[Prev][Next][Index][Thread]

Magnifier action!

Greetings!

Today the GNATS group got together for a monthly meeting.  This month we
decided we should try some sort of magnifier.  

We met at "Castle Of Fear", a haunted house that will likely be a somewhat
permanent meeting location for meetings.  It appears to have the
facilities necessary for coiling: power, space, no neighbors :-).

Several of us brought stuff to assemble the magnifier.  I brought some
rolled caps, a magnifier primary and secondary, an oscilloscope, signal
generator, frequency counter, as well as miscellaneous odds and ends. 
Terry Fritz brought his scope, current/voltage antenna measuring system, a
beautiful rotary series gap made by Ed Wingate I believe, and his
secondary coil. Very nice piece of machine work on that gap too.

<<<< The gap was actually loaned to me my D.C. Cox.  It worked very well!!!
 Perhaps a few improvements could be made to improve efficiency though -
Terry >>>

We put the magnifier together, used the scope, signal generator and
counter to tune the primary tank system and match its frequency relatively
closely to the frequency of the secondary/extra coil system.  Once
everything was in order, the circuit double checked and people out of the
way, Bill Lemieux pushed the "fire" button on the transformer.  We saw
streamers right away from the top of the extra coil.  They were probably
about 3 to 4 feet I'd recon.  We also saw some strange sparking, so we
made a few adjustments, put more plastic in between the two pieces that
were arcing and tried it again.  A little more tweaking, and another
test.  After a bit of tinkering, we were able to get to the point where
we felt comfortable with a run of a few seconds.  Nothing blew and we
were getting sparks about 4 to 5 feet long.  Not too bad for a first
try.  We also tried tuning the thing, but it appears that the tune point
wasn't all that sensitive.  Perhaps it was because it wasn't optimally
configured or something, but considering it was our first try, it was
mighty impressive.  I took pictures and will post them, as well as
pictures from halloween and the blown caps, once they are developed.

Chip

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
 Chip Atkinson 
 http://www.pupman-dot-com 
 --- If I can't fix it, I can fix it so it can't be fixed --
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-