Treehugger: There’s Still Light After Death: Castor Canadensis’s Recycled Tube Light
Like the idea. Hate the site at http://www.castordesign.ca/ because it uses FLASH and it won’t read my browsers under Linux so this one gets a HUGE thumbs down from me. Fix your site so all can see it!
And I have updated my flash player to the newest and greatest and it works elsewhere so I suspect that there is a problem at the designers site. 
WTF!?!?!?!? You take a bundle of fluorescents, surely the most fragile things on earth this side of a twelve-year-old with severe acne’s ego, put a frigging INCANDESCENT bulb, probably the most inefficient thing since the whale oil lamp inside of it, and call it COOL???? As an object ‘d art, well, yeah, but as ANYTHING approaching the practical, it leaves me speechless……I love the guy in the Mackinaw walking around with the thing, trailing the industrial-strength extension cord-the thing probably pulls about 4KW to light it up like that…..
And if you ask me, the picture on the opening page strongly suggests that a couple of the guys at castor canadensis have NO interest at all in beaver, if you get my drift…..
….and definitely, too much Flash, and not enough Substance.
You missed the haunted garage didn’t you?
I admit that there is no practical purpose to putting burned out tubes around a light source other than the cool or gee-wiz factor but it does have that.
The haunted garage reference had to do with the light show that I put on at the exit (just before the biker with the real chainsaw jumped out and chased the marks out of the parking lot) with the pole pig and neon transformers. Will have to see if there are any pix of that mess around. Anyway the tubes will light up if you put enough juice (pole pig was wired to output 6000 vac and the neons were 12 to 14kv) close to them or to an end. I would use one (being careful to NOT touch the metal end) to hit the rods coming out of the pole pig and make it arc and spark and at the same time the tube would light up in my hand. I was a warped Frankinstein or something.
Back (somewhat) on topic. When I first saw this thing it hit me that it would be cool to make a circle of tubes like that and run (wire mesh?) down the inside hooked to a neon transformer and really make the tubes light up without them being hooked up or directly connected to anything.
I haven’t been able to see ANYTHING on that site yet. Just a black page that tells me to go get the latest flash. Tried 3 different browsers and even went to the flash site and downloaded the latest and greatest and installed it and then went back and tried again. It just doesnt’ like linux I guess so I will forgo the pleasure.
But I may use the concept in a sourceless version…
Now, THAT would be cool. I wondered about that, I guess these folks just don’t have enough sense to do it right. But would that work with burnt-out tubes? It seems if the tubes were burnt out then they are just burnt out, whether you use them normally or in other ways. If they are good tubes then yeah, you can get them to light up by standing under high-voltage transfer lines, even. I remember a thread on slashdot about high-voltage safety where a guy talked about a place he worked at that had tubes by the door of the transformer room that everyone was supposed to pick up and carry with them around the room so that they knew when they were getting into a high-potential area and could back off before they became a discharge flambe. No joke. He said you could get into places in the room where the tubew would light up in a fashion that would put light sabers to shame-at which point it was past time to get the hell out of dodge. Someone was supposed to have killed that circuit, it seems…..
All the tubes that I used at the Haunted Garage were bad ones. Doesn’t matter as long as the seal is intact. The heater elements are what go bad in them and then they quit lighting but the phosperesent or flouresent aspect is still there and all it takes it to get it near a high voltage and they will light up.
Hold the metal end opposite the end you touch the high voltage with and you can get the piss shocked out of you so current does flow. It also will only glow to where you are holding it. I did learn to wash the outside of the tubes. The dirt tends to get conductive and makes for a shocking time.