first tests (Patreon)

I finally got to blowing things up with the car battery bank. This clip shows the zinc boiling off of a 3/8" galvanized steel rod, shot at 4000 frames per second.

Unfortunately I'm dealing with mostly failures so far. The biggest is that the switch spring force is overcome by presumably a magnetic force, which limits the current to 55,000 amps. I did some napkin math on the expected forces a while back, and got some huge numbers that I didn't believe, mostly due to the major approximations I made. It looks like those were more correct than I thought! My options now are to either add enormous external springs, or rebuild the switch in a way that the magnetic forces close the switch instead of opening them. Both options are sketchy, and both are a lot of work! I think I'm more afraid of big springs than big lorentz forces though.

Shooting with the slow mo camera has been a nightmare too. Hopefully I can figure out some of the "quirks" before doing the bigger experiments. For the time being, I'm going to keep blowing up smaller things in order to get a better feel for the camera. This will also give me some time to plan how I'm going to modify the switch.