I didn't have time to play with it this evening. (my night to take my daughter to dance, and raining when I got home. Tomorrow, as long as the sun doesn't set too soon. :^)
HV, not to worry, I've been bitten several times, and have a healthy respect. George H.
As others have said, it's an old, primitive, cheap timing light:
Looks like a fairly powerful flashlamp inside--it might be the business end of one of those old photo flash units that ran off a 300V dry cell
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net
No, they just had a Neon tube. You had to enhance the timing mark on the balancer with white chalk. It really would not work outside in sunlight. They were the cheapest timing light one could buy then. Now they use Xenon flash tubes and inverters/storage caps.
I would venture a guess that unit was made in the 60's or earlier.
Why go to the trouble of making that huge helical tube then?
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net
To get as much light as possible from a hand held tool. And Neon tubes are cheap. Remember, you had to hold the strobe close to the harmonic balancer while turning the distributor housing to set the timing. It got much easier when the consumer grade xenon units came out. Even then, they cost $100+ in the 60-70's. The neon units were $30-40.
Years ago I had a motorcycle with 6V electrics - I couldn't buy a 6V xenon unit at any price.
The problem was solved by building my own in the housing of an old flashlight.
Haven't seen it for a while, but its highly unlikely I would've thrown it out - it must be under the clutter in the garage somewhere.
Whether building another would be less hassle than finding the old one is a whole 'nother question!
AFAIK: the latest development in more efficient white LEDs, is ditching blue LEDs with yellow phosphor in favour of UV LEDs with white phosphor.
These are already finding their way into phone-camera flash rings, and the white phosphor may have short enough persistence to use in a strobe.
OK I hooked this up to the spark of my tractor last night. The nice cherry glow of Neon was visible.
Thanks everyone for the suggestions, comments and links.
So here's a question, My daughter likes the elements, we have a small collection. Adding Neon would be nice, but we'd have to make a little circuit to power the tube.
1.) How much voltage do I need to start it? (10kV?) 2.) could I run it CW or would a pulsed thing be better/ easier. 3.) How to make the HV? My first thought was a cockroft-walton chain. Could I choose the caps and frequency such as to have a crude current control.(I like the Cockroft chain because it's not all that hard to understand.)
Any thoughts?
George H.
You could probably get away with the chopper transformer out of the SMPSU in a ser top box like a DVB-T type thing.
Using the transformer back to front, you can get pretty decent HT with a simple blocking oscillator on what used to be the secondary.
Or you could go for a capacitor discharge unit. Of course you need another chopper transformer to make the inverter. About 250 - 350V is good enough for the intermediate voltage, you can make a simple relaxation oscillator with 2 or more series neon bulbs and a capacitor to fire the SCR.
Years ago I made a pocket disco strobe along those lines, it used the xenon tube from an old camera and run off 4x AA Ni-Cd cells.
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