SpudFiles

i am pondering different ways to ignight my new combustion gun, and i noticed we had an electronic fly zapper laying around, se i was sticking a metal screw driver in it, and i was was suprised the brightness of the spark. ( then i had to zap myself with it ) so after playing around with this thing i was thinking... hmm wonder if this could work as good as a camera flash ignition ... can someone answer this for me?

Possibly but unlike a camera flash circuit theres no ionisation part which gives a longer spark.


It charges a capacitor linked to the wires aroundabout 1500-3000v I believe. At that voltage it ought to be able to jump about 0.5-1mm.

Could be possible to have a spark gap of that size so when a switch is thrown the gap is small enough for the spark to jump.

I don't think the voltage is high enough. Probably less than a KV.

If you can actually get it to spark across a 1mm or more gap then it will work. Otherwise....

You might be able to use a switch and an ignition coil (or home rolled trasnformer) to boost the voltage some.

Overall, probably not worth the effort. Besides, it uses line voltage which will kill you if you do something wrong.

I wouldn't even consider a mains powered fly zapper, I was making the assumption this was a battery powered thing.

I measured the voltage of one of those to be ~700V, IIRC.

i am talking about the battery operated ones, just to clarify myself, runs on 2 AA batteries

Yeah, those mains powered ones are beasts, but you should have a hard time killing yourself with a battery powered one.

TurboSuper wrote:I measured the voltage of one of those to be ~700V, IIRC.

The ones I've seen claim 1500 to 3000v but advertisers do tend to be optimistic...