Re: Interesting residual charge

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "Terry Fritz" <twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net>

Hi Chris,

	Probably you or John just got a good static charge on your from being near
(too near ;-)) the coil.  Just like rubbing one's feet on the rug, you can
build up a substantial charge on you and when you touch something it can
spark.  Negative voltages tend to arc better than positive voltages so TCs
can easily impart negative static charges on nearby people or ungrounded
conductive objects.

I recently did some 25kV cap testing and just being about 2 feet away I
could repeatedly draw a little arc between me and ground simply because I
was in the powerful fields such high voltages produce in the area.  I used
to work near 375kV power lines when the nearby fields and static shocks
were very annoying!  Everything I touched would give me a powerful static
shock which was really bad since I was usually on a ladder (fiberglass)
holding tools and stuff.  Although you can't see the fields, they are
around 50kV/meter which is very powerful.

Cheers,

	Terry


At 11:04 AM 12/21/2000 -0800, you wrote:
>Hello All, 
>
>I know the topic of residual charges in the coils
>ended a while back, but i have had an interesting
>experience today. Me and my freind john where
>experimenting (ok, playing) with my tesla coil. He was
>standing on the insulated plastic box taking arcs to a
>metal object in his hand whilst i manned the switch. I
>know this is a bit of a stupid thing to do, but it is
>only a low powered coil with a 450W input. After i
>switched the coil off, i reached up to take the metal
>object from his hand and got a shock from it. Is this
>normal? The AC from the coil should not leave a
>changre like this. My coil is a very normal spark gap
>style thing. 
>If anyone has any thoughts on this i would be
>interested to hear them. 
>Oh, yeah, and we got several shocks from the
>secondaries when we were packing them away.
>
>Thanks, 
>
>Chris Telford
>
>
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