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Creating Fusion In My Basement
I found an article about the easiness of people creating fusion (or a demo there of) with a surprisingly small amount of work. The concept is based on a Farnsworth–Hirsch fusion system. Basically you smash ions together using inertial electrostatic confinement.
Since I lack any real machining equipment, I did everything with a hand drill… A drill press would have done wonders. I ordered 2 4″ Aluminum circles off of Amazon, and proceeded to hand polish them using sand paper starting at 120 Grit and finishing with 1200. This would allow a good seal for vacuum.
For Glass I used a pressure rated Borosilicate glass tube 3×3″ Here is an example of the one I used here.
I cut seals out of 1/16″ Neoprene rubber, again from Amazon.
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For a vacuum pump, I got very lucky and found a Edwards E2M0.7 pump lihtly used for very cheap on Craigslist. After 2 oil changes, It pumped down to 15 milliTorr, with just a meter dead heading the KF10 port.
For a meter I am using an old Varian thermocouple vacuum gauge. It is good for 2000 milliTorr to 1 milliTorr.
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For grids, I’m using the outer Aluminum shells (attached to ground) as the outer grid. For the inner grid I silver soldered 22 AWG stainless steel into a few ~1″ diameter circles. One trick to make the grid fit together better is to size each circle smaller or bigger by adding or removing ~2mm from the length.
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Update 09-OCT-2019:
New Grid and Better Camera, This grid seems to have an ion beam leak, I did not notice this as much with the older grid, it was closer to star mode. These images were even taken at a lower pressure of 40um, so not sure what is up. Probably something with the outer spiral grid I created…
I need to post new images of the grid creation. Also note, when I turned it on with vacuum pump off (~500um) the inner grid de-soldered the small connections. This is due to the system pulling >50mA at ~1kV. So effectively the small inner grid is handling over 50W of power.
Note most of these images taken at 40um vacuum and ~voltage of ~1kV. I was unable to turn up the voltage more, because of fear of melting the grid, since at 1kV I was already pulling ~10mA.
I've been wanting to hack one of these together for years....
Might have to actually get around to it soon.