RE: Flat spiral or helical primary?

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

Original poster: "John H. Couture by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <couturejh-at-mgte-dot-com>


Ralph -

To my knowledge no one has ever made the proper tests to determine if there
is any advantage to the spiral compared to the helical primary for Tesla
coils. Both systems appear to work the same when correctly designed. You may
want to fill in this gap for coilers by making tests with the secondaries
you have available.

There are no TC computer programs that I know of that takes the type of
primary into consideration. To find the spark length only the input watts
are used. The JHCTES Ver 3.3  goes a step further and uses the input watts,
power transformer secondary voltage, and the secondary inductance to find
the spark length.

John Couture

----------------------------------------


-----Original Message-----
From: Tesla list [mailto:tesla-at-pupman-dot-com]
Sent: Friday, March 01, 2002 9:20 AM
To: tesla-at-pupman-dot-com
Subject: Flat spiral or helical primary?


Original poster: "by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>"
<Parpp807-at-aol-dot-com>

Can someone please 'splain me the relative merits
of a primary wound as a flat Archimedes spiral and
a primary wound as a helical solenoid?

I have seen a few coils use a solenoid primary. A few
wound with strap, but it seems that these are usually
large coils. The flat, Archimedes spiral is almost
always used by coilers. Why?

I am in the process now of converting one of my
24 inch secondaries from the twin bipolar into a
1/4 wave coil. I have many solenoids of various
configurations that I will at least try with the
1/4 wave TC before making a flat coil.

Happy day,
Ralph Zekelman