Gurstelle - Adventures from the technology underground : catapults, pulsejets, rail guns, flamethrowers, tesla coils, air cannons and the garage warriors who love them

This book is about the art and science of making catapults, pulse-jets, flamethrowers, Tesla coils, high-voltage electrostatic machines, high-power amateur rockets, air cannons, rail guns, fighting robots, magneformers, and more. It is as much about the people who make them as it is about the culture that engenders their creation. This book is the end result of a long and detailed exploration, a result of two years spent spelunking in the Technology Underground.

The knowledge for making devices such as these is not taught in any school, shared in instructor-led seminars, or obtained by reading mainstream science textbooks. Rather, this knowledge is acquired only by consorting closely and directly with ardent technophiles in their workshops and labs, by commingling with them at their competitions and gatherings, and by participating in obscure subject-specific Internet chat rooms.

Most of all, it is attained by using one's own eyes, hands, and brain to weld, machine, solder, bend, drill, plumb, design, break, tweak, experiment, and tinker. It requires spending more money than one would think reasonable on a hobby, and risking more of life and limb than a loved one would think prudent. In short, it requires a determined and long-term exploration of the Technology Underground.

When is something a part of the Technology Underground? It is reasonable to outline, at the outset of a conceptualization or a project, the rules of conformance. Not every piece of interesting technological fabrication or eccentric scientist's folly belongs in the Technology Underground. There is a large number of possible candidates for inclusion; if the definition is stretched too far, the idea loses meaningthe boundaries become too dim and porous. So definitions and qualifications of a sort are required.

The changing nature and the continuous introduction of ever-newer technologies makes it a bit problematic to determine which projects belong and which do not. However, for the purposes of writing this book, the extreme and radical tinkerers of the Underground and their inventions all meet five conditions. These qualities are the membership criteria, the admittance ticket to the TU.

All experiments, inventions, or projects of the Underground are ultimately based on the work of physical scientists. Such projects use Newtonian physics and Faraday-style electricity and magnetism. This means that the projects here are built upon the science of men such as Archimedes, Galileo, Maxwell, Faraday, and Newton. These projects are typically much closer to the hammer, wrench, welding rod, and soldering gun technologies of Thomas

Of these ten, only Archimedes, Faraday, Galilei, Lavoisier, Maxwell, and Newton have direct applicability to the material in this book. Einstein's and Rutherford's contributions were to theoretical physics and Pasteur and Darwin's were to the biological sciences.

Edison, the Wright brothers, and Henry Ford than to the virtual, computational machines of Bill Gates and John von Neumann.

These are the projects of amateur scientists and technology enthusiasts. Qualifying projects must be motivated by love, not money. The projects in this realm are the work of individuals or at most small groups. There are no large corporate R&D teams, no government-sponsored laboratories, and there exists no real hope to profit financially or recoup monies spent. Here, technological prowess and profit have at best a distant relationship, and typically no relationship whatsoever.

TU projects are always edgy and often dangerous. While not every project described in these pages is overtly dangerous, in point of fact, the majority do have some risky aspect or involvement. Almost all have some hazardous detail, some threatening characteristic, some sharp, hard, pointy thing moving at high velocity, an exposed hot surface, or a high-voltage shock risk. Always, there is some attribute that would cause your mother to prefer you trade participation in this activity for a safer onesay, steeplechasing or prizefighting.