Don Smith device information and tips

[tswift]

To All,

Over the last several years, I have spent considerable time, effort, and money experimenting in pursuit of Don Smith's elusive overunity device(s). I have learned a great deal on the journey and I believe the time is right for me to give back to this forum where I learned so much critical information, without which I would not be as far along as I am today.

Here are the important things you need to know:

The L1/L2 coils arrangement, either step up or step down, is not critical. Study Don's "commercial model" device for how he did things without coils. You can make it work with the coils but it creates needless complication and expense. The relative length of the L1/L2 coils is also not critical, although if you pay attention to the 1/4 length rule apparently you don't need caps. It seems to work just as well if you just use the right caps for L1 and L2 to get their respective LC resonant frequencies equal.

I am currently having the best results charging caps without the coils by going from the HV terminal of the flyback directly to one AC terminal of a diode bridge. The other AC terminal is connected to earth ground, and the DC terminals are connected to the cap bank. To understand why and how this works, think of the diode bridge as two back-to-back Avramenko plugs instead of a regular rectifier bridge. It rectifies the longitudinal wave component of the flyback HV/HF output and uses electrons supplied by the earth ground to actually fill the caps. Charging is somewhat enhanced by connecting the third terminal of the caps (outer case) to earth ground. Yes, you need fast diodes. The high speed, high voltage diodes made for inverter-style microwave ovens seem to work well and are cheap enough on ebay.

Using a GDT (gas discharge tube) on the cap bank at this stage produces a very nice cold blue spark. The GDT barely heats at all even after extended running. Hmm, maybe there is something different about energy gathered this way?

The final step is to discharge the cap bank into a Plauson converter (see the Plauson patent for details) to convert the "cold" electricity in the cap bank back into regular hot electricity. The real trick to this is to size the cap bank and the GDT or spark gap trigger voltage so that it gives exactly one spark per oscillation at the resonant frequency of the output transformer. I have tried using caps to lower the LC resonance of the output transformer and this doesn't work well, it basically has to be the natural resonant frequency. To attain realistic values this means very large inductances and explains Don's love of Metglas. I'll let you know when I have some. I can get very nice ringing waveforms with every spark but to work well and produce useful power the spark needs to happen every cycle, perhaps 50 or 60 Hz if that's what you're aiming for. With a 400 nF cap bank and 400V GDT I get sparks around this frequency.

One of the things I have struggled with from the very beginning with the Don Smith device is to understand exactly at what point does the overunity magic enter the system? Is it the L2 coil? Is it the cap bank? In a running device, where does it actually appear? If any of the very select group of people who have a working device that shows overunity care to answer this question, I would appreciate it, but I think I now know the answer. It's in the output transformer (Don's "isolation transformer"). It's possible that the cap bank charging using longitudinal wave energy and ground electrons is overunity if done right, but in my arrangement I don't see any noticeable power gain at that stage. This is good news for all those experimenters who got that far with the device and were able to tune their coils to get power through and charge the caps. IT IS NOT EXPECTED TO SEE POWER GAIN AT THIS POINT. WHAT IS IMPORTANT IS THE KIND OF ENERGY THE CAPS ARE CHARGED WITH. The magic happens in the output transformer and only at resonance.

So if you are one of the many who experimented with this device but gave up because you never saw overunity, I suspect you gave up too soon. You didn't build the output circuit. Go back and finish the job.

I will leave you for now with this final tip, something else I have learned along the journey. Has anyone else thought to try WEIGHING your cap bank? Hmmm...... Maybe you should try that! Post your results in this thread. I will go into more detail on this at another time, but for starters refer to the diagram on page 40 of Ken Wheeler's "Uncovering the Missing Secrets of Magnetism" book. There are 4 quadrants, electricity and magnetism, dielectricity and gravitation. Moving charges create magnetism. Moving dielectricity (LMD/longitudinal wave energy) creates what? Try it and see.

[genessc]

Let me know if you do manage to get around smiths lack of current density... its great for lighting ne2 bulbs which is mostly a voltage driven device, but if you want any current, you will have a hard time finding it.

