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Re: Beginners Tesla Coils

>This is something I am very interested in, also.  I would >love to have
a "cookbook recipe" for a proven small or >medium tesla coil.  This way I
would know that I was not >wasting my time on a poor (or non) performing
>experimental coil.

>I have searched a good bit of the tesla ring and have not >found
anything I would consider a "recipe"...  

>Thanks,
>matt

I have the same concern. The problem is that there is no plan for the
plan. I've seen some "recipes", but there are none I would care to bake
in their entirety due to any of the following issues:

(By the way, I've been off list for a few days.  If someone has covered
the stuff below, my apologies.)

1.) Safety. For example, I'v seen several plans on the web that were easy
to follow, but called for building a capacitor out of unsheilded glass
bottles full of oil - I'm not an experienced coil builder, but wouldn't
catastrophic failure result in an explosive spray of hot glass and
burning oil?  Come on guys, at least advise us on containment.  PVC isn't
terribly expensive and I've seen very few capacitor plans that wouldn't
fit into a big enough tube of the stuff.

2.) Lack of equipment - yes, relatively safe rolled caps can be made, but
I don't have (for example) a vacuum pump. The recipe would have to be one
that could be built in the average home workshop without purchase of
expensive equipment.

3.) Simplicity.  I don't want to worry about secondary issues like line
filters or perfect quenching if I don't have to. A good "recipe" would
have to be cheap and basic, (in other words, it works with a just a
transformer, capacitor, basic (not rotary) spark gap, primary, secondary,
and easy emitter) with room to add the frills (and expense) later. 

A better recipe would start out in the basic manner described above, so
that someone could build and enjoy a working coil easily, and then
_guide_ the beginner through the advanced issues - a rotary gap, line
filteration, strike rails, quenching, etc. and maybe even include some
experiments which would demonstrate the effect of these additions upon
performance.

4.) Standards.  (This is the worst problem with the recipe attempts I've
seen) I would like to know _exactly_ what to build it out of. Take the
glowing pieces of prose like this one - please. "For the secondary, wind
a piece of ABS pipe with lots of wire.  Use Wintesla to calculate the
amount." Wouldn't it read better as, "Your secondary should be a piece of
Acme type 3 ABS pipe (part # 91-786) 32 inches long and wound with 628
turns of 28 gauge wire (part # 24-536) from the Acme Wire Company." A
single part list (rather than many parts seperately described in a 58k
file) would be wonderful.

5.) Detail. Some of the stuff I've seen has too much, some has too
little.  I want well described essentials.

This is definitely not to whine. I want to be quite clear on this point,
so please don't flame me.  I've learned an enormous amount reading the
web pages all of you have created, and I've downloaded an enormous amount
number of text and program files, which have given me a clear enough
understanding of all the primary issues to successfully build a working
coil (Now if I could just get the money for the parts!!) but I picked it
up in pieces from a dozen different sites. There is not a single "recipe"
out there that addresses all the above issues at once in a clear manner,
and it would be nice if such a thing was out there.

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