Joule Thief

[xee2]

  But, can you light a 100watt incandescent bulb brightly, using your body as the wire?

I would not advise that. As the power goes up so does the amount of energy penetrating the skin. This can result in "RF burns" where the skin gets burnt without noticeable pain until later (like getting a sunburn).

[TinselKoala]

Worse than that.... the power might not remain on the skin (it could have lower frequency components or the apparatus could glitch) and you can damage internal organs.

I used to light up incandescent bulbs by sticking a wrench into a Tesla coil discharge with one hand, and holding the incandescent in the other hand, touched to a ground. The bulb will light up brightly, all the power going through me.
I don't do this any more. When I die, they will probably find holes burned through my liver or something.

[NickZ]

  Did you watch Igors video?  NO burns, when using LOW Voltage, HIGH Amps.  At least none that he mentions. 
  If I touch the 1500+ volts output of my Joule Ringer 3.0, I honestly can't take it. The whole room with smell of burn flesh.  Its ferrite core increases not only the voltage, but the amperage as well.  Not like the air coils. Ferrite coil burns hurt, a lot.

[Pirate88179]

Crowclaw and Xee2:

Thank you for the replies.  I have been busy over here but tonight, I received 8 led chip modules in various configurations from dealextreme.  (China)  I was able to light all of them including the ones rated 2,500 lumen using the JT power tube with the ferrite rod core.  In the interest of lack of time, I used my JT handy box powered by a modified flash circuit and it too lit all of the modules  BUT, not as bright as the high freq. power tube did.

I wish i had time to post some photos.  (I will this weekend)  This core I bought (got 3 of them) is 6" long and I was considering winding about 500 turns of 32 ga. mag wire on one end and then sliding that into the JT power tube.  This would give me 2 different outputs and I would like to see how much the amp draw increases vs the amount of light that I can get out of it.  I know it won't be free but, I think that by adding the additional "secondary" coil on the core, I can get more light total for not that much amp draw increase.

What do you guys think?

I have not tested this on my scope as of yet.  I am always concerned when hooking up the output of these HV JT circuits to my scope but have been told by several smart guys on here that it won't hurt anything.  The ferrite rods are low permeability (and cheap) and I did not think that I would get anything decent by using them.  I will also make a new circuit using just one of these long ferrite rods to see what happens.

These led chip modules burn brightly for sure.  I tested them on my power supply using the rated input and they were bright but got hot right away even though mounted on a nice heat sink.  Using the JT power tube or the surplus circuits, they remain nice and cold but are still blindingly bright.

I stupidly tested the output from the powertube again with my fingers and there is not even a tingle.  I also did it with my JT powerbox (flash circuit driven) and got zapped really good.  (as usual)  It is quite possible that I may be an idiot.

Bill

[xee2]

I have not tested this on my scope as of yet.  I am always concerned when hooking up the output of these HV JT circuits to my scope but have been told by several smart guys on here that it won't hurt anything. 

Use a divide by 100 voltage divider to drop the voltage before connecting to scope. You can make one using a 1K and a 100K resistor. Google voltage divider.