Re: First light with pig power

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

Original poster: "Justin Hays by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <pyrotrons2000-at-yahoo-dot-com>

Hi Weazle,

> Based on what I've seen so far, it appears that my present "acorn 
> nut" safety gaps will have to go, as the arc won't go out once 
> struck.  Do those of you running pig powered coils just not
> run safety gaps anymore, or do you use a horn gap arrangement? 

My bud and I never used safety gaps on our pig coil, because #1 pigs
don't die easily and #2 we weren't worried about our capacitors
frying.

A friend of ours is running a pig coil, he is using a safety gap
across the pig. It doesn't stop arcing once it fires, so he simply
turns the variac down until it extinguishes and the main gap takes
over again.

So unless your capacitors are less than bulletproof, I would
completely do away with the safety gap. 

I will ask for an autograph if you ever kill your pig!

One note I think is worth mentioning: When we ran our 12" coil at
10kVA, we had THHN insulated 14 gauge for the high-voltage input to
the coil (from a saturated, 7.2kV running at 14.4kV pig). The wire
was laying directly on top of the pig, which was grounded. Only
slight corona was visible when running at full input power, there
were no huge voltage spikes to speak of as they would have flashed it
over. The coil was making 10 foot arcs at the time.

Hope it helps, take care.

Justin Hays
KC5PNP
Email: justin-at-hvguy-dot-com
Website: www.hvguy-dot-com