laser microwave
Starting off casually we have the laser microwave by the YouTube channel Styropyro.
Styropyro doesn’t do any editing to his thumbnails. This is just what this microwave looks like when it’s running. Microwaves are already the most common cause of death for electronics hobbyists (that transformer gives you a nasty shock) but not content to simply max the output of the regular microwave he decided to make one that can blind you if you look at the wall its shining at.
The most dangerous a laser can be rated at is Class 4. This setup uses roughly fourteen hundred times as much power.
Yes, it can cook things. No, it cannot cook them well.
2 1000 amp hot knife
In the mid twenty-teens the “thousand degree knife challenge” was all the rage. The pitch was simple. Blowtorch a knife until it glowed and film yourself cutting satisfying things. It would normally come with a thumbnail where a knife was digitally painted red.
Photonicinduction has only added the text to this thumbnail.
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He also bucks the trend of the “challenge”. Normally you make the knife hot enough to cut something. For Photonicinduction, he simply makes the knife so hot it melts.
3 Thunderstruck played by tearing the air apart
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice is not remembered as a good movie. However, embedded in the mind of every child who saw it is the idea of making music using tesla coils. Franzoli Electronics has made that dream a reality using nothing but FL studio, several tesla coils, an unwise amount of power, and presumably several complaining neighbours.
4 30,000 watt light bulb
Styropyro returns with a video that doesn’t seem as scary as the last one. Until you realise that the springs in front of him aren’t for a garage door, they’re the filaments to an incandescent lightbulb that could power a lighthouse. Highlights include him wandering through the woods at midnight lit up like sunset and the lightbulb at full output melting its aluminium container. In the background of the video there is something strange, almost as if someone had wired 400 car batteries together…
5 Lightning in a bottle
Here’s something harmless and pretty. You may have heard of Lichtenberg figures before. In the right circumstances, electricity can etch its path onto the medium it travels through. There’s a little poetry to it, lightning scars looking the same as lightning. Electron Impressions has a video showcasing a lovely method for creating a Lichtenberg figure in a resin bottle, creating something that both looks like and is lightning in a bottle. They’re even selling them for the low low price of $220 dollars.
Why such a commanding price? For the resin to take the Lichtenberg figure it must be primed, and the only way to prime it is to wheel it through an active particle accelerator.
6 400 car batteries
Back in dangerous and ugly territory we have 400 car batteries wired together.
For someone who has made laser cannons and a “soviet death circuit” it should say something that Styropyro’s most horrifying project to date is as simple as 400 car batteries wired together. But some fun facts about that. So much power goes through this circuit that it becomes practically impossible to switch on or off. When full blocks of copper both tear themselves apart from the electromagnetism and then fuse together it takes a log splitter to do the job. Or it did when he tried it with “only” 200 batteries. A fair portion of the almost 2-hour video is dedicated to just working out how to turn the damn thing on and off.
But once it’s working it shoots geysers of molten metal, evaporates zinc in an instant, and pops a 6000 amp fuse like it’s nothing.
7 Plasma cannon
Right back where we started. No photoshop, just a terrifying machine. If making thermite puts you on a government watchlist then LightningOnDemand’s Lorentz Plasma Cannon probably gets you a job offer from the Department of Defence. The really terrifying thing about this machine is the sound. Plasma is often described as the air being ripped apart and the thundercrack that this machine makes when it fires reminds you of that fact.
