Experimenting with the first burns
To get a feel for the process, I decided to experiment with some scrap pieces of timber and vary the duration of the burns, as well as the level of saturation of the timber with the borax solution. Using celery pine resulted in more finely detailed burns, clearly showing the small spidery tendrils as the electricity made its way between the probes. Tasmanian oak burnt more deeply and rapidly, and also lacked the fine detail of the celery pine. Tasmanian myrtle gave a similar result to the celery pine, and plywood gave a more coarse finish, but not as aggressive as the Tasmanian oak.
Frequently moving the probes, doing only short-duration burns, and carefully controlling the saturation level give you control over how deeply the tracks are burnt in the timber.
Apart from controlling the position of the two probes, the process of the burn itself is unpredictable, making every project unique and different. It
It therefore lends itself to adding further points of interest to bespoke items, such as wooden furniture and boxes
therefore lends itself to adding further points of interest to bespoke items, such as wooden furniture and boxes.
Can you trust YouTube?
As you will gather I have relied quite a lot on YouTube clips of Lichtenberg burners for inspiration for how to build my own. A word of caution needs to be raised here. Just because someone makes what seems to be a useful video and posts it on the internet does not necessarily mean that their approach is safe or even correct. Most YouTube sites recommend that you wet the timber with a tablespoon of borax in 500ml or so of water before starting ‘the burn’.
Presumably, the borax is important in causing the shorting process, which is necessary to ‘get the burn’. One YouTuber blithely sprayed a mix of the solution on his timber while the burner was on when he felt “it was getting a bit dry”.
If the borax is important to get the burn, common sense suggests that it conducts electricity, which to me at least means that happily spraying a mist of it from a hand-held bottle on something generating 3000-odd volts at the time may not be the smartest idea.
So I highly recommend that if you are enthused about making and using a Lichtenberg burner, you check out the YouTube sites devoted to them, look at their suggestions and how they go about demonstrating their burns, and run both through the filter of your own common sense first. This is one activity where your day can very rapidly be ruined if you opt for the wrong technique.