Sunday, July 8, 2012

Creating X-rays with a standard vacuum tube

I forced an RCA 811A tube to produce some X-rays by operating the tube in cold-cathode mode at about 20KV and 150uA.  The glass fluoresces nicely, but I didn't get any light from my X-ray intensifier cassette.

MightyOhm's geiger counter kit: http://mightyohm.com/blog/products/geiger-counter/

2 comments:

  1. I'm, not sure if you've seen this article on making a cheap x-ray source, but it's a pretty interesting read!

    http://www.noah.org/wiki/An_Inexpensive_X-ray_Machine

    Supposedly, the old radio tubes that have a magnesium getter can be used for producing x-rays pretty well.

    - Jordan

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  2. Not all tubes will produce X-rays.

    Ref.

    http://www.dangerouslaboratories.org/xray1.html

    TG

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