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Re: TRANSFORMERS

> Now if you are a tabletop coiler you could have stopped reading
> after "OK, everybody...", 

So far I'm a tabletop coiler, but I only plan on staying in my basement 
until I get the garage cleaned out (springtime at the very latest), and I 
am very serious.  I told my wife I want a pole transformer for Christmas, 
but I think she's hoping (although not really believing) that I'll feel 
differently when the fever breaks ;-)  But until the day comes when I buy 
that wonderful 400 lb of copper and oil, I'm stuck with my used, cheap, 
and already present neon sign and microwave oven transformers.

The next questions are nominally targeted for Richard, but I would 
enjoy comments from anybody else with thoughts on the matter...

> Err on the side of higher voltage rather than lower. 

I have a 35kV "in", 120V "out", 3.5kVA potential transformer that I picked 
up real cheap and I was wondering if I will be able to use this for 
coiling? I was thinking that I could use a variac to keep the voltage 
down low enough to use it, but will this really work in practice?  Even if 
I can't use it for Tesla coil work, I figure I'll have the best Jacob's 
ladder on the block.

> Several microwave oven transformers may be wired in series to 
> build a Tesla power supply.

Can you connect more than 2 transformers in series to get higher 
voltages, and if so, how?  I wired 2 together in series so that the HV 
outputs are 180 degrees out of phase to give 2x the rated voltage (the 
other ends of the secondaries are tied together and grounded), but I 
didn't think I could put more than 2 in series and still have everything 
work right.

I have a couple of large .04uF, 80kV DC rated caps that came out of an 
XRay generator and I was wondering if these would be good for Tesla 
coil work?  They were used to filter the high voltage DC output to the 
XRay tube, so I'm not really sure if they would be good for pulse work?


Steven Roys (sroys-at-radiology.ab.umd.edu)