Science/Engineering/Technical forums

Hello everyone!

My name is David McKee, and I am glad I found this place! The work you all are doing in phenomenal and inspiring. I too am a "Backyard Engineer/Mad Scientist" so I look forward to having lively discussions and reading interesting and inspirational ideas.

-David T. McKee

Wecome David. If you do/have done anything cool, we'd love to have a thread or few on it/them. That's kind of how we roll around here. While many of us are more or less "do it yourself" and all by yourself types - we like to see others like us doing it, maybe something new we didn't think of ourselves yet. Makes us all smarter and more motivated to keep adding to the world in a positive way.

Well Doug, you already took a quick look at my personal site where I display my current set of projects (when you "vetted me" ).

But I will list that here for those who are interested: http://www.celticcrosseng.com

I'm a cheap-skate... mainly because I have to be so I try to build everything out of junk or cheaply available stuff I find - and I see that is popular here too so I like that.

For those of you who are interested in such things as how to make a cold-smoker for meat and cheese, a food dryer out of plastic culvert, turning your Lincoln buzz-box welder into a DC Tig welder source, Playing with "scaler waves", or my latest project (which I need to get up and posted) Building a precision Scroll Saw inexpensively.

I am slowly moving back to high energy physics - I used to have a massive Tesla coil I built (magnifying transmitter type with a 4 foot main and a 2 foot third coil) where I was able to demonstrate that you really don't need a Pole-pig to create big sparks - unfortunately I lost most of my pics so going to have to rebuild that.

But I am really interested in the fusion stuff you guys are doing... so that is why I am here. Thanks!

-David T. McKee.

Well, by genetics, I'm primarily a Scott - the very definition of cheapskateness. Though it's been a daunting amount of money we've put into the fusor ( a big fraction of $10e6), considering the billions spent by others to get less worthy results, we win!
Only certain parts of this were simply bought outright from the vendors thereof, and only if I could get them to give us a really nice discount - some of the "good stuff" just hasn't been surplussed yet, but the other 90% of the stuff was bought for things like the scrap weight of the metal. Particularly the mechanical parts of the vacuum systems where the savings are huge ratios (flanges, tanks, couplers). And of course, a lot simply built from raw materials where that made sense (as much as I could, in fact).

And some half and half. Get a flange for 5 bucks (new price more like 10x that) bore it, and weld in a tubing coupler (about 100 bucks new). So I saved $50+ for just one weld and one hole. I can deal with that. I can't quite make the tubing coupler from scratch - the 100tpi thread and nut (in 316 SS) are a little past what my lathe can turn out decently, but w/o a flange they aren't too expensive. Sure, the first one or two leaked a little, that's why there are some tricks here about leak detection. Another hit from the welder, and that's all fixed.

Doug Coulter wrote:Well, by genetics, I'm primarily a Scott - the very definition of cheapskateness.

Oh no You too, I am as well, my father was born in the Firth of Forth Area. He was tighter than a popcorn fart.