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Re: Small Coils



Original poster: "Jan Wagner by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-uswest-dot-net>" <jwagner-at-cc.hut.fi>


> Hi, Do you know of a list of materials for a small and rather simple tesla?

There have been several articles with small Tesla projects in
electronics hobby magazines, easy to understand and step-by-step.

Like "Popular Electronics" of November 1999 with an article on "solid
state Tesla" (if I remember right that was actually a car ignition
coil driven spark gap TC).

Also, "Electronics World + Wireless World" of March 1995 has a very
neat article from Malcolm Watts, "Like lightning?", got it right in
front of my nose printed out but I can't find any of my multiple PDF
files anymore... :o(

But some electronics hobbyist shop (maybe RadioShack) or about any
larger library should have past issues.

You could also download some articles. One place is as PDF files from
a site of some coiler, darned if I remember which site it was... If
you are in a tech. university, you can search their
online-subscribed-library for Tesla coils. 

Basically you need plastics and aluminium sheets for the capacitor,
some plastic tube, some meters of copper tube or heavy loudspeaker
cable, a small roll of copper wire (at least one hundred meters for a
reasonably small coil), and polyurethane varnish (boat varnish), and a
lot of screws and bolts and metal corner plates or small metal plates
(scrap yard, definitely). 

As for a power supply use either a used neon sign transformer, car
ignition coils, or TV flybacks (for how to use these or where to get
them check for example some of the links at
http://www.hut.fi/~jwagner/tesla/links.htm on the right hand side. or
just about any other TC site on
http://nav.webring.yahoo-dot-com/hub?ring=teslaring&id=236&hub )

Somehow (=in my opinion) it is way preferrable to get these things
from a scrap yard or recycling center, don't call first but just walk
right in. If you are friendly and talk a lot about a "school project",
or if you mimic (to some extent) the typical talk style of the scrap
yard owner, you'll probably end up with a large bunch of useful stuff
for free or next to no charge.

 - Jan