First light with new 12" secondary

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

Original poster: "Gregory Peters by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <s371034-at-student.uq.edu.au>

Hello all,

Just fired up the coil with the new 1170 turn 12" secondary and an
extra string on the MMC (now at 0.15uF). Tuned the coil roughly with
the CRO, and set the coupling pretty loose (not going to fry this
secondary as well). Fired up the coil, synced the gap at 200BPS and
recorded 11.5 foot strikes with first run. I feel the coil could do
better, but it is running nicely and reliable (ran it for 4 min
continuously), and is using all the space it has available anyway
(nice ground strikes). I haven't even tried to vary the tap point,
toroid height, coupling, etc.

I was finally able to remove the breakout point - beautiful high
current arcs. Input was my 11kV pig. Current draw sat dead steady at
38 amps. An absolute pleasure to run. A good night by anyone's
standards. No smoke :) Photos soon.

I want to increase the coupling, but have noticed that racing arcs
tend to do pretty bad damage rapidly at ~10kVA. Think I will leave it
as is.

I'm going to make a tape with all my coiling activities, including
ballasting, gaps, control cabinet, etc - not to mention spark
footage. Anyone interested? Cost is only for shipping and tape. 5USD
at a guess. Will also post some digital video to my site (if Terry
will give me some space) at some point - still got free space Terry?

Cheers,

Greg.