Hello! Justin from Hamilton, Ontario here.

[Justin Bennett]

Hello everybody.

Needless to say, I was excited to stumble upon fusor.net yesterday. Not just because of my interest in the great quest for fusion BE, but also because of my line of work. I operate and maintain three research Linacs: two 3MV KN-3000 VandeGraffs and a 1.25MV Tandetron; primarily h-, h+, D, and T plasma accelerated on Li for all three.

I see a ton of tech talk not just about Fusors but about systems in general. This is big resource for me.

I started working on these machines for 2 1/2 years ago with very little experience and very little training. I learned enough to make them run and do basic maintenance and troubleshooting. That's about it.

Once the KN started to malfunction, I was thrown into the water to learn how to swim. Problematic RF systems, cracking belts, HV distributions, high vacuum leaks, dirty cold cathodes, and so forth. I've researched and studied about old school tube full wave rectifiers (good ol 5UG and 6146's!), diodes, RF wave sync, inductors/DC chokes, power transformers, RC time constants, all on my own.

I've had help here and there. The big cheese who knows everything about this machine recently retired and has moved down south so we've been corresponding via email. His huge thumbs make his messages a bit hieroglyphic. My boss is really supportive and has great ideas but his knowledge of the terminal innards only go so deep. The SNEAP forum is kinda helpful.. to people who have been working on these machines for decades. Its intimidating to someone new, not to mention very out-dated.

I like the idea of group of a self enthused reactor peoples. I'm hoping that I can find some helpful folks that can guide me along this path of accelerator poetry. Big shout outs to /r/engineering. Smart peeps there.

I'll be sure to submit photos of whatever I'm working on. People seem to like that.

We'll see you around folks. Cheers.

Justin