RE: Joining two rolls of wire on the secondary coil

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

Original poster: "Mccauley, Daniel H by way of Terry Fritz <teslalist-at-qwest-dot-net>" <daniel.h.mccauley-at-lmco-dot-com>



Good to know.  I always thought the discontinuity there would kill you in
the performance / reliability of the coil.

The Captain


 > To prove a few points at our summer 2001 teslathon, we did
 > many bad things
 > to a secondary coil (we had about 4, and chose the ugliest to die),
 > including drawing arcs to a ground rod directly from the secondary
 > windings!  At one point we had finally managed to short a
 > couple turns
 > about 20% from the top.  To rectify, I unwrapped a couple
 > turns in each
 > direction, clipped the wires so that I could make a nice,
 > ugly pigtail
 > splice (twisted the wires together).  I didn't even fold the
 > splice over,
 > but left the 2 inches pointing out radially.  At the next
 > power on, there
 > was a very faint green spark that lasted a second or two as
 > the insulation
 > was burned off the splice.  The secondary proceeded to work
 > flawlessly for
 > about another half hour....  We even attempted to discharge a
 > pulse cap
 > through the thing (4kV, 100uF or something like that).  We failed to
 > electrically kill the coil.  I think we have video and pictures of it
 > somewhere....
 >
 > So, in summary, it doesn't have to be perfect, or even LOOK
 > good to work
 > well....
 >
 > I've never spliced wire on a TC secondary, but would think
 > that scraping a
 > flat spot a half inch long or so would make the easiest and least
 > conspicuous joint.  A small clamp could hold the two wires
 > together at one
 > end of the splice....
 >
 > The previous night of that teslathon featured R. Scott
 > Coppersmith's coil
 > killing a PC (it took a while, and some manual intervention)....  but
 > that's an entirely different story.
 >
 > Regards,
 >
 > Mark Broker
 > Chief Engineer, The Geek Group
 >
 >
 >