Thomas Powers
Controlled Explosions
My Dad (electrician/handyman previous to current RN work), my uncle Bill (party thrower extraordinaire), and I (wee little peon) made this electric set up to set off fireworks at my uncle's July 4th party. This is the plug box half. Just a bunch of 12v dc parallel circuits. Switched by 24 house switches in a different box about 60ft of cable away. Each plug gets an extension cord plugged in. We modified the extension cords by replacing the female end with two alligator clips. Between the clips we attached little resistors as improvised electronic matches. On the night of the party we tapped the resistors to their fuses with a bit of electrical tape, flipped the switches on time, set to a music mix, and watched the fireworks fly.
My uncle Bill came up with the initial circuit design and my Dad and I volunteered to put it together. My Dad put together the switch box while my sister and I worked on the music mix. As I'm far from an electrician, it took me about an hour to wire all this in and another hour to make the plugbox enclosure.
The overall project took more time than planned as we had a couple of miss-starts when we tried to use a bunch of untinned tiny momentary switches, ended up giving up on them as they were taking to long. We also started making an enclosure for the switches out of plexiglass, but once again that was taking forever and was scrapped as time was running out. Overall, about 10 hours worth of work went into it. Though now that the overall design is set, I'd say we could make another one in just a couple of hours.
It was a very fun little project and worked out well.
Controlled Explosions
My Dad (electrician/handyman previous to current RN work), my uncle Bill (party thrower extraordinaire), and I (wee little peon) made this electric set up to set off fireworks at my uncle's July 4th party. This is the plug box half. Just a bunch of 12v dc parallel circuits. Switched by 24 house switches in a different box about 60ft of cable away. Each plug gets an extension cord plugged in. We modified the extension cords by replacing the female end with two alligator clips. Between the clips we attached little resistors as improvised electronic matches. On the night of the party we tapped the resistors to their fuses with a bit of electrical tape, flipped the switches on time, set to a music mix, and watched the fireworks fly.
My uncle Bill came up with the initial circuit design and my Dad and I volunteered to put it together. My Dad put together the switch box while my sister and I worked on the music mix. As I'm far from an electrician, it took me about an hour to wire all this in and another hour to make the plugbox enclosure.
The overall project took more time than planned as we had a couple of miss-starts when we tried to use a bunch of untinned tiny momentary switches, ended up giving up on them as they were taking to long. We also started making an enclosure for the switches out of plexiglass, but once again that was taking forever and was scrapped as time was running out. Overall, about 10 hours worth of work went into it. Though now that the overall design is set, I'd say we could make another one in just a couple of hours.
It was a very fun little project and worked out well.