Re: Primary construction

To: tesla-at-pupman-dot-com
Subject: Re: Primary construction
From: Stan <sdarling-at-columbus.rr-dot-com> (by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net>)
Date: Mon, 09 Aug 1999 16:58:45 -0600
Approved: twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net
Delivered-To: fixup-tesla-at-pupman-dot-com-at-fixme

Daniel, I'm in a similar situation.  I ended up going to HQ (Home Depot
or Lowe's would work too) and bought a sheet of .177 acrylic.  I had
them cut 8 3" x 11" strips out of the big sheet since they have one of
those nice cutters.  I had them cut the other half of the big sheet to a
30"x30" square.  At home, I lined up and clamped down 4 strips,
measured, and marked with a permanent marker the holes for the primary
tubing.  I'm lucky enough to have a drill press, but with good clamping
you could easily do the same with a hand-held drill.  I drilled the
holes so that there was about 1/4" between the top of the hole and the
top of the strip. I used a 5/16" bit.  With the strips still clamped, I
used a coping saw to saw out the remaining 1/4" above the holes.  I
angled the cuts to get a slight V shape.  If you do this right, the
tubing will actually snap into place and be held there.  Finally, I
cemented the strips to 30"x30" square.  It's been great so far and was
only a couple of hours of work.  The worst part is the coping saw.

-Stan

Tesla List wrote:
> 
> Original Poster: Erthwin-at-aol-dot-com
> 
> I just went out and bought 100feet of 1/4" copper tubing for my primary, my
> TC is run off of a 7.5/30 NST and I have 4 strings of 10 capacitors at 0.05uF
> 1kv each (that gives a final rating of 20kv -at- 0.01uF), I'll be using a 6"
> secondary ~25"-30" length so to achieve resonance I'll need something in the
> area of 14 turns in my primary (given a spacing of 1/8" between each turn) I
> was looking into possible frames to put the primary on and realized I might
> have a slight problem. I don't have a drill press or a table saw, anything I
> build is done with a hand held drill and a circular saw so obviously it's
> going to be rather hard for me to get the holes drilled with anything near
> precision and then trying to cut along the holes would be next to impossible
> to do without ruining the entire structure, any suggestions or alternate
> ideas?
> 
> Left, left, I hadda good brain but it left...
> ---Daniel