First light...Mixed Emotions

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

Original poster: "Chris Roberts by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <quezacotl_14000000000000-at-yahoo-dot-com>


Hi everyone,

Well, tonight we fired up our second coil after many sleepless nights 
building it. It worked, but this coil right now is really bad-tempered. We 
got sparks almost EVERYWHERE. It comes off the wire that goes to the 
primary and hits the secondary, sparks along connections between wires, 
saftey gaps, primary to secondary, the secondary along itself, and oh yeah 
- a little off the toroid =P. We were able to clean it up a littlle and got 
rid of most of the unwanted sparks, but we are still getting hits from the 
primary to the secondary and along the secondary itself. Sigh - We are now 
putting a few more coats of polyurathane along the secondary which should 
insulate it better and will hopefully get it running again by tomorrow 
night. I'll try and get some pictures posted soon. (once it works)

Dimensions are here if anyone cares.

Power supply: 9kv 120ma NST. This is a BIG NST. Only RF protection is 
saftey gaps.

Spark Gap: RQ spark gap w/ vaccum motor to pull air through it.

Capacitor: LTR that has 2 strings of 6 geek caps with a total of .05mfd

Primary: 13 turns of 1/4 inch refridgerator tubing spaced 1/4 inch apart 
and tapped at about turn 8. The inner turn of the primary may be too close 
to the secondary (1.5 inches) but we don't want to be cutting off inner 
turns yet untill we're sure.

Secondary: 6.25 inch outer diameter PVC wound for 24.5 inches with 22 gauge 
magnet wire. We are triple coating the coil again to try and get rid of 
those sparks.

Toroid: 28 inch outer diameter with 4 inch flex duct. This probably needs 
to be covered in aluminium tape and smoothed out as we are getting lots of 
very tiny (10 inch) sparks all around the perimeter of the coil but no 
actual streamers.

Sorry if this post is a little long. I hope we can get this one to work 
better than the last one. (12 inches at most, it was really sad)


-Chris

"Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make all 
of them yourself."-unknown