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Re: Help PLEASE! So close.. and yet...
Yuri,
You have to "tune" it to get sparks. I did this by putting a 4'
flourescent bulb in a bucket so the end was just an inch away from the
terminal. Then place your primary tap, stand back and turn it on. If
nothing, move your tap halfway around or more. Keep moving it until you
get a spark to the bulb, then begin moving bulb further away as it gets
in tune.
You probably need more capacitance than just one jar. What size is the
jar? You need at least 6 leyden jars to get any decent spark from that
size xfrmr.
Did you seal the cardboard tube with polyurethane before wrapping it?
You will have some loss here if you didn't. How tall is your secondary?
A few more turns of the primary wouldn't hurt.
The reason the ground cable is larger than the secondary is because you
get high current out of the base of the secondary, and high voltage/low
current out of the top.
hope this helps, Bob Volk
> Well, I fired up my "not shooting for anything glorious" coil for the
> first time. I had a problem. The transformer, capacitor, spark gap,
> and whole tank circuit work perfectly. Real nice, cool sounding
> sparks in the gap, everything perfect. Only one slight detail - the
> secondary coil and discharge terminal did nothing. Absolutely
> nothing. I tried grounding the bottom to a well, and then directly to
> the house ground, to no avail. In case it helps: The power supply is
> 7500 volts at 30 milliamps(that's 220 watts). The capacitor is a
> leydan jar of an unknown capacitance. The primary is about five turns
> of really big fat copper stuff. As I said, that all works fine. The
> secondary is 30 AWG enamled magnet wire (the really thin red stuff -
> it was all I had) wound about 3/4 the height of a thin untreated
> cardbord wrapping paper tube (2 inches diameter). A softball wrapped
> nice and smoothly in aluminum serves as the discharge terminal. What
> is wrong? Is the cardboard conducting all the RF? Is the wire fatally
> thin? Help, please!