Secondary catastrophe

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

Original poster: "andy g" <aggniu-at-hotmail-dot-com> 

Hello again,

I may be asking a question that has already been answered and that I think 
I might already know the question to, but I will fire away anyhow.  I am 
still in the process of building my first coil, and the other night I 
started working on the secondary coil.  I am using a piece of 4"(nominal) 
4.5"(O.D.) PVC for the form (I know it is quite lossy, but I am a poor 
college student) wound with 22AWG magnet wire.  At any rate, I finally got 
the thing done and was going to coat it with poly the next morning as I 
didn't have any on hand, and I came to find after letting it sit for a 
while I had spots where the wire wasn't completely flat on the form (kind 
bunched up where there wasn't enough space between windings/there was too 
much wire and nowhere for it to go).  So, you can all see where this is 
going, I ended up getting a mess of doubled over windings and a hell of a 
headache at about 1:00AM.  By the time I went to sleep, the gosh darn thing 
looked like a backlashed fishing reel.  The good news is that I saved all 
but the last 4" of windings.  My question is, should I take the time to try 
to do a splice (rewinding is out of the question, I don't have enough wire 
to redo the entire thing)? Or, should I cut my losses and settle for a 
shorter than expected secondary?  If I do use a shorter secondary, what 
sort of performance change could I expect?  Originally, it was going to be 
21" of windings.  Now, it is a shade over 17" of good windings.  If it 
would be possible to splice, what is the appropriate way to approach such a 
thing to make it perform optimally?  For what it is worth, at this point I 
am locked into using a 12KV 30mA NST for power, otherwise, no values are 
definite.

_