Gray Tube Replication

[nat1971a]

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[Spearmaster]

New member

Hi Folks,

I'm new on this forum, but I've started working on a Gray's tube and I have many questions. I'll start with just one;

Is there a commercially available motor in the one to five HP range that would work with the Grays tube? My knowledge of motors is very limited, so please be gentle . If not, please explain.

Thanks,
Carl

[Electrotek]

Motors

Welcome to the forum, Spearmaster.



I've heard that any motor which has brushes will work, but I don't know that for a fact. I do intend to find out.

Treadmills have DC motors ranging in size from 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 HP. I have some of these, and will open one up shortly, to see what configuration it has.

The patent says the CSET is for 'inductive loads', so it shouldn't be too hard to find something workable.

The main thing you'll want to look at is a large enough armature radius that you'll have time to trigger your pulses fast enough. And short enough.

[Jetijs]

as far as I know, Grays motor did not have any magnets. There were coils on the rotor and equal count of coils on he stator. Each time when the stator and rotor coils were aligned, the CSET was fired and the rotor coil cores repelled the stator coil cores. If I remember correctly, the stator cores were all connected in parallel and the rotor coils were connected in series.

[Aaron]

repelling magnets

I think in Gray's earliest motors - he had coils repelling magnets on a rotor.

[Electrotek]

I saw a picture of Gray and his car once, in a "Suppressed Inventions" magazine back around '79. He had the hood up and I could see a large, heavy cross arms with a 6" bobbin coil on each end. I couldn't see the stator or any magnets. I've never seen anything about this on the Internet, since it came out.

A motor with magnets would probably work, but due to the shortness of the time a pulse is applied, coils would be more effective, as far as the force generated.

The most important experiment at this time might be the coil popping replication. At least a couple of people, including Aaron, have done this with a magnet. I wonder how it would compare to two coils?

With my circuit, the cap discharges too slowly through the coil to produce a usable effect. Maybe energy from the grids doesn't have a time constant?

[Spearmaster]

More questions

OK, so I'm looking for a brush type DC motor. Keeping in mind that I will be able to work with input voltages of from 2000V all the way up to around 60KV, what voltage(s) will the motor be seeing from the output of the Gray's tube? Also, what current should the motor be able to handle?
Is there a place to find the meanings of some of these acronyms?

CSET
COP

The questions are not likely to stop anytime soon .

Thanks,
Carl

[gmeat]

as far as I know,If I remember correctly, the stator cores were all connected in parallel and the rotor coils were connected in series.

I never realized that Jetijs,What would the reasoning be to run a motor like this.Is there some kind of benefit in doing this?



-Gary

[Electrotek]

OK, so I'm looking for a brush type DC motor. Keeping in mind that I will be able to work with input voltages of from 2000V all the way up to around 60KV, what voltage(s) will the motor be seeing from the output of the Gray's tube? Also, what current should the motor be able to handle?
Is there a place to find the meanings of some of these acronyms?

CSET
COP

The questions are not likely to stop anytime soon .

Thanks,
Carl

It doesn't have to be a DC motor, it only needs to have brushes. An AC motor, such as an electric drill, will also run on DC, if it has brushes. This might be the cheapest motor to start with, because you, and us, will probably let a lot of smoke out along the way.

You shouldn't go too high on your voltage. Gray used around 3kV. He also had Transient Voltage diodes in his circuit to protect the motor and other components in case the voltage spiked. With some electrical components - such as magnetrons - you can strobe them with 20 times their normal current, if done in a short enough time period. The same is probably true of a motor coil. The short enough time period is the hard part. Also, no one has proven that electron current actually goes through the motor, with the type of energy we're dealing with.

CSET stands for Conversion Switching Element Tube, the name of the patent. This is the Power Conversion Tube which Gray presents in the patent as being able to switch 12VDC. Alternately, it might be the capacitor which is being switched on and off, similar to the operation of a Step Recovery Diode. I've seen a patent (#3764830) in which this kind of diode effect is used to produce a nano second pulse.

COP means Coefficient of Performance. At 100% efficiency, the COP is 1. This is pretty low, nowadays. It would be nice for an electric car to generate all of the energy it needs, or even more, so it never has to be charged up. But this is of secondary importance, since there are other ways of getting the power. The main thing about the EV Gray motor is the amount of torque and HP it puts out for its size.

[Aaron]

simple test to run

The only thing I want to do for starters is to simply have the grid output pulse a coil that repels a magnet on a pendulum.

The shaft of the pendulum has a switch that connects the circuit between the diode's annode and the LV + source.

This is demonstrating the principle in one of the simplest ways and is probably the easiest tests for anyone to run.

[Electrotek]

Sounds easy enough. I've got a CT coil that's heavy, with a lot of small gauge wire. I'd like to have this on a pendulum, with and without the LV. Experimenting is the only way we'll find out if the LV is a factor.

We need to get these experiments set up!

[Beshires1]

I used a accessory relay. I wired a led to up to light so that I could see if the pulse energized the coil or not ...simple. The led might burn out if you get a large pulse but thats OK.

