The ultimate in car thief protection, Tesla style.
“Continue reading” for more details and photos and a video.
This is a long photographic exposure of Tesla coil sparks from a rotating rod on top of the car. Note that this is just a bit of fun. No thieves were harmed in the making of this project.
It’s quite safe to be in the car although my son was apprehensive. This was a Hyundai Getz hire car (as I don’t own one) and it still works. I did get extra insurance “in case”. Of course a Tesla Roadster from Tesla Motors would be the ideal car for this or a De Lorean. My wooden counterweight is on fire here at the top of the coil which is the yellow flame coloured halo.
Construction photos. There is a rod projecting out of the top of the TC and the sparks will come from the tip of the rod. Masking tape, duct tape, sticky tape and bubblegum are all essential construction items.
The rod is bent so that it nearly touches the ground it will spark to ground. If you rotate the rod around the car it will form sparks as it traces out a circle. If you take a long exposure then the sparks will all be on one photo giving a ring of sparks.
But there’s more….
A video was needed to show how this long exposure photo was set up. Of course, I needed a red car. This new model was released in March 2007.
More of the same (but a different hire car), experimenting with lighting and clearer sparks which are better centred and levelled. This exposure is for 14.9 seconds at dusk.
A 24.9 second exposure at night gathers all sparks in two full rotations.
The lower photo is a shot of only 3/4 of a revolution. Well, you need a space to walk out don’t you!
I had to hire the car on 3 different days to get lighting OK. The video is much less tolerant of low light unless the frame rate is slowed a lot. Budget was $300 for the car hire (plus pizza).
Playback speed was increased to 300% for the action scenes both to give a Charlie Chaplin, silent slapstick movie feel and to speed up the rather dull sparks in that light. I did try to randomly interpolate 100 frames (manually!) to give the effect of a uniform field but it wasn’t convincing.
Actual rotation speed is about 10 seconds per revolution which is easy for thieves to avoid I guess.
I did night time shots with great looking sparks but there was severe motion blur with the reduced frame rate and you couldn’t see the bad guy. The brightest sparks are to the dummy thief (stuffed with old blankets) who had a grounded wire in his torso.
Smoke was from a smoke generator controlled by Chris in the car and timed to smoke at the time of the sparks. It is the blue thing under the front bumper.
I wet the ground to intensify the sparks but didn’t turn off the tap properly so there is a bit of a river through the scene.
More behind the scenes shots. The purple box near the rear wheel contains the transformers out of 4 discarded microwave ovens. This steps up the mains 240 VAC up to around 8 kV.
A single spark shows on a normal daytime photo. Exposure time here is 1/160 second rather than 14.9 seconds for the daylight red car photo.
Media
Lots of comments and links on around 100 blogs and sites for example Autoblog, Gizmodo, Overclockers and Neatorama. In total 200,000 website hits and perhaps 1,000,000 people have seen this on other sites since Feb 2007.
Also on Youtube with 229,563 views and Break with 385,128 views.
German Pro Sieben TV covered the Car Thief protection in 2008 titled “Australien Blitz“. Ann-Mirja Boehm was the producer and Dean Lomax was the local cameraman.
Ann-Mirja is the reluctant driver.
Related pages
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External links
Photo Date: Feb 2, March 6, 2007