cardboard maggie/big fat secondary

["Albert Hassick" <uncadoc-at-xxxxxxxx> (by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-xxxxxxxxxx>)]

Hi all.  We just tried out our newest and fourth secondary.  It is a 12"
quicktube concrete form that is 20" high. Spray painted with green enamel
and then coated in and out with three coats of poly.  We used two 7/16"
flakeboard (O.S.B.) discs as end caps, epoxied into the form.  We fixed a
1/4" toggle bolt into the center of the end discs to facilitate mounting.
 The form is wound with one 500' spool of #14 solid thhn green wire which
we got from home depot for 15 bucks.  It is close wound and covers 17" of
the tube, with the remaining three inches of the top of the tube loosely
spiral wound with a 1" space between the sides of the wire. We gave the
finished coil three coats of poly to lock the wire to its form and let it
sit for a week to cure.  The whole thing cost less than $30 to make. It
looks kinda neat, short&fat, just the way Tesla liked em'!  Looks like a
little barrel!  Any way we wanted to try it out as a conventional Tesla
coil before we it rig up to our 'maggie' setup.  We mounted it onto our
existing 3/8" copper tube primary and hooked up the test clips.  We fired
it up and got no breakout but every fluorescent tube in the shop lite up!
 We must be sending out a lot of unseen energy!  But we wanted to see
some sparks, so we kept tuning the primary with alligator clips until we
got massive 48" sinuous arcs out of the 8" foil coated hollow rubber ball
topload. We only needed one and a half turns of the primary to get big
sparks!  The power supply for the tank is two modified 15/60 neons and
ganged barium titanate caps with a R.Q. spark gap.   We then let it rip
for a five minute continuous run just to see what would happen to the new
cardboard form and its wire.  It preformed flawlessly!  So, we began to
scratch our heads.  This was the cheapest secondary we could wind and it
worked just as well as our 8" diameter painstakingly prepared magnet wire
wound professional looking third coil.  And to boot, we needed less than
two loops of the primary to get it to work!  We tuned our 14 tube loop of
3/8" copper tubing primary until we found the sweet spot, which was the
mid centered loops of the primary which were 2" away from the outside of
the secondary form.  That gave us about six loops of unused primary at
the center and another unused six loops at the end (remember now, we were
using a primary that was designed for a 8" diameter form).  The secondary
was raised on spacers that stood it up 1and 1/2 " above the primary
tubing.    Now we are looking into a flat copper strip primary since we
now see that we will only need two loops of strap to make it work.  Also,
we can see that a primary which would be closer to the secondary form
rather than on spacers should give us much better coupling/bigger sparks!
 So a new primary to match our new  12" diameter secondary will be the
next step we will take. And a 10' length of strap would be more than
enough. We always wanted to use copper strap but we could not afford to
get enough to make a many turn primary.  But now we see that we do NOT
need a primary with many turns. This opens up other possibilities for
primary construction.  Plain old #2 aluminum service entrance cable scrap
would work. or just a 10' piece of 1/2" copper tube, or whatever you can
get your hands on that is metallic and bendable!  My point here being: 
It looks like you can make a nasty Tesla primary and secondary coil for
less than 40 bucks using the cheapest stuff you can get your hands on,
and the 500' spool of #14 solid wire winds fairly quickly onto the form. 
But the one thing that strikes me most, is that we could make this work
with less than two primary loops, just like Tesla used in his Colorado
Springs experiments. It hardly seems possible, but nonetheless, it is
true.   AL.