I read the article and surely not an expert, much less spending 35 years of my life studying the subject.
I have been told that rods were intended only to bleed off the static charge built up when clouds move through the atmosphere generating "static electricity"....like you do walking across a carpeted floor especially in the winter with cool dry air. You realize that when you grab a door handle and get a spark, or you have plastic seat covers in your truck, slide across the seat to grab the door knob and get whacked.
I believe the bleed off theory having made a career out of managing high voltage and understanding it's behavior, ozone generation and the physics of all of that.
However, the amperage of the bolt is what deters me from considering rods effectiveness for a direct strike. You can look up the fusing current of conductors as compared to normal loads and for a conductor to sustain a bolt of lighting at 35,000 amperes, much less 158,000, without fusing and blowing apart (hence become useless after it attracted the lighting in the first place) it would have to be a foot in diameter or something of the sort. Most lightening wires I have seen are like 1" across, square in shape and spiraled....for whatever that does.
I have seen them spiked (spire) and the ones with the glass bulb between the spire and the ground connection. Have no idea as to to the reason for the bulb.
Have a pecan tree about 50' from the house and 20 feet from a Morton building that sustained a hit one night. Trunk was about a foot in diameter at the time. Was in bed and the fireball lit up whole house, an enormous boom, and scared us big time. The next morning I examined the tree and it had a burn mark from the top to the bottom.
On the trunk it was about 4" wide, bark blown off and burned into the tree about 1". The tree survived but the core wood rotted. It grew new bark around the dead part and it is alive today some 20 years later. with the trunk about 18" in diameter now. It is however on it's last leg. I bought this place in '79 and it was a mature tree then. Just time for it to go I guess. The lightening didn't help matters obviously.
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Today's Featured Article - Third Brush Generators - by Chris Pratt. While I love straightening sheet metal, cleaning, and painting old tractors, I use every excuse to avoid working on the on the electrics. I find the whole process sheer mystery. I have picked up and attempted to read every auto and farm electrics book with no improvement in the situation. They all seem to start with a chapter entitled "Theory of Electricity". After a few paragraphs I usually close the book and go back to banging out dents. A good friend and I were recently discussing our tractor electrical systems when he stated "I figure it all comes back to applying Ohms Law". At this point
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