Skip to content
Stan’s Legacy The Stanley Meyer Archive
Sign in

He Chose the Losses

Figure 7-8 is the most honest drawing Meyer ever made: every loss in his own circuit, named. The stainless chokes are usually read as an accident that killed his resonance. He says twice he put them there to stop the ringing — and the one VIC anybody has measured is copper, on iron, at Q twenty-six.

The archive's own copy, 15 September 2026 56 MB

6 views

What was shown

Memo WFC 426 is sixteen pages of the Water Fuel Cell technical brief, and it is the only place Stanley Meyer stops describing his circuit and starts specifying it. Wire gauges. Ohms per pound. A resistivity. A permittivity. A droplet volume in microlitres. That makes it the most checkable thing he ever wrote.

This episode checks it.

The drawing

Circuit Resistance ends with Figure 7-8, the VIC Matrix Circuit. It shows a transformer, a blocking diode, two resonant charging chokes and the resonant cavity. Each choke is drawn as an inductance L in series with a resistance Rs, with a capacitance Cd and a second resistance Rp across the pair. The cavity is a capacitance Cp in parallel with a resistance Re.

That is, element for element and in the right places, the standard lumped-element model of a real inductor feeding a lossy capacitor. It is the model an engineer draws when they want to know a coil's self-resonant frequency and its Q.

Meyer draws it and then reads every element as a mechanism.

What the chapter specifies

From Capacitance (Cd):

Resonant Charging Chokes (614/615) 430F/FR 36 AWG (.006) stainless steel (s/s) wire equals 60 micro ohms per centimeter; Primary Coil (622) 22 AWG (.028) copper wire equals 5.1933 ohms per pound weight; Secondary Pickup Coil (623) 35 AWG (.007) copper wire equals 13K ohms per pound weight.

The primary line is catalogue-exact and mislabelled by one gauge step: .028 inch is 21 AWG, and 5.18 ohms per pound is 21 AWG. Both of his numbers are the same row of a real wire table. Wind .028.

60 microhm-centimetres is the published resistivity of Carpenter 430F Solenoid Quality — a soft magnetic stainless made for solenoid cores and relay cores. The number is right; the unit is a material property, not a resistance per length. As resistance, .006 inch of it is 0.33 ohms per centimetre, and his 11.6 kilohms per choke is about 353 metres of wire. A real coil, of a real size.

From Circuit Resistance:

(Re) is the dielectric property of water and it's resistive value is typically (78.54 Ω)

78.54 is the relative permittivity of water at 25 °C. It is dimensionless. It is not ohms — and it happens to land inside the range of the real leak resistance of rain water in his own cell, which is why it survived thirty years.

Rp is not a loss

The symbol drawn across each choke reads like core loss. Inductance Reactance (Rs - Cd - FL) defines it as the opposite:

primary electromagnetic coupling field (Rp) … transmitted by way of Inductance Pulsing-Core (190) … enters into and passes through both Inductors (L1/L2) simultaneously and … automatically increases voltage potential … across Resonant Cavity

And Transformer Action Eq 30: Ltcc = L1 + L2 + 2M. The chokes are magnetically coupled to each other and to the primary — extra secondaries on the same iron, driven every pulse. This is a forced circuit, not one left to ring down.

It was never a coil in air

Figure 6-1 is the only drawing in the memo with the word steel printed on it: “ELECTRICAL STEEL CORE (53)”, with the chokes bifilar-wound into a bobbin cavity on the same core as the primary and secondary. Transformer Action: “Inductance Core (53) … composed of ‘Grain Oriented’ Electrical Steel laminations.”

Meyer's own Eq 20 — Wheeler's 1928 multilayer formula, copied exactly — on his own winding gives 0.21 H in air. What the iron does to that was measured, once, in 2009:

Don Gabel, 3 April 2009
choke C1, loose, 1 kHz 76.3 mH
the same choke on the core 1,218.8 mH at Q 69.5
a factor of sixteen
its DC resistance 76.7 Ω — it is copper
his Delrin tube, rain water, 1 kHz 21 nF at D 29.4

0.21 H × 16 = 3.3 H. Meyer's own formula and Gabel's meter agree.

He chose the stainless to stop it ringing

Instant Explosion of Water, one chapter earlier, describes two VICs:

VIC voltage circuit (60) utilizes copper wire-wrap to form Resonant Charging Chokes … whereas, VIC Voltage Enhancement Circuit (620) incorporates the use of stainless steel wire-wrap coils (614/615) … without experiencing “signal distortion” or “signal degradation” (preventing transformer ringing during signal propagation) … while allowing the reduction of Capacitor-Gap (Cp) … (typically .060 - .010)

And Resistance (Rs) gives the number with the reason attached: 11.6 kΩ per coil “is sufficient enough to inhibit current flow oscillation”.

He did not accidentally damp his own resonance. He bought the damping, twice, in writing, and what it bought him was a gap he could close from 0.060 in to 0.010 without arcing.

So can it ring?

Q at 4.33 nF Q at Gabel's 21 nF
copper, on the core 58 26
copper, in air 24 11
430F stainless, on the core 1.0 0.46
430F stainless, in air 0.42 0.19

The copper VIC rings comfortably. The stainless one sits on the line, and which side depends on a cell capacitance nobody has measured on a working machine.

But the ring was never the point

Instant Explosion of Water describes a staircase, not an oscillation: “Blocking Diode functions as an ‘Open’ switch during Pulse Off-time”, holding each step. An overdamped circuit step-charges perfectly well — that is what the diode is for.

What the diode cannot stop is the leak sideways, through the water. Gabel's tubes give it directly:
rain water 21 nF × 258 Ω 5.4 µs
distilled 25 nF × 255 Ω 6.4 µs
the gap between pulses at 10 kHz 50 µs

Gone nine times over before the next pulse arrives. To hold it, the water has to be under about 0.14 µS/cm — cleaner than laboratory ultrapure, and the two Meyer cells anybody has measured are near 1. Amp Leakage reached the same threshold from the other direction.

The droplet

From Mode of Operability:

approximately 7.4 (μl) microliter of a liquid-volume of a water droplet per injection cycle is all that is required to run the Dune Buggy 1600cc 50hp VW I.C. engine at 65 m.p.h. on the open road

The hydrogen in 7.4 microlitres is worth 117 joules, burnt — which is also exactly what it costs to free it. A Beetle holding 65 needs about 600 joules a cycle. A factor of five, in a droplet the size of a grain of salt.

See Q factor and voltage rise and Coaxial cell capacitance to change the numbers yourself. The whole of Gabel's workbook is at VIC coil readings, column for column.

WFC 426 VIC matrix circuit bifilar distributed capacitance 430F stainless voltage coefficient inductance reactance instant explosion of water Q factor synthetic voice