As for the claim that theres some "different" energy in the caps, How do you know?

Did you know the color of the arc has to do both with the voltage on the gap and the metals used for the gap electrodes? copper gives a green arc, is that martian energy? Tungsten gives a white arc... Silver coated electrodes would give a blueish arc... Also inflating a tungsten arc in progress with a method like a trigatron causes the white arc to become a blueish white arc in the form of a sphere in the spark gap. If there is not enough Current crossing the arc during its discharge we end up with the usual lame weak violet arc, like what you see on spark plugs in cars. (even that can be augmented with a few hundred nF of capacity localized on the gap itself to cause a much more "energetic" discharge.) I think I have a vid on my coruscantme account on youtube that shows just that. (if the caps wouldn't fail from the heat of an engine it would be a great means of improving the burning of the fuel mixture... versus those other inductorpulse plugs.)

I too built 2-3 of smiths setups, the 18kva one, the neon sign transformer one, using gdt's which worked fine primarily because of a lack of actual Current being behind the discharges... using the same GDT on the 2000volt ac output of a microwave oven transformer had the gdt turned bright red and smoked the lettering right off it before the ceramic cracked and let the internal nitrogen gas out... It was rated for 2000volts.. but not 500mA of current...

I still have the parts from those builds, just collecting dust now. Hope you find something I couldn't. Take care!

Gene

To All,

Over the last several years, I have spent considerable time, effort, and money experimenting in pursuit of Don Smith's elusive overunity device(s). I have learned a great deal on the journey and I believe the time is right for me to give back to this forum where I learned so much critical information, without which I would not be as far along as I am today.

Here are the important things you need to know:

The L1/L2 coils arrangement, either step up or step down, is not critical. Study Don's "commercial model" device for how he did things without coils. You can make it work with the coils but it creates needless complication and expense. The relative length of the L1/L2 coils is also not critical, although if you pay attention to the 1/4 length rule apparently you don't need caps. It seems to work just as well if you just use the right caps for L1 and L2 to get their respective LC resonant frequencies equal.

I am currently having the best results charging caps without the coils by going from the HV terminal of the flyback directly to one AC terminal of a diode bridge. The other AC terminal is connected to earth ground, and the DC terminals are connected to the cap bank. To understand why and how this works, think of the diode bridge as two back-to-back Avramenko plugs instead of a regular rectifier bridge. It rectifies the longitudinal wave component of the flyback HV/HF output and uses electrons supplied by the earth ground to actually fill the caps. Charging is somewhat enhanced by connecting the third terminal of the caps (outer case) to earth ground. Yes, you need fast diodes. The high speed, high voltage diodes made for inverter-style microwave ovens seem to work well and are cheap enough on ebay.

Using a GDT (gas discharge tube) on the cap bank at this stage produces a very nice cold blue spark. The GDT barely heats at all even after extended running. Hmm, maybe there is something different about energy gathered this way?

The final step is to discharge the cap bank into a Plauson converter (see the Plauson patent for details) to convert the "cold" electricity in the cap bank back into regular hot electricity. The real trick to this is to size the cap bank and the GDT or spark gap trigger voltage so that it gives exactly one spark per oscillation at the resonant frequency of the output transformer. I have tried using caps to lower the LC resonance of the output transformer and this doesn't work well, it basically has to be the natural resonant frequency. To attain realistic values this means very large inductances and explains Don's love of Metglas. I'll let you know when I have some. I can get very nice ringing waveforms with every spark but to work well and produce useful power the spark needs to happen every cycle, perhaps 50 or 60 Hz if that's what you're aiming for. With a 400 nF cap bank and 400V GDT I get sparks around this frequency.

One of the things I have struggled with from the very beginning with the Don Smith device is to understand exactly at what point does the overunity magic enter the system? Is it the L2 coil? Is it the cap bank? In a running device, where does it actually appear? If any of the very select group of people who have a working device that shows overunity care to answer this question, I would appreciate it, but I think I now know the answer. It's in the output transformer (Don's "isolation transformer"). It's possible that the cap bank charging using longitudinal wave energy and ground electrons is overunity if done right, but in my arrangement I don't see any noticeable power gain at that stage. This is good news for all those experimenters who got that far with the device and were able to tune their coils to get power through and charge the caps. IT IS NOT EXPECTED TO SEE POWER GAIN AT THIS POINT. WHAT IS IMPORTANT IS THE KIND OF ENERGY THE CAPS ARE CHARGED WITH. The magic happens in the output transformer and only at resonance.

