I recently discovered Philo Farnsworth's "fusor" reactor design, which uses inertial electrostatic confinement to produce fusion reactions for up to 30 seconds at a time.

 

I have a moderate (electrical) engineering background and have done lots of simple projects, but building a "fusor" sounds somewhat... involved. However, I'd like to build one.

 

Can people suggest more intermediate skill projects that use similar concepts to the fusor which I could do in order to develop the requisite background to construct a fusor? I am thinking various devices based around vacuum chambers or related to creating confined plasmas.

 

I have a friend who has the requisite equipment to produce vacuum chambers and would likely be collaborating with him to construct a fusor.

As I understand the technology fusors require a lot more power than they have any hope of producing.

That can be considered a good thing because they don't have any appropriate shielding for the radiations produced by fusion reactions.

If you want to spend money to make some power you can get more power from solar or wind or even low tempurature geo-thermal units.

If you are building it for the "status", well, that is hard to match with anything that really works.