Re: new pictures

[FutureT-at-aol-dot-com (by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net>)]

In a message dated 9/28/00 4:48:43 PM Pacific Daylight Time, tesla-at-pupman-dot-com 
writes:

> Dave,
>  
>  I studied your new pictures, and something got my
>  attention.  Your toroid doesn't look wide enough. Have
>  you considered trying a toroid as wide as your
>  secondary is tall? That alone could possibly cure your
>  racing spark problems.
>  
>  I've run a little 4" x 24" coil wound with 22AWG
>  magnet wire at over 4kW, extracting fat 60" streamers
>  from it, with no hint of hot spots, racing sparks,
>  corona, or anything else. However, I use a WIDE toroid
>  that looks almost silly atop such a small coil.  I
>  think the toroid is the reason I can push my little
>  coil so hard and extract sparks 2.5 times the winding
>  length without a hiccup.

Greg,

the wide toroid might help, but the breakrate might be
helping a lot also in your case (if you are indeed running
at a higher breakrate than 120 bps).  Using a 6" by 26"
toroid, I began to get racing sparks on a 24" tall
secondary at 120 bps, when the streamers reached
61" or so.  At a higher bps, I could have gotten much
longer streamers without racing sparks, because high
bsp operation uses a smaller bang size for a given 
streamer length.

JOhn Freau
>  
>  Now I'm doing the same thing with my 6" X 30"
>  coil--using a 32" wide drainpipe & foil toroid for 70"
>  streamers.  Again--tame, trouble free operation at
>  4400VA.
>  
>  Forgive me if I'm covering old ground.  I haven't been
>  following this thread.
>  
>  Spark On,
>  
>  Greg