Things that go boom? Need to present to some kids

Dump a big cap or a biggish battery into a resistor?

Or just AC line voltage.

Makes a controllable bang and smoke.

Burn up a speaker ?

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Even using DC, its slow, boring and smelly.

..... Phil

What about the flour, candle, paint can, grain dust explosion example? I'd think its safer than tiny parts flying around. Just the lid will fly up and hit the ceiling.

Cheers

Iron wire. Sparks!

Cheers

I have always had great luck using a 1/4 watt carbon film 1K Ohm resistor on 120 VAC.

Back in my my audio days, we would connect up the 1K resistor to the amplifier load bank and so when the tech would fire up his bench for the day and the first amplifier, he would get a swell surprise. Adding a firecracker to that would REALLY get a response !

Kids also love Jacob's Ladders.

I thought it was a 1/2 watt, but anyway, it was wired in the big Weller soldering iron, when it smoked, what smoked and what was it's job?

Mikek :-)

Resistors across the power line is a good trick. An Instructor in AF electronics school liked to connect one across the line in an AC power plug and tell the student to plug it in. Woke everybody up.

uff

es boom,

id the

Steel wool and a small firecracker?

Maybe launch a rocket? You could give specs on the electronic igniter circuit and ask how many AA batteries in series and/or parallel.?

George H.

As a I kid I enjoyed 'welding' with some 30-50mF cap, power supply and aluminum wires or steel wool. Not a big boom, but a lot of nice sparks.

On a sunny day (Thu, 24 Oct 2019 12:28:17 -0700 (PDT)) it happened snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote in :

In my school days I scored a big 220 V flash bulb, edison base, screwed it in in pace of house normal light bulb. Just wait until somebody switched on the light,,,

My kids always enjoyed the steel wool and 9V battery demonstration.

Typical trick is pass an inductor around room one way, and a battery around the other way.

On Oct 24, 2019, snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote (in article):

When I was a kid (old enough to play unsupervised), one simple thing I did was to explode copper bridge wires underwater, in a half-filled fish tank. The bang could splash a lot of water onto the floor.

The equipment consisted of two insulated solid #14 (1.8 mm) copper wire pieces about a foot long clamped in parallel using some wood and screws. The far ends were stripped bare, and had a bit of #36 (0.127 mm) wire bridging the two #14 wires, which were connected to 115 Vac power via a large knife switch.

No, the 15-amp circuit breakers never popped - the bridgewire blew too fast.

Joe Gwinn

I'm surprised no one's mentioned these little gizmos:

Thank you all for the comments

I used the shorted cap for welding/sparks, a small speaker at DC to show how sound sort of works and especially the 1k resistor at mains, which gave a good loud effect

I normally reverse bias a cap, but we were inside, so too much mess doing that

Cheers

Klaus

A line powered flash bang would be too much? Bet it get their attention. ;-)

Blasting cap?