So if you are one of the many who experimented with this device but gave up because you never saw overunity, I suspect you gave up too soon. You didn't build the output circuit. Go back and finish the job.

I will leave you for now with this final tip, something else I have learned along the journey. Has anyone else thought to try WEIGHING your cap bank? Hmmm...... Maybe you should try that! Post your results in this thread. I will go into more detail on this at another time, but for starters refer to the diagram on page 40 of Ken Wheeler's "Uncovering the Missing Secrets of Magnetism" book. There are 4 quadrants, electricity and magnetism, dielectricity and gravitation. Moving charges create magnetism. Moving dielectricity (LMD/longitudinal wave energy) creates what? Try it and see.

[BroMikey]

Here is a converter? Is this the right thing?

[tswift]

@genessc: thanks for the good information on spark gaps, I didn't know any of that.

@BroMikey: yes, that first diagram from the Plauson patent is what I'm talking about. I hadn't seen that second one, it looks interesting. If you take out the parallel cap bank entirely and just have the two series Plauson caps charging from the Avramenko you'd basically end up with that, although the spark gap arrangement is different too. I have experimented with the spark gap in every position I could think of and I still have yet to find anything that rings better than the parallel gap in the Plauson arrangement. Instead of the "collecting combs" of the Wimshurst you have the cap bank being charged by the Don Smith or Kapadnadze style diodes to earth, and then a parallel gap with Plauson style series capacitors on the outputs. Other than the fact that I have the GDT firing at about 60 Hz and the output transformer rings at about 3 KHz now, this arrangement seems to work pretty well. I don't see any power gain at this point, but I suspect the trick to producing the power gain is to get the output coil ringing in sync with the sparks.

I am also only using miniscule drive power from a very small flyback at this point and I suspect it will take significantly bigger sparks to show any real output power, so I'll need a bigger cap bank discharging at 60 Hz, thus more input power. But one step at a time.

However, what I'm really interested in is seeing whether anyone reading this thread can reproduce the interesting possible gravitic effects I'm seeing. I won't say exactly what it is at this point so as not to bias experimenters. If you have the technical ability and parts on hand, rig up a Don Smith/Kapadnadze style charging arrangement, either with a 4-diode bridge as I described in the first post, or just an Avramenko to earth ground, with the HV charging the metal case of the cap. Do this with your caps on a scale. Record the static weight with the power off. Turn the power on. Note the scale reading. Either have a spark gap or output circuit or be quick on the switch to cut the circuit off before you overcharge the caps. Note that this is much easier to do with a bigger cap bank, I have 100 uF of 550VAC rated motor run caps that work pretty well, I can let it run at full input voltage for about 3 seconds before overcharging, enough time to note the scale readings. Note the weight after power is removed with the caps charged. Then discharge the caps through a suitable resistance to give a few seconds RC time constant and note the scale readings under discharge. Finally, note the finished static weight of the caps after the whole process. Repeat several times.

Right now the only scale I have is a digital kitchen scale, so I can't be sure that any readings aren't due to interference with the circuitry. I have taken measurements using the whole cap bank, then weighed only part of it, then had the scale sitting right next to the caps, and the results would seem to indicate to me that it's not just interference. But this is how real science proceeds: if it's real then it can be replicated. If you are able, try weighing your cap bank while charging it and see what happens. I am curious to know, whether positive or negative results. It would also be interesting to compare with DC charging at a comparable charging rate, I don't have a good way to do this but someone else might.

