SAN MATEO, California -- It's true your money doesn't go as far as it used to. Seattle-based Hackerbots Labs can take a coin and shrink it down such that quarters appear the size of dimes and dimes become little more than little molten balls of metal. What's amazing is that through this process, the identity and value of the coin remain almost intact.

Here's their trick: They take a small candy carton-sized machine that hosts three capacitors, which together discharge 15,000 Joules of energy or 10,000 Volts, into a small coil that is wrapped around the coin. Bombarding the coin with that much energy shrinks it almost perfectly, while retaining the weight and volume.

At the Maker Faire festival for DIYers, as onlookers peered eagerly, Rob Flickenger, a member of Hackerbot Labs, explained how it works. To generate the energy, power from a wall outlet goes into a variac or a variable transformer, from which it is channeled to a volt neon transformer. The resultant huge jolt of energy creates an extremely powerful magnetic field inside a coil in the machine's chamber. This induces a magnetic field in the coin attached to the coil. The two magnetic fields strongly oppose each other leading to the shrinking of the coin.

The side effect of the process is that the coil expands and explodes violently inside the chamber. To make the whole experiment safe, says Flickenger, Hackerbot Labs has constructed the chamber out of high density plastic and uses a long rope to engage a trigger that sets of the process. And along the way they just have to make sure everyone around plugs their ears.

And after all that, perfect tiny buttons of coins are spewed out. Just don't try to pass off one of those shrunken quarters as a dime.

To see more of the process including photos, check out their blog.

Photo: Hackerbot Labs