Re: My first TC

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

Original poster: "Jason Johnson by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net>" <hvjjohnson13-at-hotmail-dot-com>

Congrats on thinking out of the box! I've thought about building a flat
secondary, and I don't think that it will put out as much voltage as a
helical secondary, though it may make a good driver coil in a magnifier
setup. The main thing that has stopped me from winding a flat secondary so
far is the difficulty of winding the thing. How did you wind yours?

To tune the coil most everyone taps the primary coil, until the combination
of inductance and capacitance gives you a frequency equal to your
secondary's resonant frequency. This may be a bit difficult in your coil
since it has heavily insulated wire for the primary turn and the fact that
you only have one turn. You may need more turns depending on the inductance
of the secondary coil. Also I noticed that your are drawing your sparks from
the middle of the coil, without a topload. It may help to add a topload,
though you'd have to raise it so that it couldn't arc to the rest of your
secondary, a peice of plexiglass covering the secondary may be a good idea
w/ a topload. Do you have one end of the secondary grounded, I'm assuming
that you do, but can't see in the picture.

Also what is the diameter of your secondary (inside and outside), wire
guage, number of turns, distance between turns, so we can calc. inductance,
etc. and help to tune it. It is interesting to note that in your secondary
most of the inductance is concentrated in the outer portion, because the
greater diameter contribute a much larger inductance than the small turns in
the middle.

I also just wanted to say that is pretty good for first light, considering
that you haven't tuned it yet, and your doing something that not alot of
people have done before w/ the flat secondary.

Jason Johnson

----- Original Message -----
From: "Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>
To: <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>
Sent: Monday, April 23, 2001 9:58 AM
Subject: My first TC


> Original poster: "William Swanson by way of Terry Fritz
<twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net>" <swansontec-at-yahoo-dot-com>
>
> Hi,
> I've just finished building my first TC. Instead of
> doing things the easy way and building a helical
> secondary like everyone else, I was silly enough to
> build a flat pancake secondary instead. Right now,
> without any attempt at tuning other than on paper, the
> coil puts out two inch sparks to a ground wire placed
> in close proximity to the secondary. The primary is a
> single turn of thick cable. From a 15/60 NST running
> at half power with a 6 nF cap, this isn't too bad for
> first light. I have a picture of the coil at:
>
> http://members.aol-dot-com/swansontec/tc.jpg
>
> Has anybody else tried building Tesla coils with flat
> secondaries? Any words of wisdom, especially on how to
> properly tune a coil like this?
>
> -William
>
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