Mad science hack: How to make a plasma tube from a kombucha bottle

Science is cool and, more often than not, it can help you create beautiful (and super-useful in educational settings) stuff like your very own plasma tube out of an empty kombucha glass bottle. 

As it happens, Simranjit Singh made a sealed plasma tube out of a glass kombucha bottle and shared the process in an article on Instructables, as well as on his YouTube channel, so anyone who wants to can copy his strategy to the T.

According to Singh, you’ll only need to vacuum this plasma tube once instead of vacuum pumping every time you want to use it.

To get started, you’ll need to equip yourself with one thick glass bottle (Singh used a 1.4l Synergy kombucha bottle), one glass end cap (he used a candle holder from Dollar Store, two 8mm bolts, two-part silicone, two-part epoxy (optional, as you can just use silicone), a vacuum chamber, 8mm diamond drill bits, and a high-voltage power source to test it.

Step 1: Preparing the bottle and making holes

First, Singh cut the bottle because he wanted to make it more symmetrical (this is optional). He carefully drilled holes at the bottom of the bottle and the same-sized hole in the end cap (candle holder).

Step 2: Sealing the bottle and end cap

Then, he used two-part epoxy to seal the bottle end (alternatively, you can use two-part silicone). For the end cap and the place where the bottle meets the end cap, he used two-part silicone. He left epoxy to dry for more than 48 hours, and silicone for over 24 hours.

Step 3: Vacuuming

He then put the bottle in a vacuum chamber for at least 10 minutes, placing a 5lbs weight on top of it so it’s easier to achieve a vacuum inside the plasma tube.

Step 4: Testing

Finally, it was time to test the plasma tube. Singh accomplished this by using his flyback transformer as the high-voltage source. As he pointed out, you can change the length of the arc, as well as its behavior by altering the voltage on the variac transformer.

Conclusion

And there you have it! Your own very cool plasma tube you can keep on your nightstand or give as a present to your loved ones. And the best part? You can easily make more, so all your friends and family can have one. Kids will love it. Other projects you may want to try your hand at could be a Tilt-A-Sketch, laser harp, red-light therapy gear, ‘glasses’ to transcribe text to audio for the blind, or a GPS receiver.