Newbie with a few questions...

["Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>]

Original poster: "Gary Abusive by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net>" <gary_abusive-at-hotmail-dot-com>


Hi there, first of all, thank you all for all the information on this
list. I've been checking out the archives for a little while now and
thanks to you guys I've been able to build my first coil. :)

Last night I finally tested it and was only getting about 1" sparks, with
or without various toploads. :(  My problem is I'm in a second story
apartment and can't ground the darn thing anywhere. Don't want to use
the line ground, and don't want to use a cold water pipe, ( and I believe
it goes to plastic downstairs anyway ) so all I was using for a "pseudo"
ground was about 80' of 10 gauge wire strewn out about the floor in my
place.
The coil is very low power (1) 10kV 23ma OBIT, would it be safe
to try to ground the secondary to the ground in my wall?  Or does anyone
else have any ideas on how I could ground this sucker? (short of dropping
wire down outside my window to a ground rod in the flower garden where
my manager sees and comes knocking on me door)

Next question, I want to remake my primary. It's 8 turns of 1/4 copper
refridgerator tubing, and a pretty good spiral but I want a better one.
What I plan to do is slide the copper into this 1/4 inside diameter
clear PVC tubing I have, then start it around a round form, and wind it
as a flat pancake with no spacing. (don't worry, I'm gonna tap it
internally with a copper slug that just fits, connected and being pushed/
pulled by a length of stiff 10 gauge, thought of it this morning and
tried it and it actually worked pretty well, I can even mark 'sweet
spots' on the insulation) Anyway, the tubing is only about 1/16" thick,
:
my question is, is 1/8" too small a spacing between primary turns???
:
In case you were wondering why I wanted to slide it into a clear tubing,
I want to shine the copper up, and keep it away from the air so it'll
keep shiny and not tarnish in like 12 hours. :P  And of course also it'll
help reduce arcing between topload/secondary and the primary. But not
like I have to worry about that with my 1" arcs. ;)

Thanks for you time,
_Mike

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