RE: air blast gap

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

Original poster: "David Dean by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <deano-at-corridor-dot-net>

Hi Justin,

I used a single static air blast gap for a while. Blew it with my shop air
compressor. As others have said, you need to narrow the gap a bit if the air
flow is high, but my gap would fire reliably once adjusted properly. For a
while anyway. After a while, there would be some condensation in the air
line and bubbles of water would come out. The condensate is apparently
pretty pure, because once in a while would hang in between the electrodes
and stop the gap from firing. I thought it was shorting the gap, but once a
big drop got hung and it was there long enough to see the ammeter clamped
around the power lead to the NST drop to 0A (instead of pulling the short
circuit current) and the NST died soon thereafter from over voltage.
(running resonant size cap at the time) later I used the same gap with a pig
and had similar problems with water getting in the gap. I put a dryer in the
air line and that solved the problem. It is an interesting phenomena to see
a drop of water resisting the tremendous force of the air blast and just
hang there between the gap electrodes, twisting and turning and spinning
like mad, but it just doesn't want to come loose.

later

deano

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Tesla list [mailto:tesla-at-pupman-dot-com]
> Sent: Saturday, September 08, 2001 8:47 PM
> To: tesla-at-pupman-dot-com
> Subject: air blast gap
>
>
> Original poster: "by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>"
> <Cydesho-at-aol-dot-com>
>
> I've been trying different variations of air blast gaps on my
> coil recently,
> and I've had a small problem. It seems that the faster the air is blasted
> into the gap, the more unreliable the gap is. After a few seconds
> of run time
> the gap will abruptly stop firing and I have to flip the power
> off and back
> on again to get it to start firing. Sometimes it wont stop firing
> at all, and
> sometimes is does it quite often. Is there any way to remedy this?
>                                         Justin
>
>
>