Crazy things you did as a kid.

Another engineering beauty. I had an automotive coil...that used to be before in the distributor / spark plug / points days. I dunno, I guess it made 15-20kV with a pulse to make a spark at the plug. Hmm....I wonder what would happen if I just put AC into it.... I had a variac at the time (didn't every boy genius have one?), put 20 or 30VAC into it and enjoyed making arcs and sparks with it....even charred a bit of the work bench where I was....even the carbon in the char would conduct... So more volts in equals more volts out, right? So, I increase it a bit more, bit more, bit more - all the way up to line voltage...I could get about a two inch arc with it. I had it mounted in a vise, which worked quite well as a ground.

After a few minutes and at a seemly end of the experiment, I was going to shut it down. I had the coil pointing with the cap to the right, control and me to the left - all of a sudden that cap blew off...boom ! That coil unwound itself all the way across the basement....and of course it was oil filled and that went all over. As I said....idle hands.

 

I used to hitchhike a lot when I was a teen around town and to school. After I graduated hs I started hitchhiking from state to state and up and down the east coast.