hello

["Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Original poster: "Dr. Adriano Mollica" <adriano.mollica@xxxxxxxxxxx>

Hello,
my name is Adriano, and I live in Italy. I lived also for a year of 
year in Tucson, Arizona.
I just started to project my first tesla Coil, and i'm experiening 
some general problems.

I started to design the device around a NST 7KV , 50mA. then using 
the  tesla coil design free software i calculated the capacitor 
resonating valueand  it come out to be 22nF. Then , someone  with 
more experience in tesla coil design told me that that value was not 
good, so he told me to swich to 37nF. It was ok for me, but now i'm 
in trouble because i can'tf ind that right caps with  reasonable 
price. So i decided to do them by myself, using alumium foil and 
polyethylene as insulator.

My usual hardware store sold to me a 2 quare meters foil for 15$ 
(13.50 euros). that it is not enoght for that capacitor i need (i 
calculated 1.87 m^2) but i'm going to divide that foil into 3 or 4 
pieces, and buy another one or two more,  in order to be able to 
build 4 or more capacitos of 10 nF each.

But anyway this is not the main problem, the real one, is how to 
connect efficiently the copper wires to the aluminium foil, 'cause i 
suppose that the high voltage can start some sparks that will ruine 
the aluminium foil and the isolant very quickly.

I red about rolled poly caps here, but no one explained very well and 
delailed how to make a safe ad durable connection between the armours 
and the coming out wires.

any ideas?

thank you for your patience and sorry for my grammatical errors.

Adriano