Man builds homemade X-ray machine

X-ray imaging is best left to the professionals for a good reason. While the tool is not dangerous when utilized properly, it’s whole purpose is to fire radiation at a target. Knowing this, it’s probably better to simply admire DIY YouTuber Mirko Pavleski’s recent quest to build his own at-home X-ray machine from scratch. The secret ingredient to making it all work? A repurposed DY86 vacuum tube taken from a vintage CRT television set.

X-ray imaging is not only a vital tool for both medicine and science—it’s one of the oldest methods of its kind. Discovered by German physics professor Wilhelm Röntgen in 1895, the breakthrough earned him the inaugural Nobel Prize in Physics later that year. The machine fires  X-ray beams at a subject, then uses a specialized camera to record how a bone absorbs the beams based on density. In the human body, thick bones absorb the most X-rays, and appear white on the resultant image. Softer tissues show up in varying shades of gray, while empty spaces like inside the lungs appear black.

In order to power the homebrew X-ray camera without blowing up the vacuum tube, Pavleski relied on a chain of power supplies. First, a low-voltage DC generator runs a high-voltage AC inverter, which then channels current through a transformer and finally a voltage multiplier. This last part is crucial in order to create a sufficiently high voltage to ensure the vacuum tube’s radiation emissions include X-rays. Unsurprisingly, this took a few attempts to get right—resulting in three vacuum tubes exploding.

To create the photo itself, Pavleski used standard dental X-ray film placed behind his image subject. Once zapped, he completed the usual development process of washing, setting, and rewashing over the course of around 30 minutes. The final results offer looks inside various items in Pavleski’s workshop, including a microSD card and tiny transistors. The important caveat there is “items,” and not body parts. Safety first, after all.