Grant Stockly wrote:
I must admit to feeling some revival of the desire to build my own X-ray machine. But I thought that modern CCDs had drastically reduced the "dosage" required to get an exposure. The several- hundred-RAD territory sounds a bit out of my range. ;-)It was several hundred rad for 16 or so full exposures. The exposure required depends on the pixel size. That was quite a high resolution x-ray. ;) That said, 80kv 6ma is hardly anything. The tube I was using goes up to 160kv 20ma, and it isn't our biggest tube. We have a tube that goes up to 420kv and 10ma. THAT is a high dose... I imagine that an old AM radio tube could make some crude x-rays... Or you could buy an x-ray tube off of ebay. : )
Those power levels sound much more doable, but 480 Watts is still quite a supply! What type of power supply does it use? I used to have a couple of big X-ray tubes, one about 18 inches long with a central bulb about 6 inches in diameter, and one about 24 inches long with a cylindrical central enlargement and window about 8 inches in diameter. Both envelopes had the characteristic darkening from receiving a large radiation dose. When I was in high school, I imagined operating them with an induction coil, but the highest voltage DC supply I ever made was about 2800v (at 15mA), and it was a linear supply. A flyback supply for 30kV at about 1mA seemed practical, but I never aspired to higher powered vacuum tube circuits. ;-) -michael NadaNet networking for Apple II computers! Home page: http://members.aol.com/MJMahon/ "The wastebasket is our most important design tool--and it's seriously underused."