Re: First Failure and Help

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

Original poster: "Terry Fritz" <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>

Hi Alan,

At 10:43 PM 12/26/2002 -0600, you wrote:
>Hello everyone,
>
>I tried to build a geek group sw bottle cap. I think I must have 
>completely failed. I have no way of measuring capacitance so I hooked the 
>capacitor up to a 110v line in series. After letting it charge for a while 
>I disconnected the mains line and tried to connect to other wires and get 
>them to spark. No such luck. Is my experiment wrong or my cap isn't made right?

I think the cap is probably fine :-)

The cap is probably like maybe 15nF of capacitance (wild guess there).  The 
AC line can almost instantly charge and discharge it like in...  (15nf x 1 
x 5 = 0.0000000133 seconds ;-)  The capacitance may seem very small and is 
no effort for the AC line.  However, it can store big voltages which is 
what we want.  If you were really lucky and got the cap charged to say 150 
volts, it would only store:

1/2 x 150^2 * 15e-9 = 169uJoules ;-))  That might as well be zero energy :o))

It was really made for a Tesla coil cap not an AC line cap...  It needs 
like thousand of volts stored on it before the fun begins ;-))  don't 
worry, the cap is fine!

>Also, does I'm trying to use strips of a cutting board I made as the 
>supports for my primary. Does anybody have a quick and easy method for 
>drilling all the holes with the neccessary spacing? The current way i'm 
>looking at doing it is where I"ll have to drill a hole, measure .5 inch, 
>drill a hole, ad infinitum. Help would be appreciated.

A $150,000 CNC milling machine is faster...  But you are doing it exactly 
the way I would... ;0)  I guess you could mark all the hole locations first 
and then drill them...  That poly cutting board would probably just gum up 
a CNC machine anyway... ;-D

No worries, your doing fine.  We never said this stuff was easy ;-)

Cheers,

         Terry


>
>Thanks,
>Alan