Re: tesla coil funds

["Jim Lux" <jimlux-at-jpl.nasa.gov> (by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net>)]

Save pennies, give up beer for a month, claim that your wife doesn't really
need new pillowcases, just like any other hobby, it can get expensive...
(at least it's not like a horse, where you have to keep feeding the darn
thing)...

The cool thing about TC'ing is that you CAN make a coil that works for
literally a few pennies, with the investment of significant scrounging and
begging time. Sure, if you spend the bucks, it'll work better, but I know
of few things that you can literally build for under $20 (and many, many
hours) that will actually work.

It's always a tradeoff between hours and dollars.  Spend your hours at work
earning the dollars, or spend them browsing through surplus yards and the
like to find that surplus pulse cap.  The catalog surplus places (like C&H)
are expensive (compared to a scrap yard) just because they reduce the
"scrounging through the junk heap time".

I used to have a hard time explaining this concept to folks I used to work
with when they'd break something I had spent literally months looking for. 
"Hey, you only spent $10 on it, what are you complaining about???"  They
didn't appreciate the hundreds of hours rummaging it took to find that
$1000 component for $10.

Anyway, sure, beer bottles, scrap NSTs and so forth won't produce the 100
foot arcs... But, gosh, Tesla himself was really working at the beer bottle
and scrap NST level, and he did some might impressive stuff.  We're sort of
spoiled today, with fancy polypropylene caps, off the shelf pole
transformers with good insulation, high quality enamel and epoxy, PVC pipe,
etc.

----------
> From: Tesla list <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>
> To: tesla-at-pupman-dot-com
> Subject: tesla coil funds
> Date: Friday, October 06, 2000 7:15 PM
> 
> Original poster: "Jeremiah" <jmeizis-at-metallicafan-dot-com> 
> 
> Where do you people get all your money for this expensive hobby?  I see
> people buying all this expensive stuff in their websites and then they
> break it and go out and buy more (commercial pulse caps).  What kind of
> jobs do some of you people have?  Can you get people to sponsor you?  Do
> you get some of this stuff from where you work.  I personally have to
wait
> a week till my next paycheck to buy things like a fuse or something.
> thanks
> Jeremiah
> 
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