Questions from a newbie in Australia

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

Original poster: "Stacy Gillett by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net>" <sgillett-at-hotmail-dot-com>

Hello all...

I'm a uni student from Geelong (a town near Melbourne in Australia), and I'm 
planning to build my first coil.  I've got most of the parts together, but 
I'd like to ask some questions before I start putting anything together:

1.  Instead of a single NST, I have two 15/25 units.  The problem is that 
they both have one side of their secondaries shorted (in effect, they can 
only put out about 7500V each).  The guy at the sign shop I got them from 
said that I could get 15kV out by tying their centre-taps together and 
taking the HV from each of the good secondaries (the bad sides are not 
connected to anything).  Assuming that I had the primaries wired up in 
parallel and in the correct phase, would this arrangement work?

2.  I'm planning on using a 4" x 20" PVC secondary form wound with #22AWG 
magnet wire.  With this size secondary, what would be best in terms of 
coupling: a flat primary or a saucer primary?  I've heard that for the 
smaller diameter secondaries like mine, a saucer is better, but a lot of 
people seem to recommend the flat primary.

3.  As I can't really afford a Variac at the moment, I was planning on using 
a 100W light globe in series with the mains input so as to lower the NST 
output voltage until I had tuned the primary.  Quick and dirty though it is, 
is there any reason why this wouldn't work?  If it would, is 100W in the 
ballpark for the globe wattage?

4.  At these power levels (~375VA), is there any real benefit in cooling the 
main gap with a muffin fan or similar? (My main gap will be 11 x 3/4" x 3" 
length copper tubes, .028" spacing)

Although these are only fairly minor queries, I'd be grateful if someone 
could clear them up for me.

Thanks,
Stacy Gillett

P.S.  Are there any coilers from the Melbourne/Geelong region on this list?  
It'd be good to hear from someone local who's actually got a coil up and 
running, as my parents tend to think I'm crazy doing this stuff by myself :)
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