The Mark-7 Prototype upgrades for Project Thumper were done primarily for cosmetic reasons. Thumper had gained a very serious following and it deserved a makeover. The Group had come a long way in it's resources and abilities and it was time to put some of those to use in turning Project Thumper into more of a showpiece than just a big ugly piece of explosive fun.

Since we couldn't find Queer Eye For The Physics Guy we had to made do with the resources available. We choose a handful of the usual suspects, mainly Chris Boden, Ron The Funky Machinist, Moose, and a few others and worked on making Thumper "Pretty".

The first thing it needed was more Red.

It is a fundamental rule of laboratory aesthetics that every piece of High Voltage equipment simply must have at least some part painted bring red. Thankfully, Miss Moose's Painterly Establishment (the Geek Group's Art Department) was able to provide just the perfect Danger Red paint. Moose prepped the bases of the insulators and Chris painted them.

Now that we had beautiful insulators, we had to clean up the large main buss bars. Chris worked them over with a jar of Mother's polishing compound that he borrowed from the VSL and with the creative application of several roles of paper towels and a random-orbital sander polished them to a most impressive mirror finish.

The next step was finding something better to mount everything onto. The original Discharge Table was made from an old workbench that we had salvaged from the basement when we moved in to the Schippers street labs. It was fifty years old when we found it and had been beat to hell for most of that judging by its looks. All we did was screw a sheet of new MDF onto the top of it and call it good. It was ugly, but it worked and the rule of the lab is "Form Follows Function".

But now it was time for a better form.

So we started carving holes into a nice pretty table that we bought from Kalamazoo College in their surplus sale for $15. You'll also note that we completely rebuilt the wiring system and routed all of the interconnects under the tabletop. This gives the entire display a much cleaner look.
During this process Ron redesigned the can holder to work with bottom-fed wiring and the gap had it temporary legs removed and was mounted on it's proper base.

During construction.

The original bare copper interconnects were replaced with sleek black rubber insulated 500MCM cables with the ends lovingly polished by Adam Knight and his Wire Brush Of Science.

Even this little short run was routed under the table (a process that took quite a while to install because the heavy wire has a low strand count and is a serious pain to bend).

Very beautiful, Thumper now has Class.

Every piece of copper, even the connection terminations are hand polished and clear coated to preserve their shine.

During this process we also built a One-Cubic-Foot box from pieces of 1/2" Makrolon ballistics rated plastic sheeting. The idea was to finally have a working blast containment vessel and if anything could do it, Makrolon could.

The box was made by putting 3" long, 1/4"-20 bolts through one piece and threaded into the next. There were 8 bolts on each edge. The finished box was a beautiful sight to behold and had a considerable weight, much more than you imagined when you first picked it up.

It also blew to pieces with the very first test firing. To it's credit it did have a very interesting failure mode.

Not one bolt pulled out.

Not one piece of Makrolon failed in any manner.

The bolts *sheared* in half and the top flew off with such force that it hit the steel ceiling fifteen feet above, hard enough to leave a permanent dent.