The infamous first light

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

Original poster: "Ben McMillen by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <spoonman534-at-yahoo-dot-com>

Hello all,
  This isn't actually my FIRST light, but rather a second..
and with a MUCH better coil.. ;)

  Way back when (several years ago) before I knew much
about engineering, coiling, or even tesla, I set out to
build a coil.. my first secondary was wound with (I'm
guessing) 22ga wire pulled from old television yokes and
then strung together.. there were maybe 5 or 6 pieces all
strung together.. the former was a 3" ABS piece of pipe..
widing length was about 20".. first primary was a few turns
of steel wire wrapped around a 5 gal. bucket with the
bottom cut out.. 15/30 NST and a static gap made with 2
bolts..6 pack of saltwater caps..  topload was an old
copper toilet float.. performance was pretty sad.. 4"
streamers to a grounded rod at best.. 

I later added a helical primary, rising at 30 degrees..
performance slightly improved.. now 6" streamers.. 

I reused my primary and wound a new secondary on a piece of
4" PVC.. took me nearly a month to complete.. it was wound
with 22ga wire.. 25" winding.. 16 coats of varnish.. 7
brushed, 9 sprayed.. and only 2 runs.. ;) The primary cap
is a .01uF 75KV transmitter cap.. The sync rotary runs at
240 BPS.. wtih some rough tuning and slight adjustment of
coupling, I managed to get 18+ inch streamers without a
breakout point! They're a bluish purple in color and very
fluid..white arcs to a grounded rod can be drawn out to
about 2'.. The rotary is still out of phase (need to build
a phase controller) and seems to 'misfire' now and then.. 
and the topload is too small.. right now I'm using 4 6"
vent pipe elbows screwed together.. it works pretty well,
and doesen't look half bad.. ;)

My power cabinet is ALMOST finished.. I'm waiting on more
crimp lugs.. 

I'll get some pictures up in a few weeks or so.. ;) I'll
also post the exact coil specs when I can figure out where
I wrote them down.. 

Does anyone have any suggestions for optimization? Would
there be any benefit to removing 2 electrodes from my rotor
for 120 BPS operation? Also, if I increase the topload,
does that allow me to add more primary inductance and
increase output? It seems to me that it was an inverse
relationship.. but I can't quite remember... 


Thanks for all your help!

Coiling In Pittsburgh
Ben McMillen

_