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New ground rods

 * Original msg to: Esondrmn-at-aol-dot-com

Quoting Esondrmn-at-aol-dot-com (Ed Sonderman)

> Well, I made it back from Las Vegas.  What a trip, it's going 
> to take me a while to rest up.  I did not loose all my money -
> tried hard however. 

Yeah, when I was there in April I found out you can't really
loose a bundle in a couple hours if you play the nickel slots
five cents at a time...

> I did finally get my ground rods in this weekend.  I put in 
> three eight foot copper clad steel rods about seven feet apart. 
> I rented a medium duty electric impact hammer (chipping hammer)
> and managed to drive the rods in about 4 feet.  That's all the
> farther they would go.  Then I beat on them for a while by hand
> - not much luck.  Then I took the impact hammer back and got 
> the largest electric jack hammer they had.  I managed to get 
> two of the rods all the way in and the last one about 6.5 feet
> in.  Must be solid rock under there.  

Sounds like the ground around my new house. 

> Then I dug a trench about one foot deep and connected the rods
> and filled in the trench.  I plan to also dig another shallow 
> trench and lay in some bare copper wire in an area that is 
> usually moist - it is a french drain and usually stays quite 
> damp from my sprinklers.  I also installed another rod about 50
> feet away for my 60 cycle ground.  It is near the house
> and the smaller impact hammer drove it all the way down.

This grounding system sounds a lot better than what you were
running. I can see why it took you so long to get up the energy
to install the new ground system. 

> I have a question about my layout.  The ground rods will be set
> up on the left.  About 20 feet to the right will be the coil on
> it's cart in the position where I plan to run it.  25 feet to 
> the right of the coil will be the pole pig, filter board and 
> the controls (this is up by the house, the coil is in the 
> middle of the yard and the ground rods are at the back edge of
> the lawn).  I will have the coil connnected to the ground rods
> on the left. To the right, I will have the low power lines for
> the fans and the rotary. Also I will have the RG213 laying on 
> the ground connecting to the filter board.  I still need a RF 
> ground wire going to the pole pig case and the safety gap. Do 
> you think its OK to use the RG213 shield for this (tied to the
> main RF ground at the bottom of the secondary) - or should I 
> run a separate wire?

You can use the shield on the RG-213 coax for this. If you have
any discernable problems you can always run a smooth strap
parallel to the HV lines to beef up the ground path. In general
the heavy RF current is coming off the coil base. RF dumped to
ground from the safety gap and transformer core would only be 
intermittent pulses. Since you are also using a heavier than code
60 cycle ground as a backup you should be fine. 

Richard Quick

p.s. I know you are behind on mail, but read the posts from Mark
Barton on "Inductive Ballast". You asked if I knew anyone who had
built a straight, sliding core, ballast as I had proposed. Mark
gave dimensions that matched my "off the cuff" plans nearly to
the letter. 


... If all else fails... Throw another megavolt across it!
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