Bruce’s Wimshurst Machine

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Bruce writes:

Hi Jake,

Attached are a couple current images of my 20 sector Wimshurst machine based on your construction article, with changes made as needed to suit locally available materials and to resolve some issues that showed up after the initial construction. 

Click through to the full set of pictures, this is a very elegant machine and some of Bruce’s innovations make it superior to my own!

UPDATE: Plans for my Wimshurst Machine are now available here!

These are some differences in my machine from the construction article. The drive bands are 1/8" black braided cord with white strands inside from an army surplus store with the ends melted together. The current leyden jars are plastic toothpick containers on top of pieces of florescent light tube protector material salvaged from one of several protector tubing jars that shorted between the foil edges. The collector supports are pieces of small size PVC tubing with brass couplings hammered into the ends and glued with thin CA glue. The set screw collars are made from nylon spacers and 6-32 brass screws. 

Building and getting the machine operational was a lot of fun, debugging a few problems and getting the best out of it sometimes paid off in the end.

Bruce