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Homemade X-Ray Machine: Liftoff
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Gyro:
Your response to the safety feedback does you credit, many teenagers wouldn't have been so mature about it. You've obviously had a fright, but have hopefully done yourself no damage. Pausing the project at this stage is probably a good thing - it will give you time to get a pencil and paper out and start thinking about how you can improve the setup, both from the safety perspective and for achieving a better point-source for focus... and protecting your camera too (those pixel speckles were rather impressive!). Maybe a better source will turn up too.

It's probably also a good time to do some research on the history of X-rays, and the early pioneers rather than just current implementation. It's a fascinating reading about the early set ups and the mistakes they made. I remember seeing the images of one early radiographer in a London hospital who actually documented the crumbling of the bones in his hand over many relatively uncontrolled exposures. It's believed now that Marie Curie, after all the risky stuff that she did isolating Radium and Polonium, may well have died, age 66, as a result of the X-ray exposure from the work she did running an X-ray machine in the field during the first world war. As I say, there's a lot of interesting reading to be found on the web.

I'm not sure how your metalworking skills are, but you could maybe look at mounting the tube in an offcut of cast iron or steel pipe with a window cut in it, you could then experiment a bit more easily with plates with different apertures to try to improve focus. You'd probably need the Lead too, but it might help to constrain things a bit better.

There are also members on this forum with professional X-ray experience, Fraser comes immediately to mind but I'm pretty sure there are others.  They may be able to offer you practical and safety advice too. Do some forum thread searches.


I really hope none of the above comes across as condescending, as Dave said, it's seriously impressive that someone of your age can come up with anything of that sort of power, PSU included. I have a Hitachi Kenotron tube, which a few seconds experiment with 25kV (forward direction) and a geiger counter was enough to scare me. At 45 years older than you, I haven't plucked up the courage to take it any further yet, because I don't really trust myself not to cut corners on safety!
james_s:
Seriously, just use a proper xray head, or don't play with this stuff at all. Taking an xray of one's hand with an un-shielded rectifier tube means a significant dose to the rest of the body, even if you try to protect it it's very hard to protect everything. There tends to be a lot of safety hysteria in the world these days but this is one of those cases where the concern is justified. Xray photons pass through your body, blasting apart your DNA. It's a bit like UV exposure from the sun except it penetrates all the way down through your tissue and bones. As has been mentioned, the soft xrays are particularly dangerous, a real xray head has an aluminum filter to block those.
Treehouseman:
I'm going to put in another vote for just getting a dental xray head, they're easy to use and they're a good known level to work with. Though I will also note that the entire "the xray head will filter those soft xrays" thing is a bit inaccurate, I still get hot pixels on my camera when using the xray head even if it's not in the path of the beam. Granted I don't know what exactly he's running at and what his camera settings are, but they do still happen. This isn't to say that running that tube without shielding isn't insanely stupid, but a sheet of aluminum doesn't stop those stray xrays.
BFX:
From the photos what I seen I'm almost sure you have to stop your experiments right now for a long time!!!  :--
This is not dangerous only for you but also for your family or neighbors.
And I need to mention that you can finished with your "experiments" in the jail!
Again !!! X-Rays are more dangerous than main voltage! Believe me I'm X-Ray medical machine developer.
AutogolazzoJr:
I haven't x-rayed anything since may. I have no plans to x-ray anything soon. Thanks for the warning, though.
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