Making a Jacob's Ladder Better

Around a year ago, my friend, Max Justicz, was graduating high school and headed off to MIT. As a parting gift, he gave me his 12000 volt neon sign transformer. It's been sitting in my closet since then, so I decided to finally put it to good use and make a Jacob's Ladder.

This was definitely cool, but it needed some improvement. Also a little over a year ago, my former robotics coach left our school to live in Connecticut with his wife. He let me keep his 12V air compressor, and for the longest time, I've been searching for a project to use it in. I realized that I could probably use the compressor to make the Jacob's Ladder spark upwards even faster by using the compressor to pump air along the wires in the direction of the arc's movement. This was the result:

As you can see, this was totally awesome. It ended up making something that looks almost like a plasma sword. This project was definitely worth the small amount of effort it took to create it. Overall, it's one of the coolest things I've built.