Re: TC discharge... safe or not

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

Original poster: "Crow Leader by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <tesla-at-lists.symmetric-dot-net>

The power levels you are working are more of an issue than "is it safe". You
can kill yourself by drinking too much water.

At several hundred watts, in my opinion, you can play with the output of
your coil. Do you want to perch on the top of a coil the size of a person,
or go at it with a fork in your hand to do some spiffy tricks with 5 foot
sparks? Probably not.

Static electricity from around the house can be tens of kV. Will it hurt
you? No, it won't. Will grabbing the terminals of a 20kV 4uF capacitor hurt
you? Probably something bad will happen.

My cell phone is 900MHz. Does it burn me? No, it does not. Would I want to
sit at the top of a cell phone tower for a month, no, I would not.

I can stand in the sun, but I'd rather not be under a fresnel lense with a
magnification of 10x in the sun. Again, we're talking different power levels
of the same stuff, and some basic judgement.

Back to coils though. I have and I'm sure many of us have brushed up against
a neon sign transformer. It does not feel good, but they don't tend to kill
people. Not that you should be sloppy around anything of the sort, but the
power levels are not there to incinerate your hand while evaporating your
joints from some incredible ohmic heating effect. You can safely play with a
small van degraff generator as well. There is plenty of voltage, but the
current and power levels are not going to make you explode.

Bigger coils use components that are known to kill people who bump into
them. Quite a few people have been killed fixing microwave ovens. It's
usually beause they forget to discharge the cap.

There are a few coils I've read about on this list that use multiple MOTS
and some have doubles made from strings of these caps. That would make me
think that if the output of the coil probably won't be any safer than what's
coing on in the "low voltage" side. That might be a coil to not play with
the sparks from with your hands or face or whatever.

 > Original poster: "c d by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>"
<vbprg1-at-hotmail-dot-com>
 >
 > When people refer to the skin effect they are refering to the tendancy of
 > high voltage to travel along the outer surface of a wire or channel
instead
 > of the interior of the wire. Ok Im not a scientist and I have actually
only
 > recently learned about all of this, but I am truely amazed at how many
 > "smart people" take this literally in a human biology sense. The skin of
 > your body is NOT being refered to.
 >
 > If a High Voltage charge gets to you It will travel along the outer
surface
 > of every channel in your body. That means over your skin And along the

The skin effect is not about high voltage. It's about high frequencies. It
seems people mix this up.

 > surface of your blood vessles, along the outer surface of your nerves, and
 > even down along the surface of your bones. In this case, Skin means the
 > outer structural edge. The human body has lots of substructures on the
 > inside, those substructures have lots of outer structural edges for
current
 > to run along.
 >
 > Please Look for information on people that have been struck by lightning,
 > it is good safety data. Just because we make lightning at home doesnt mean
 > its any less dangerous...RF is RF. RF burns nerves, and vaprizes joint
 > lubrication, all kinds of seriously usefull internal parts can be damaged.

Lightning is not a RF discharge. The energy levels of lightning probably
exceed that of your tesla coil.

 > Was I the only newbie coiler of the year who read all of the safety
 > documentation that came with the kit. Um oh yeah there wasnt a kit. :)
 > You probably didn't know that the coil has to be tuned exactly to the
 > specific capacitance of the human being doing the light bulb trick. And

If your coil is not tuned to the load it drives, you are not going to get
any sparks, let along ones to drive a lightbulb. It's not about mystical
body frequencies.

 > lots of other safety precautions have to be taken, or so Ive been told.
 > Leave the throwing sparks stuff to people like KVA effects, people who can
 > do math and measurements accurately enough to survive the process
unharmed.

Not to try to attack anybody, but Jeff mostly states "I'm not an engineer"
and then hearsay with no numbers involved. The whole field seems and
probably is quite empirical, for which there are no hard facts when it comes
to what is or is not safe, just your judgement based off hearsay and
sometimes common sense.

KEN

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