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Coil Finished!

Hi Everyone,
 
Well I finally finished my "high power" Tesla coil - about a year after I
started making it! The secondary is 30 inches of wire wound on a 6 inch piece
of pvc pipe. A homemade toroid (as described by Richard Quick) measuring 20
inches across sits on top of it. The  capacitance is 4 homemade roll
capacitors (as described in Richard's notes) in a series parallel
arrangement. Power is provided by two 15kV 60 mA neons in parallel.

The secondary resonates at 174.3 kHz and I tuned the primary to the same
frequency - I had to tap the primary out at about 10 and a bit turns. The gap
is a cylindrical gap (as described by, you guessed it - Richard Quick! ).

When I turned the juice on and turned up the variac big purple sparks came
shooting out of the toroid - I'm getting at least 3 foot of spark off the
toroid and I'm sure that I would get more except that the spark can go no
further as it hits the wall of the metal garage- I cant take the coil outside
as my driveway is very uneven. When the spark hits the metal of the garage it
turns from purple into a white hot spark and the safety gap fires. I also
notice a lot of little sparks on the toroid - I think this may be where the
metal tape is kinked up a bit - I guess I'll have to redo the surface of it
again.

No interference is generated by the coil in operation - there is no snow on
the tv or anything - I guess this must be because my earth is pretty good -
(two ground rods and a whole lot of copper flashing buried underground, also
the ground has underground streams running under it which helps I bet). But
just to be safe I always unplug all my 
computer equipment.

Even with the cylindrical gap the coil is still quite noisy in operation. I
enjoy watching newbies jump at the sound when I turn it on! I haven't fine
tuned the coil yet and I guess I'll wait until I take the coil to a bigger
space so that I can really let it rip.

At the moment I'm really pleased with how the coil is operating - amazing to
see those lightning bolts jumping out of the toroid. However I already feel
the beginnings of the Tesla curse i.e I'm already thinking about making
bigger sparks and I'm going to check up on the availability of pole pigs over
here for sure. I cant wait to try one of Scotts commercial Tesla caps out on
it.

I'd like to thank Richard Quick, Jim Oliver and everyone else on this list
for all the help you've given me-if it wasn't for you guys I'd still be
playing with car ignition coils and thinking that 5 cm of spark is a
"lighning bolt". Thanks!

Best Regards and have a great xmas,
Mark


-- Mark
       _/_/_/   _/_/_/_/       Mark Conway
      _/    _/    _/          Deep Thought BBS, Auckland, New Zealand
     _/    _/    _/          A FirstClass(tm) Macintosh GUI BBS
    _/_/_/      _/          Internet: mconway-at-deepthnk.kiwi.gen.nz