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well, this is interesting
Subject: well, this is interesting
Date: Sat, 3 May 97 05:02:48 UT
From: "William Noble" <William_B_Noble-at-MSN.COM>
To: "Tesla List" <tesla-at-poodle.pupman-dot-com>
well, I learned a few things tonite - maybe even some make sense. I
added
some capacitance to my new coil - I started from .001 mica and added a
.001
14.5KV capacitor made by Plastic Capacitor company (it's about 1"
diameter, 8
inches long, encased in glass) - sparks went from dinky little 3 inch
sparks
to really nice looking 18 inch sparks with lots of forking. So, adding
capacitance is good, and the little Plastic Capacitor unit is good too -
it
warmed up just a bit in a 20 to 30 sec run (about as long as I can run
with my
half done RQ spark gap with no fan) - it felt like it raised up about 5
degrees or so.
I also learned that the toilet float I used for a top capacitor (a
plastic one
with some aluminum foil wrapped around it) keeps a charge - I got a
small
shock when I went to dismantle the coil - I don't quite understand this
since
I thought it would be grounded through the secondary (the low side of
which is
grounded), but the connections were't the best, so maybe there was an
open
circuit???
What I don't understand is the following - when I doubled the tank
capacitance, I would have thought I would halve the tank inductance to
keep LC
about constant and maintain resonance with the secondary. But I found
that
with .002 uf it was best on turn 13 (I only have 14 total turns on a 1/4
inch
{50 ft} tubing flat spiral primary), and with just the .001 mica
capacitor it
seemed to like fewer turns - my notes say that with the same secondary
configuration (toilet float on top, etc) I got best performace at turn
8, and
with no top capacitance, best was at turn 13. does this make any
sense???
And, can I expect still better performance by adding more primary
capacitance?? (input xformer is 15KV 30 ma neon) - it would seem so....