Thanks !
The idea of using tubing in topload came from greg indeed. The topload is big. 60cm bij 260 cm (24 bij 103 inch) and had to look beautifull. We take this appart with a bunch of hex bolts and end up with an easy to store bunch of 1/3 aluminium circles.
The whole build was never possible without the hughe amount of information from the tesla community. TCML, 4hv.org and all the induvidual websites. Thanks everybody for that !
We had only one option to test the coil before getting on to a truck to amsterdam, quite stressy. A NE555 kept popping in a switching supply. This limitted runs to a few seconds. Not the best way to tune a new coil ! The next test option was on top of Nemo.
This whole event was a nice combination between education and entertainment. Thursday we set up the coil on top of the science museum Nemo. The museum is packed with interactive displays where kids can find out how physics work.
While we where setting up the coil on the the 20 meter high roofterrace with a big crane, klokhuis was filming an episode about the working of coils in general . Klokhuis is an kids program on national television that explain physics in a really nice way. So they start with a wire with current through it and see a compass move and go on to how transformers work. In the end bit they show the teslacoil being tested.
A photographer took the picture of the test and it ended up with the article on the front page of a national newspaper Trouw. The next day my phone wend grazy with news channels wanted to interview and take shots of the coil!! So on Saturday during museumnight in amsterdam 8000 people showed up at Nemo and the coil was shown on national television on several news channels. The night couldn't be any better !!
Inbetween the runs we went to the fence and explained to everybody that wanted to know, how the machine works. We could run the coil as long as we wanted, no more ne555 faillures !!
Here are some Youtube movies i found a few days later.
EMM++ from the street below:
http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=k-ReX44TZUk
From the roof it self:
http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=QFY5urw6SDU
Here it goes up to 250 bps around 40 KVA
http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=zd2ul7zgF2Y