MOT coil update, toroids, strike ring

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

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

Well I finally got my MOT coil back on its feet and back outside for some more
power runs. The coil is slightly different (that is if anyone still remembers
the MOT coil :-) than it was last time I ran it this winter. For one thing it
has another MOT replacing the one that blew up from a streamer hit. The new MOT
is slightly older than the other one was but similar in size and output. I also
added a strike ring to keep arcs away from the base. The MMC is slightly
different in the way I have it hooked up, I got rid of two of the copper bus
connectors I used before and twisted the MMC cap leads together on seriesed
boards. Performance was not as good as last time with only 4' long sparks with
minimal tuning this time. There is now a well defined cone of plasma like
sparks between the bottom toroid and the strike ring which is actually even
fairly bright (loss, loss, loss!). The coils performance also greatly depends
on the location of the toroids now, and I'm going to have to experiment to find
the optimal spot for them to be without causing to many racing sparks, or too
much plasma to the strike ring. I also noticed that the spark gap's
performance  greatly depended on the toroid postion as well,  were as before it
was not all that critical. Comments?
 
Jason Johnson
G-1 #1129