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RE: TCBOR Teslathon report


The Teslathon at Richard Hull's laboratory was a blast.  I saw more
Physics demonstrated in two days than in ten years at the university.
The Maggy was!  Talk about field control!  This little, teeny, tiny,
itty, bitty coil putting out Huge (>100") sparks.  When it did arc
over it arced between the toroids, not across the tiny coil!!!!!!
Go figure!  The driver wasn't all that big either.  Very nice rotary
gap design.  The sparks had a musical quality to their sound.
Nice tune.

The demonstration of electrostatic potential waves from a small
Tesla coil using an electrometer connected to an isolated sphere
was very interesting.  The demonstration of the "umbrella" effect
of electrostatic shielding was very nice.  Gauss's flux theory will
never be the same.  Thanks Richard for letting me try this
experiment in your awsome high voltage laboratory!

The water arc explosion device was amazing.  Three drops of
water vaporized by a capacitor bank discharge inside a barrel
of tool steel "made" a one centimeter hole in 1/4" fine veneer
plywood with very sharp clean edges!  I'll have to think about
this one for a while.

Steve and I bought copies of Richard Hull's newest edition of his
Colorado Springs Notes Commentary (SP?).  Just the additional
pictures at the end were worth the price.  We also bought copies
of The Electric Spacecraft Journal.  I was curious.

The "group" dinner on friday was something else.  The
conversations were very interesting!

Thank you very much Richard for inviting me to the
Teslathon. It was the most interesting experience
I have ever had.
Barry



 ----------
|From: "tesla-at-poodle.pupman-dot-com"-at-PMDF-at-PAXMB1
|To: Benson Barry; "Tesla-list-subscribers-at-poodle.pupman-dot-com"-at-PMDF-at-PAXMB1
|Subject: TCBOR Teslathon report
|Date: Thursday, October 17, 1996 3:43AM
|
|<<File Attachment: 00000000.TXT>>
|From sroys-at-umabnet.ab.umd.eduWed Oct 16 22:34:46 1996
|Date: Wed, 16 Oct 1996 10:08:42 -0400 (EDT)
|From: Steve Roys <sroys-at-umabnet.ab.umd.edu>
|To: tesla-at-pupman-dot-com
|Cc: Tesla-list-subscribers-at-poodle.pupman-dot-com, sroys-at-radiology.ab.umd.edu
|Subject: TCBOR Teslathon report
|
|Well, I attended Richard Hull's Teslathon this past weekend, and it was a
|real blast.
|
|I went down a day early on Friday with Barry, a fellow member of the Tesla
|Coil Builders of Maryland, and we visited the Grande Junquetion Surplus
|store in Virginia Beach that Richard is always talking about.  The array
|of stuff was amazing - optics, electronics, magnets, hardware, equipment,
|instrumentation, caps - practically anything neat you could think of was
|packed in there somewhere.  We wandered around the store for about 2
|hours, and every time I went down an aisle, I saw things that I hadn't
|seen before. There was certainly a vast array of stuff, and most of the
|prices seemed reasonable - a bit more than what you would typically pay
|for the stuff at hamfests, but still way below regular retail prices.
|
|We got stuck in traffic coming back across the bridge from Virginia Beach
|to Richmond, and we pulled up at Richard's a little after 6:00 PM.  When
|we got there, a bunch of coilers were standing around talking, and Ed
|Wingate was selling .06uF and .035uF Maxwell pulse caps hand-over-fist out
|of the trunk of his car (talk about a buying frenzy!).  Before we all went
|to dinner, Ed had sold 24 of the 30 caps that he had packed into his car
|(I think the rest made it to the Teslathon the next morning, but they
|didn't last long at Ed's prices).
|
|After a hearty "group" dinner on Friday evening, there was an informal get
|together at Richard's lab.  The whole flock of us early-birds got a great
|showing of Richard's 11" long magnifier throwing 100+ inch sparks at just
|about 8kVA.  The water-arc gun was also demonstrated, as were some of the
|electrostatic motors and experiments that Richard has been talking about
|on the list.
|
|The next morning dawned crisp and clear, and after a 7AM group breakfast
|at Denny's with Richard and most of the other early arrivals, Barry and I
|trekked over to the famed TCBOR Salvage Yard.  There was literally stuff
|everywhere!  Most of it seemed to be from power companies, with BIG line
|fuses, interrupters, insulators, machinery, motors, scrap metal, etc...
|all over the place. Along with the BIG stuff that would have taken a
|flat-bed truck to move, there were palettes and boxes of smaller fuses,
|CT's, SCR's, circuit boards, cable cutters, radios, and just plain junque.
|I fell in love with a beautiful 8' brown ceramic insulator, but since I
|only had my 1/2 ton pickup and no spare springs, I had to pass it up.
|
|After scrounging around the yard for a while, I ended up with a pile of
|stuff that included a nice 30A 240V variac in a really filthy, beat-up
|metal box, some large (2' diameter, ~50lb each) toroidal current
|transformers, a bunch of smaller CT's, a 3' long tubular tuned something
|or other, a bunch of aluminum signs, some large 700W light bulbs, a
|handful of large SCR's, a hand-held cable cutter, and a few other
|miscellaneous items.
|
|The total damage? $33!
|
|Barry also picked up some other items, but his buy of the day was a nice
|1.5kVA potential transformer for $10.
|
|After the yard, we returned to the Teslathon at about 10:00 to find things
|already hopping.  People were milling about, buying and selling all sorts
|of neat high voltage stuff, talking, and generally having a good time.  As
|the day progressed, we were treated to some beautiful gasseous tube
|displays, a demonstration of the glass-blowing techniques used to make
|neon tubes, a small solid state Tesla coil that put out 3" or 4" sparks
|and made the most annoying, shrill noise I've heard in a long time (almost
|like scraping your fingernails along a blackboard), Richard's magnifier,
|water-arc explosions, electrostatic motors run by a small Tesla coil,
|radioactive meters and carnival glass, mercury glow tubes, a late night
|xray demonstration with a small veterinary xray machine and the xray
|screens that I have for sale at very reasonable prices (hint, hint), fun
|with electrometers and more electrostatic tricks, and God only knows what
|else I missed while I was talking with other people, selling my stuff, or
|walking around looking at all the neat stuff other people were selling.
|
|All in all, a wonderful day of comraderie with a bunch of nice people who
|all share the same passion, and a mind-expanding day of dinking around
|with all sorts of really neat stuff!  Kudos to Richard Hull for an all
|around great time!
|
|Steve Roys.
|