The reason I even thought to try this is several fold: first, the credible reports of overunity over the years all seem to be associated with several phenomena. The devices run cold, as if absorbing heat, and also get lighter under load. Some have even been reported to become weightless and take off entirely (SEG for instance). Second, look up the diagram from Ken Wheeler's book. If this line of thought is correct (and Don Smith has a very similar diagram in his Resonance Energy Methods), then what we are dealing with is not electromagnetism, it is a 4-fold phenomenon that would be better called dielectro-electro-gravito-magnetism, for lack of a better term. If moving electron charges produce magnetic fields, it seems to reasonable to check and see whether moving dielectricity in the form of LMD/Tesla waves/Longitudinal waves can produce gravity fields. So far my results suggest that the answer might be yes, but science proceeds on experiments, proof, and confirmation. It's possible, even likely, that whatever I'm seeing is just an experimental error caused by a hokey scale. I'm not brave enough to hold an HV cap while charging it to find out if it seems to change weight. I did try this with a toroid on the end of a string and I'll detail those results later.

[boguslaw]

Look at Kapanadze spark. It's silent and low current. There are only two explanations. First : it is not in direct power circuit but just to limit voltage or secondly : maybe the process of "transformation" took all energy from this spark. In case of the former the real switching is taking place in round container having probably mechanical interrupter dipped in transformer oil, while the second case is completly not familiar for me (yet) :-(

[wayne.ct]

Electronic scales

Protect your electronic scale from interference as much as possible. As much as possible, cover the top of the scale with a square of aluminum foil. Electrically ground the aluminum foil to earth ground. Best technique would provide an independent circuit to earth ground. Put a cardboard cylinder (light weight) on top of the aluminum foil to raise your caps off the scale, about 10 cm. would seem to be good. I would guess you have already thought of this?

[tswift]

Good suggestion. I had tried shielding but not separation. Indeed, that was the trick to eliminating the interference, and sure enough no measurable weight change. I still think it's a worthwhile exercise to weigh components when searching for overunity, because any weight change would immediately point to non-standard physics. I also tried putting objects on the scale above the charging capacitors to search for any weight change related to the Podletnikov effect but did not see any at any point. But again, I think it's worth looking for, only with an analog scale which I will need to acquire. Something like an old fashioned postal scale should work for small components.

Thanks to those who contributed!

[genessc]

Cool man, glad you sorted that out. The problem with HV is one can't really tell how far it reaches and when it does encounter conductors it wants to convert to current... to move on the wire...

I have a trifield.com emf-100 meter I use for my Ion Chair config to measure the fields localized around the chair I sit in and dose myself with 50kvdc for 30 seconds or now and then. The E-field measures out 20 feet from the chair in any direction, while the magnetic field measure is confined pretty much to the space between the top and bottom electrode and I read zero on the RF activity end of the meter.

Don't feel to bad, Smiths stuff for the most part never was shown working. The one thing he Did show driving an actual load had a big black case large enough to hold an inverter and battery along with smiths "unique" configurational "devices"... ironically that was the only device he also never opened up to show the guys of.

I still have the B&W coils from that 18kva device... just collecting dust...

Take care!
Gene

Good suggestion. I had tried shielding but not separation. Indeed, that was the trick to eliminating the interference, and sure enough no measurable weight change. I still think it's a worthwhile exercise to weigh components when searching for overunity, because any weight change would immediately point to non-standard physics. I also tried putting objects on the scale above the charging capacitors to search for any weight change related to the Podletnikov effect but did not see any at any point. But again, I think it's worth looking for, only with an analog scale which I will need to acquire. Something like an old fashioned postal scale should work for small components.

Thanks to those who contributed!

[mikrovolt]

I found this pdf useful about the secrets to the amplification of energy.
The pdf by Vladimir Utkin comments on various Don Smith demonstrations.
I notice that Don Smith continues to be a popular discussion.
Has anyone found success ? Or Believes he might have been correct ?

Vladimir Utkin's Free-Energy Secrets - March 2012

[med.3012]

I found this pdf useful about the secrets to the amplification of energy.
The pdf by Vladimir Utkin comments on various Don Smith demonstrations.
I notice that Don Smith continues to be a popular discussion.
Has anyone found success ? Or Believes he might have been correct ?

