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Introducing the Bulb Buster®! - Experimental version.
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You have a broken microwave laying around? You have tons of Microwave Oven Transformers waiting to be used?
You don't know what to do with all those burnt out incandescent lamps?
Here is how to combine all that stuff into a cool lamp destroyer! It's simple, just connect a lamp socket to the secondary of a MOT, then connect the primary to 120V, in series with a resistive device (light bulb, heating element) that will act as a current limiter to prevent the MOT from both burning itself and blowing the bulb
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The Bulb Buster will probably be suitable for small fluorescents as well.
As long as the bulb is gas-filled, it works
By the time my Bulb Buster is completed, there won't be any exposed parts on HV, so it'll be 100% safe. For now I'm just super-careful.
I've also first smashed out the glass envelope of a flashlight bulb, then apply 12KV from a flyback to pop the filament.
Another way to blow out bulbs: I use a argon thyratron, connect to a vented bulb, overvolted, then trigger grid of thyratron tube to blow the filament. In one case, the (headlight) bulb was so tough it pulled enough current to make the thyratron plate glow red hot. The bulb did pop, and the tube survived.