[Jetijs]

Aaron, I based my opinion on a video that I saw on Grays motor. I watched that video again and those guys don't mention magnets at all, except for the demonstration coil that was used to shoot the magnet up high to demonstrate the force. Maybe early prototypes had magnets in them, but prototype 4, 5 and all the next models did not have magnets in them.
For those interested in Grays motor there is a "must see" video where Norman Wootan shows how the Gray motor worked in every detail. He is the guy who salvaged two actual Gray motor prototypes (prototype 4 and prototype 5). He shows the inside of the motor, the stator/rotor poles commutator and everything else. Try to find that video. I found it by searching on the key words "Peter Lindemann". The video name is "Peter Lindemann KeelyNet Conference 2001"
If you can't find that video, I will share the info that I found most important from what Norman was saying.

The Gray motor was very powerful, you could not stop it with your hands even if it ran at only 10 RPM. The reason for this was also the weight of the shaft and flywheel, both of them together weighted about 70 Lbs It could fun as fast as 10 000 RPM, the estimated power was about 80-90HP. Gray developed his first prototype in 1961 and he got the idea from a Russian named Popov who has studied Teslas work for years. When he saw the potential of his first motor, he started to look for funding to build a better motor. In 1971 he made his prototype #4. It had all aluminum case, three stator coils and only one rotor coil. The coils were powered in the following manner, first the HV from the grids went through the rotor coil and then through the stator coils that were connected in parallel and then back to power supply. Later he developed the prototype #5 that was almost identical, but had three rotor coils that were wired in parallel. The switching was also identical, first the HV from the grids went through parallel rotor coils and then through the parallel stator coils. So - parallel rotor coils, parallel stator coils and rotor>stator coils in series. Here you can see the rotor from the prototype 4:



There is a stator coil put on the rotor coil. Here is the stator:



And here you can see the rotor from the prototype 5:



You can see that this one had three poles on the rotor. The prototype 5 was made out of various plastics such as nylon, delrin ect, it might be because Gray wanted to reduce the weight of the motor, but when the motor was finished it weighted about the same as the aluminum one, so no gain there. Also the plastic material was about 10x more expensive than aluminum. It might be also that the powerful magnetic flux inside the motor heated up the aluminum case of the motor because of eddycurrents, so he switched to plastic. Can't say for sure. But this prototype 5 used also different coil wire. The coils were wound with silver tinned stranded copper wire, possibly because the high voltage loves to travel on the surface of the wire so it was a waste of material to use heavy gauge copper wire. This also decreased the resistance. On both motors the stator and rotor coils were equal in weight, that is just like Tesla said, that in order to get two coils to work together, you need to mass match the coils, no matter what the wire gauge. Stators and rotors were wound with the same gauge wire. The coils of prototype4 were wound using about 14AWG wire. They think that Gray used 4kV 2uF caps for each fire. John Bedini supposedly used 5kV12uF caps. On the commutator wheel there are also contacts that pick up the inductive spike from the collapsing magnetic field a few degrees after each pulse, this was done in order to recover energy, but Gray had trouble in storing that energy, because batteries would explode and die. If you can get 1000V inductive spike from a coil that is pulsed with 12V, then imagine how great the inductive spike is if 3000v is used tp pulse the coils , it can be in hundred thousand volt range, so no wonder that it was hard to harness that energy. As far as I know he eventually abandoned the recovery idea and just used an alternator coupled with the motor shaft to charge up the batteries.
He also had a starter motor coupled with his prototype motors, because you had to get the motor to certain RPM's and only then you could start pulsing the CSET, because the power from the opposing magnetic fields was so strong, that if would just tear the motor apart if you would pulse it from a stopped position because of the mass and inertia. Also different speeds required different timings. To get the motor to speed, he retarded the timing and at work speed he advanced the timing for maximum torque. His rotor coils all in parallel had a resistance of 1.3 Ohms, so did also the stator coils in parallel.. Also the stator/rotor poles were machined so that the laminations had a 15 degree skew, this made the flux asymmetrical and increased the efficiency. If you look closely, you can see that skew in the pictures. Here are some more pictures:







You can see how big the motors actually were. You needed at least two people to lift such a motor.



This was the actual coil that was used in demonstrations of the jumping magnet. Actually there was another coil on that upper plastic cylinder which was matched to the coil on the bottom side. The coils were wired so that when the CSET fired, opposing magnetic fields were created and this shot the magnet in the sky His Latest motors had 9 stator poles and three rotor poles, this was done in order to maximize torque.

I hope this helps someone
Thanks,
Jetijs

[Electrotek]

Jetijs,

This is all very interesting. I'm still trying to figure out the function of those three top pins in the first picture. Gray had plastic slugs sticking out around a lot of his motors.

Thanks for posting this. I hadn't seen them yet with this particular motor.

[Jetijs]

What pins? Do you mean those from this picture?



Those are just three bolts that are used to bolt the stator poles to the aluminum motor case. That's all. Those plastic slugs are just some plastic caps that cover the bolt ends. Grays prototype #5 has four of them and nine rows all around the case. In his #5 prototype he used slightly longer coils, that is the reason for 4 bolts needed, also he uses 9 stator poles all around the stator instead of three as in the prototypes #4 and #5.

Edit: if you look closely, you will see that in his prototype #4 even his rotor shaft is made out of plastic