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Re: proven design


> How is your coil been doing?  Looked at the pictures you sent
> of it.  Nice piece of work there.  Scan some pic's of it in
> action when you get a chance.

Well, here's the latest on my coil.  

This weekend (didn't have time to post until now) I put on the big toroid
and fired up the air blast gap that I made.  The sparks were amazing.  I 
measured 39" maximum.  Unfortunately, that spark was to the light fixture
in the garage.  As soon as I saw that I turned down the power.  I figure that
all the RF grounding in the world doesn't do a lick of good if you are sparking
directly to the house power.

I noticed that there is a definite difference between opening up the 
parallel pipe gaps  (|||||)
and good quenching.  Previously I didn't have the gaps open enough to get
much spark.  Then I opened them up and got "kick back".  After using a couple
fewer gaps, I was getting fairly good sparks and less kick back.  I don't think
that it was really kick back, but was just a firing of the safety gaps due to
the fact that there was a smaller total gap in them than the main spark gaps.

The air blast gap gave better quenching than the pipe gaps.  The pipe gaps
have no active cooling or anything, just convection.  They get quite hot in
a hurry and loose their effectiveness.  The air blast gap on the other hand
stays quite cool.  The problem with the air blast gap is that it requires 
compressed air.  If I have the air compressor on at the same time, I'm afraid
that I'll trip the breaker for the garage.  I will eventually move to a 
vacuum cleaner motor forced draft pipe gap system, which should be just about
as good as an air blast gap, and be quieter and use less power (for the 
compressor that is).

Since the sparks were so much longer than expected, I am going to have to 
either put up ground/strike wires in the garage or move outside.
I'll tell you, I am totally thrilled to have just about outgrown the garage!
There's nothing like having your own creation take off like that!

Then next thing I plan on doing is a little trick photography.  I will either
use the double exposure, or Corel Draw to make some interesting
effects.  I'll try that this week and post the results.

Another cool thing is that we are getting a new color copier/scanner.  It will
have the ability to make iron on transfers too.  You can guess what kind
I'll be making.  If they work out I'll let all know about that too.



> Well, time to put another coat of glyptal on the form.

Based on my success, I can now recommend Behr's Build50.  It is epoxy based
and moderatly thick.  If you have a motor driven coil winder that will
work for 4 hours, you can put this stuff on in one coat.  One coat for me 
was so nice and thick that the wire was completely embedded.  I'm never 
using urethane lacquer for coil coating again.

Well, lunch is over, gotta go.

Chip