Re: The finger of God.

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

Original poster: "albert hassick by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <uncadoc-at-juno-dot-com>

Hi Chris,  It seems as though you do not have enough capacitance to get
an output from your coil.  You may need to double check your actual
string cap ratio in relationship to your tank capacity, (since you are a
geek you have probably already done that about 200 times by now), then
perhaps there may be a "fakey" cap or caps in your original string.  I
call em fakey cause they check good cold but they then zap out when you
put em under a real load, then when you check em again with no power in
the circuit they check good again, then you end up like Lazarus, stuck in
limbo forever, and in your case not quite knowing if the caps are good or
bad.  Anyway, it sounds to me that you need more capacitance in your
tank, try adding cap strings until you get some output.  Also, why not
build up a supplementary string of MMC caps (that is what you are using
is it not?) to see if there may be a borderline cap in your original
outlay.  Last but not least are the venerable Champagne bottles that
Tesla liked best!  Just in case you want to fire your coil and have good
cheer at the same time!   Al.

On Sat, 19 May 2001 11:47:13 -0600 "Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>
writes:
> Original poster: "Christopher Boden by way of Terry Fritz 
> <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <chrisboden-at-hotmail-dot-com>
> 
> After reading on the list that a "Choke" coil for a neon shop 
> bombarder is 
> the absolute greatest thing for an inductive ballast...I began 
> scrounging.
> 
> 3 phone calls, 2 short drives, and some basement digging 
> later......
> 
> 100lbs little cube. 8 position knob, nice little air cooled 
> inductor, 2 
> wires out the back with beefy lugs. Looks like it can handle a 10kVA 
> pig 
> with no worries.
> 
> 
> So, of course, after sitting looking at this beautiful Pig sitting 
> on it's 
> cart for months now and not being about to use it, I had to play.
> 
> I cleaned off the new inductor (about 400 years of dust in there), 
> and dug 
> some 6AWG out of stock.....minutes later I had the pig set up with a 
> 240VAC 
> 20A feed (I have a 40 and a 60 in the works).
> 
> At Notch-1 on the ballest I could pull consistant 8-12" arcs to the 
> Jesus 
> stick. The thick fire like arcs similar to a MOT. Cool So far, 
> everything 
msnip...