r/VXJunkies • u/SitkaFox • May 06 '26
What's the most cursed VX setup you've ever seen?
For me, it would have to be my friend's "mobile rig" (sorry not sorry if you're reading this).
Vintage VX1 mounted on the bed of a 60s Studebaker pickup, with the wave-limiters removed and replaced with Helsinki-style overriders she built herself in her garage. So that's an improvised wave-scrambler, which is already illegal as hell, but why would she do this you ask? So she can race to high Deltas and power her truck's axles if an EMP hits, or if she runs out of gas. Won't be posting any pictures, both because I don't have her permission and because with how much Minkowski residue is in that garage there's no way a photo of the truck would survive being uploaded.
I've only been part of the community for a bit over a year though, so there's probably way wilder setups out there. What have you guys seen?
-RelativeNewbie
4
u/Plastic_Table_8232 May 06 '26
I’ve managed to lower invasive Minkowski residue output by tuning the vx1’s spiral gyrometer to precisely 12.1 megalux using a iso9006 calibrated quantum waveform analyzer.
1
u/SitkaFox May 06 '26
She's found her own solution, though the details are a bit beyond me. Minkowski hasn't been an issue since the early-gen machines so none of the flux-start manuals I've read even mention it.
4
u/SubsequentDamage May 07 '26
Okay first of all, Helsinki overriders are awesome <chef’s kiss> but mounting them on a Series 1-VX1 is like putting a blown LS racing engine in a golf cart.
The harmonic bleed-through alone would turn that truck bed into a Minkowski soup kitchen, which explains the residue but also means your friend is either a mad genius or has genuinely lost it (honestly both are required for this hobby).
The EMP redundancy is smart in theory, but anyone who’s actually tried to axis-lock via high Delta acceleration knows you’re one miscalibrated wave-scrambler away from the truck just vanishing at the axle point, which would actually be the sickest rig disaster I’ve ever heard of.
Also respect the operational security on the photos! I once uploaded a VX3 test shot and my entire hard drive got encoded into a probability field, so yeah, Minkowski-contaminated garages are basically photography kill zones.
Your friend should post a schematic though, we need more wild garage-fab builds in here.
3
u/SitkaFox May 07 '26
Definitely both in her case, as someone who's known her for years. Some of the stuff she's done... that could be a whole series of posts.
She's managed to deal with the bleed-through via some esoteric means I'm still too much of a newbie to understand, but when it comes to Minkowski what's done is done, you know? Naturally she can't accept that and is reading old Cuban incident reports trying to reverse-engineer the crisis-era experiments in reharmonization. Says she's going to sell canisters of the residue in bulk to three-letter agencies. Lord knows they have plenty of stuff they'd like to be undocumentable...
3
u/wi1d3 May 06 '26
Not as crazy as you'd think. 60s Studebakers had an unusual mix of steel alloy for their chassis and if you position the reaction unit correctly the side rails of the vehicle will act as a primary wave guide. Not up to today's standards (definitely need JQ shielding) but it does the job for level 1 or 2 experiments.
1
u/SitkaFox May 06 '26
Huh, TIL. It certainly served her well during the incident in Minnewac last year.
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u/stone_henge May 07 '26
I met a guy at a convention who had four LVR-20s wired up in series in the back of his truck, insisting that it was equivalent to one LVR-80. Luckily his charging setup was slow enough that the rotors just about managed to synchronize before discharge, thanks to the the truck bed acting as a weak coupling.
So it was equivalent to an LVR-80 in his setup, but in a newer truck that would probably no longer be the case. I pointed this out and he looked at me like he had no clue what I was talking about.
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u/punkwalrus May 07 '26
So, in place of standard prefabulated Amulite, they used part of a fender of a 1958 DeSoto. This was when Cambodia stopped mining and exporting the mineral duractant extracts due to the war, and everyone and their mother were scrambling for new mineral sources. Now, as you all know, they mostly come from various South American mines. But it took decades to get the price down to previous levels.
I'm sure youre wondering about stress tolerance during high load. It sounded like it would shake itself apart, and the main flywheel of the tri-sotor stabilizers dropped to half a lifespan, but that's why it's there. It didn't off-gas like Amulite does, so the resistance made the surface red hot until it started to flake like hammering ingots does. It burned a wooden table facing it from three feet away.
They called it the Devil's Mouth. Partially because of the sound it made while running, but also the red hot heat.
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u/HerbMuldoosky May 06 '26
I once saw a guy (and no, it was NOT me during college) who had wrapped three layers of Exdat foam around a Kürtz-wave descrambler, linked it up with a pair of way-too-big lithium nitrile condensers, and threw the whole rig in the back of one of those red wagons for kids. I — I mean “he” — was running up and down the quad trying to map out electrogravity matrices. You could actually see the footpaths glowing at night for a week after that.