My Stuff Page
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This is a page about all the odd stuff I'm interested in. Some of it is a bit odd, but then so am I.
In December 2004, I gave a demo of the Destruct-o-tron at the Christmas dorkbotlondon meeting. (The Destruct-o-tron is a large bank of capacitors which can discharge an immense amount of electrical energy very quickly). A few days previously, Dave Green of NTK had suggested that the event might be a good opportunity to contribute to the Band Aid Dilemma project by destroying a couple of Band Aid 20 CDs in interesting ways.
BANG...... Approximately 1.5 kilojoules of energy is dumped into the coil. This creates a massive magnetic field, which in turns induces a huge electrical current in the disc, generating an opposing magnetic field, and the resulting force provides a very large acceleration of the disc away from the coil. The Hard-Disc platter impacts against the CD and accelerates it from 0 to about 150 miles per hour in 1/1000th of a second, smashing it into many small fragments. If you want to get an idea of what actually happened, check out the High-speed camera movies and frame sequences on this page.