Micro coil earthing

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

Original poster: "Dr. Duncan Cadd by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net>" <dunckx-at-freeuk-dot-com>

Hi All!


First my apologies for any unanswered emails - my email connection
"dissolved" Thursday and has only just come back.  I now have 186
emails to read ;-)

I've been playing with my induction coil driven TC, all 15W of it, and
much to my surprise I discovered that it is really, really picky when
it comes to earth connections.  I hadn't used it in a while, and had
forgotten how I'd wired the earth so assumed I used my ham radio earth
(copper rod in wet earth outdoors) - wrong!  Very poor sparks.
Instead, what I had done was to connect the earth lead to a couple of
large mild steel cases in the shack.  Much better sparks ;-)

I assume that this has something to do with the shortness of the lead
to earth (inches instead of yards) and the fact that whatever charge
gets pushed to earth in one half cycle gets "sucked back" on the next
half cycle.  Anyone else seen anything similar with a TC, big or
small?  Comments?

Dunckx
Geek#1113 (G-1)