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Large Tesla Coil - First Light



Original poster: "Cameron B. Prince" <cplists@xxxxxxxxxx>

Hey guys,

This evening I made the final primary connections and we fired off the coil
for the first time. I must say, I am very pleased with the results even
though we did have a few problems.

David Rieben came over from Memphis and helped me get everything setup. He's
pretty good at driving 8 foot ground rods into the ground too. :)

Jonathan Moral also came over with his professional photography equipment
and took some great pictures. He's still working on them, but has sent me a
few. My favorite of which is this one:

http://www.epitra.com/tesla/images/jon/_MG_9389-01crp-m.jpg

That's about a 5 foot gap between the top terminal and the small grounded
sphere. This was about the most we could get out of the coil without those
bad racing sparks across the secondary coil. The first one blew out the
ASRG's bridge rectifier. We had to revert it to AC. We also had one of the
phases in the AC line filter short out.

I have some work to do to further tune and optimize the system. I was only
able to push the variac to 60-70%, so I know we can get more out of it once
I solve some design issues. More on this later. On a good note, the reactors
didn't go over 95 degrees and the resistor turned out to really be a great
help just as Richard Hull suggested. The coil produced greater output that
was less choppy when it was engaged.

You can see more new photos here:

http://www.epitra.com/tesla/index.html

I look forward to any comments or suggestions.

Thanks,
Cameron