Lightning-on-the-Lawn Teslathon

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

Original poster: "D.C. Cox by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <resonance-at-jvlnet-dot-com>

  
I am putting all of the photos at:

http://hot-streamer-dot-com/temp/LOL/
 
I had a great deal of joy meeting face-to-face with all the interesting
experimenters are our recent Teslathon.
 
It was truly amazing to see some of the neat design adaptions such as the
moving spark gap (while the coil was running) and other innovations that
experimenters might apply to practical projects.
 
David Weiss hands-down won the Tesla cheeshead hat contest.  His winning design
included a working plasma globe and a working laser that fired on voice
command.  Dave hauled away the pole pig for future coil work.
 
Ed Wingate and wife traveled all the way from Buffalo, NY.   A wild 2 kV, 20
Ampere DC flower pot "soil cooker" make fulgurites.  Bert Hickman displayed a
large arrangement of high power cap shrunken quarters, dimes, and nickels
including some ear ring designs that the ladies present admired.
 
Jason did a Tesla show with burning CD's and flaming gold foil.  Sam Barros
fired his railgun.  His design was very compact for such a high power machine.
 
Other experimenters operated their neat Tesla coil designs.  Cold weather
forced us indoors so everyone took turns operating and explaining their
designs.
 
Two of Univ. of Wisconsin's best plasma physicists dropped by:  Paul Nonn and
Clinton Sprott.  Paul, a Hungarian physicist, accurately answered almost
everyones technical questions.  Paul is a microwave physicist and Prof. Sprott
is head of the Plasma Physics Dept. at UW-Madison where I worked and studied in
my "younger days".
 
We had people coming and going all day long with a total turnout of around 65
people.  A lot of locals appear around 6 PM.  One interesting high voltage
electrical engineer, Beau Meskin, President of Plastic Capacitors, Inc., in
Chicago, showed up at 3 PM Sunday afternoon, missing, of course, the entire
Teslathon.
 
We didn't get the toroid finished in time so "Big Bruiser" was not operational
but we had so many coils present that it didn't seem to bother anyone.  I
promise the Bruiser will be ready next year and we will have it in Sept. to
beat the cold weather.
 
Thanks to everyone who attended and helped out with their TC operations.
 
A good time was had by all.  In case you missed the event I've posted a few
photographs of some of the action.
 
We still have 1/2 dozen t-shirts left.  If anyone is interested please contact
me off-list and we will make arrangements.
 
Best regards,
 
D.C. Cox