Vladimir Utkin's Free-Energy Secrets - March 2012

with all respect to Don Smith i think he deflect a lots of people from the right path... he never mentioned the use of radiant energy in his device ( maybe he has his own reason, why ?.....)
i think he really made something very interesting but unfortunately he never succeeded in passing the secret and this is also understood ( he say it: money is good ...)
he spent 15 years to discover the secret made him a famous researcher. but again only wealthy people can buy his device from some company he made the publicity ....


Vladimir Utkin has another important pdf where he mentioned clearly the use of radiant energy in Don Smith device, instead of electromagnetic transformer Smith used electrostatic transformer where the discharge capacitor play this role in the middle coil which play the role of magnetic core in ordinary electromagnetic transformer, more thoughts will be supplied very soon in my thread

[Magnethos]

Smith's system has a lot of critical details to make the device works.

The inductor part I think it's like a Tesla's hairpin circuit with a slight modifications.


Then there are other things like 'split the positive', the bucking coil, the capcoil techniques.... that they seem to be little known in the community.

[serendipitor]

I think Don Smith is a trickster entity of some sort. He did make his money in the oil industry, after all, so it would not seem likely he was going to upset their apple cart.

For instance, take his neon tube power supply driven L1/L2 step up device. This circuit is called a link coupled tuner, and I made one a long time ago to tune radio antennas, and to match impedances. The L1 link coupled input portion is series tuned with a relatively low impedance.

In Don's circuit he shows a whopping big capacitor (.2 uF) across the input link, as though he was trying to make a parallel resonance. That is not going to work, due to the extremely low Q that results. A few turns of L1 across .2 uF may calculate out to 30kHz, but the losses are so high that parallel resonance is not noticeable. At least that is what my measurement shows. Tesla's connections to the L1 link show series caps, from what I have seen in his patents, etc.

What *is* interesting about these circuits is seen by taking a scope probe with nothing attached, just the tip by itself, and waving it around in the field, about 10-20 cm. above the circuit. The dielectric pulsation is seen with each firing of the gap, and when using DC to drive the spark gap one can see positive going pulses on the L1/L2 side of the circuit, and negative going pulses on the power supply side. This dipole field is centered on the gap itself. This assumes that one has the circuit laid out in a linear fashion as Don shows, not a jumble of alligator clips. That is the field which we want to manipulate with these things, not the current flow.

Also, I think this type of circuit derives from a long lineage going back to people like Stubblefield. The ground connection is important. I read Gerry Vasillitos' chapters on ground radio (see Borderland Science website) and I think there are some clues there. For instance there was a statement that these 19th century ground battery telegraphers preferred using such things as buried radiators, not just ground rods. It wasn't about surface area, or chemical corrosion. I notice that the Kapanadze video demo shows him burying a radiator. Also, Stubblefield said that he had to "work the ground" for a while before the current would flow. It may take days, or it may not come at all and a new spot needed to be tried.

The recent report from the QEG folks say the same thing. Using a short antenna and a ground rod, they say it may take some time for the radiant energy to manifest. Apparently Stubblefield had some connection with the WITTS organization as it existed at that time, according to the video with Timothy Thrapp on their website.

Another link to that old tradition is seen in Don's use of resistors as voltage dividers in some of his circuits. This make absolutely no sense in terms of conventional hot electron flow. But that is what the earth battery people found that they had to do sometimes, namely to use rheostats to "tune" the ground connection in some mysterious way. If we are dealing with radiant energy, then resistance is not resistance anymore, and it has some other effect. Perhaps this has something to do with the use of the unlikely low Q tuned L1 circuit mentioned above.

So I think there is something there in Don's work, but it is so obfuscated that it has been successful in keeping anyone from replicating the work. I would think going back to the basics will be more useful. For example, see the work of Grandics and his Tesla coil designs.

[med.3012]

I think Don Smith is a trickster entity of some sort. He did make his money in the oil industry, after all, so it would not seem likely he was going to upset their apple cart.

For instance, take his neon tube power supply driven L1/L2 step up device. This circuit is called a link coupled tuner, and I made one a long time ago to tune radio antennas, and to match impedances. The L1 link coupled input portion is series tuned with a relatively low impedance.

