What was your first coil?

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

Original poster: "Garry Freemyer by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <garry-at-ndfc-dot-com>

My very first, was just some little bipolar jobber I whipped up in 1974, out
of an toilet paper roll. I didn't understand a thing about turn ratios,
tuning. I just wound up one with some 32 guage wire, and I'd splice it and
put a dab of wax on it when the wire broke which was several times, The
primary was INSIDE the toilet paper roll and I just guessed at the number of
turns and used a ceramic doorknob cap, with a 9kv 20ma NST, no filters and
taking sparks to self. The thing made sparks about 3 inches high, which
isn't too bad considering that it was a toilet paper tube, and the spark gap
was a couple nails inside two ceramic light fixtures to muffle the spark, no
fan, no cooling, nothing to assist quenching.

My next one was in a box, and was a little table top unit and put out
streamers about six inches long I think.

Considering all the variables, I knew nothing about, it was the wildest
stroke of luck that I got the results I got. I could have easily gotten such
lousey results that I could have lost interest.

One interesting thing I did was take a mayonaise jar and fill it with salt
water and hook one wire from an NST to the lid and the other wire to a hose
clamp around the bottom. At dusk, you could see sparks crawling all over the
outside and all the yellowjackets would fly in to get a closer look and bump
into the glass and form a shorter path with their head. I don't think they
yellowjackets liked that very much but it was fun to watch!