First light with car ignition TC

[Hhchicken1-at-xxxxxxx (by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-xxxxxxxxxx>)]

Hi list! 
Yesterday I had first light with my first ever tesla coil - a small tabletop 
car ignition coil-powered tesla coil.  I made the primary with too few turns, 
so at the moment I can only get 2-inch arcs and no streamers, although you 
can see a lot of corona from a bare wire (no topload).  At the moment it's 
running off two car ignition coils, driven in parallel from 240v mains with a 
8uF series capacitor for current limiting, and a dimmer switch to provide 
some power adjustment.  Interestingly enough, the output almost doubled when 
I switched from having the coils in anti-parallel to normal parallel.  
Methinks "anti-parallel" behaves somewhat like series as the current did not 
seem to be as high as I'd expected.  Anyway, once I've made a better primary 
(wound with copper pipe on a scrap of drainpipe that just happens to fit over 
the secondary at the moment), and added another one or two car ignition 
coi! ls! , I hope to get sparks of at least 9 inches, which will look pretty
cool 
in my bedroom! 

Thanks to Chris and Greg, as well as the rest of the list, for your help. 

Henry Hallam