I have been working a bit on one of those three odd sized fusors I proposed and bought parts for in 2000.
I need a small, cute and showable fusor model (operable at the demo level to amuse onlookers at Hamfests and public demos.
I decided to work up the smallest set of hemispheres I had obtained from Braun. (3.5"). This thing is jelling in my head as I go along. I will fall on the sword and suffer myself to make the flanges via the tedious route taken with fusor III. Naturally, I will keep all updated as I go.
********************
I did do a neat experiment regarding my Canberra multichannel analyzer. (gamma spectrometer) I obtained some super activated charcoal and sealed it up in a jar with four naked, rather intense, WWII era aircraft instrument dials! I kept them in this jar for 40 days.
This caused the Radon generated to reach equilibrium in the container in about 20 of those days. The extra time was to give most of the common short lived daughters to also reach equilbrium.
Upon removal, the previously non-radioactive charcoal pegged a geiger counter I have out on its second range at 4500 cpm!
I placed the charcoal in a poly baggey and zip locked it. I then placed it up to my precalibrated and running Canberra 8100 MCA. The spectrum showed the daughters were all there like gangbusters.
A few peaks have yet to be identified and oddly enough no expected radon peak at 510 kev was found!! curiouser and curiouser.......
I hope to ultimately apply this instrument to a running fusor once fusor IV is in operation.
Richard Hull
Created on Thursday, April 19, 2001 11:59 PM EDT by Richard Hull Last Modified on Friday, May 04, 2001 4:57 PM EDT by Richard Hull