spark gap question...

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Original poster: "brentonps by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <brentonps-at-optuset-dot-com.au.pupman-dot-com>

    The other night i finally got round to putting together some pieces for a
relatively small TC however, i was unable to get the electricity to bridge the
spark gap no matter how close the wires where (well, within a couple of mm at
least). At first i thought that my transformer was shot or something had
shorted so
i placed a 33ohm resistor across the spark gap and turned it on. The
resistor ended
it's life in a blaze of glory and i saw a bright flash. So, i had considerable
power but the initial spark wasen't happening. I know that my line  transformer
(MOT) is giving out more than 3kv as my 3kv capacitors sorta..um...blew up
(now i
have a large black mark on the side of my casing).
    Does anyone have any ideas as to why the gap wasn't being briged? It
was a very
dry night so i don't know if that would affect it at all.
    After a while i did another resistor but left the power on for
20-30secs or so
and a very large blue arc formed across my 2cm gap. I estimate my power
output to
be 4kv at about 500ma. My input to the MOT is 240v at about 11A. I have a
overload
protector that trips after about 10-20secs of usage.