First coil

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

Original poster: "Joseph Geiss by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <joseph20-at-home-dot-com>

hello all,

about 1 year ago I decided to build a coil so I wound a secondary and then,
it happened, I got a girlfriend so all my money and time went to a different
cause. well tonight (Thursday) I decided to drag out the secondary I hand
wound (ugh! never again) to see if I could make a coil with it and what I
had laying around.

The secondary is 4" ID PVC and about 20" tall with 15.5" wound it has
775turns of 26awg wire on it.

The primary was a 3 turn hideously malformed flat spiral of 12awg house
wire. It is about 1/2" from the secondary and varies from 1" to 1/4" spacing
between turns.

The transformer is a single MOT

The spark gap is a (now don't laugh) 1600rpm AC cooling fan I got out of
some cooling unit, I broke 2 of the  metal fan blades off and trimmed the
remaining 2 so its like a spinning metal ruler to make a sort of rotary gap,
one HV terminal of the MOT is connected to the motor shaft and the other is
connected to a flying lead that's close to the spinning blade and completes
the circuit about 80% of the time.

The cap is slightly LTR, a .86uf microwave oven cap

topload is a 4" ball of aluminum foil which could most likely be smashed to
a 1.5" - 2" ball

This is in my basement and without the secondary grounded, if I prop up a 4'
fluorescent tube on the near by table and bring one of the metal ends near
the topload I can get 1" sparks, the gap sounds to be around 200-300 breaks
per second but is probably lower than that because the flying lead shakes
and gets to far away from the fan blades.

not to bad for the crap I had laying around, any suggestions to get a little
more output?

pleased with my junk coil,
Joe Geiss in Maryland