In Don's circuit he shows a whopping big capacitor (.2 uF) across the input link, as though he was trying to make a parallel resonance. That is not going to work, due to the extremely low Q that results. A few turns of L1 across .2 uF may calculate out to 30kHz, but the losses are so high that parallel resonance is not noticeable. At least that is what my measurement shows. Tesla's connections to the L1 link show series caps, from what I have seen in his patents, etc.

What *is* interesting about these circuits is seen by taking a scope probe with nothing attached, just the tip by itself, and waving it around in the field, about 10-20 cm. above the circuit. The dielectric pulsation is seen with each firing of the gap, and when using DC to drive the spark gap one can see positive going pulses on the L1/L2 side of the circuit, and negative going pulses on the power supply side. This dipole field is centered on the gap itself. This assumes that one has the circuit laid out in a linear fashion as Don shows, not a jumble of alligator clips. That is the field which we want to manipulate with these things, not the current flow.

Also, I think this type of circuit derives from a long lineage going back to people like Stubblefield. The ground connection is important. I read Gerry Vasillitos' chapters on ground radio (see Borderland Science website) and I think there are some clues there. For instance there was a statement that these 19th century ground battery telegraphers preferred using such things as buried radiators, not just ground rods. It wasn't about surface area, or chemical corrosion. I notice that the Kapanadze video demo shows him burying a radiator. Also, Stubblefield said that he had to "work the ground" for a while before the current would flow. It may take days, or it may not come at all and a new spot needed to be tried.

The recent report from the QEG folks say the same thing. Using a short antenna and a ground rod, they say it may take some time for the radiant energy to manifest. Apparently Stubblefield had some connection with the WITTS organization as it existed at that time, according to the video with Timothy Thrapp on their website.

Another link to that old tradition is seen in Don's use of resistors as voltage dividers in some of his circuits. This make absolutely no sense in terms of conventional hot electron flow. But that is what the earth battery people found that they had to do sometimes, namely to use rheostats to "tune" the ground connection in some mysterious way. If we are dealing with radiant energy, then resistance is not resistance anymore, and it has some other effect. Perhaps this has something to do with the use of the unlikely low Q tuned L1 circuit mentioned above.

So I think there is something there in Don's work, but it is so obfuscated that it has been successful in keeping anyone from replicating the work. I would think going back to the basics will be more useful. For example, see the work of Grandics and his Tesla coil designs.

very interesting thoughts! thank you, one of the marvel of radiant energy is its flow compared to normal hot electricity, in radiant energy the flow of current must be vertical to the flow of voltage !!! this power work in 3D mode not 2D, this is another reason why Tesla used spheres in his wireless power transmitter, so using ordinary hot electricity laws will not work as expected because we are missing some dimensions to work with ...

the concept of transformer must be changed radically in order to extract the power, the secret of OU device is still hidden in a simple capacitor where it play the role of electrostatic transformer, each plates play either a primary or secondary coil !!!

if this is understood unity can be achieved very easy but with time we could replicate the power to any desired amount if we could understand what happen in normal capacitor .... nothing there unless electromagnetic scalar waves which form a kind of standing waves ( they are electrostatic waves able to charge the capacitor .... think about this ...)

[Guruji]

Hi tsswift thanks for bringing this setup up again. I once did this setup with one side of the bridge to an antenna and the other to ground.
I noticed very quick charging to bank.
The thing is I could not find a way to step the hi voltage down to usable current.
Good luck with your experiments.
Thanks

[mikrovolt]

By comparing Don Smith to Tom Bearden we may find some of the trickster
methods and a clearer understanding of how Classical EM (CEM) is incorrect.

The rate is determined by factors that conventional electro magnetic theory does not cover
because the quantum transport is related to the material. Therefore we must learn to
provide better pathways for aetheric energy to flow.

An example: an energy devise made with old old copper wire having various corrosion
inclusions and made 100 years ago. It is old and the old copper has properties that enhance the energy transmission. That same devise made with new copper does not work well at all.

The sited paper is where you can really use your time wisely.
Reference on your browser do edit/find bane ... also 1959

The Tom Bearden Website