I've been watching this post for a while and finally made it to harbor freight recently to pick up my own fly swatter. The one I picked up looks different compared to the one in the link at the beginning of this post. It uses 2 D cell batteries and the circuit board and it's components are different. This means I didn't have the option of doing an easy "high power" mod to it. That said, I believe this one is probably a high power version already. It lets out a nice POP and good size spark when grounding the dispenser to the the lead. I initially tried using an aluminum spice shaker for the dispenser but found a few problems with it so I reverted to the tea strainer and am actually much happier with the way it turned out. It was also much simpler to mount this way to. I'll try to post pics of both versions for those that may be curious.
Moving on... let me start of by saying that over the last 1.5 yrs I've spent countless hours trying to build 4 different versions of my own vandegraf generator to use for static ground cover application. It's been fun tinkering but the results were always pathetic. I just couldn't justify the cost of the Noch applicator for my small layout when I could pull parts from my junk drawer to try and make my own. I'd actually moved on with my scenery and covered most of my layout with ground foam. I am excited now to have a functioning static applicator that really only took a few minutes to build and cost a mere $10!
A couple questions:
For those of you have built these, how far away from the scenery do you hold the applicator (tea strainer in my case) to get good standing on end fibers?
How far away from the ground spike are you able to work before the fibers don't stand up effectively?
A couple observations:
I ordered silfor static grass from Scenic Express and found that the stuff is kind of compacted together straight from the package. I had better and easier application if I put some fibers in a glass jar and shook and "fluffed" them up a bit before putting it into the tea strainer.
The 4mm stuff tends to fall over easily unless you have pretty tacky glue for it to fall into. I used white glue and wetting it with water to help spread it around the scenic base only worked if the water was used very sparingly. I'm going to experiment with Matte Medium sometime soon to see what works better.
Wordy post with lots to digest but I hope someone gets some good from it all!
