Thorium radiation source

Project was created to refurbish my old gas lamp and provide radiation source for DIY radiation detectors testing. To understand relationship between these topics check links below.

Making process:

1. Old broken gas lamp mantle with some dirt and dust was collected to zip bag
2. Dirty zip bag was put to another zip bag
3. Zip bags were fold in half and put under book to flatten
4. 3D-printing was run until cavity bridging started
5. Printing was paused, folded zip bags were pushed to partially bridged cavity and printing was resumed
6. When letters printing started printing was paused, filament changed to brown and printing was resumed and finished.

Notes:

• special pause commands inserted to g-code were not used in this case
• printing was closely watched and manually paused to insert content or change filament
• interesting design challenge & solution:
  
  Q: How to chamfer edge of internal cavity which is not accesible to select by mouse ?
  
  A: Switch view to wireframe model where you can see inside object and then select the internal edge to chamfer
• text extrusion height: 0.6 mm = 3 layers

Further readings:

Wikipedia

• Gas mantle
• Gas lighting
• Thorium dioxide
• Thorium

DIY radiation detectors

• MightyOhm – Geiger Counter
  • Feed your Geiger: Cheap and Readily Available Radioactive Test Sources
• SmartFTLab – Smart Geiger (FSG-001)
• RH Electronics – MyGeiger
• Safecast – bGeigie Nano