Re: First light at 4500VA

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

Original poster: "David Speck by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <dave-at-davidspeckmd-dot-org>

Winston:

I doubt that you would see any difference in performance with identical 
RSGs which differ only in steel vs. tungsten electrodes.  The advantage of 
tungsten electrodes is that they would last longer with less degradation 
and oxidation damage than equivalent steel ones.

Threading tungsten rods would be nearly impossible with ordinary tools, 
because of the extreme hardness of the material.  All the RSGs I've seen 
that use tungsten electrodes have them installed in a way that does not 
require any machining of them, usually be clamping them directly in the 
G-10 of the rotor wheel with set screws.

If your RSG electrodes are getting that hot, you need to install some form 
of heat sinking on them.  Even tungsten will oxidize if you get it hot 
enough for long enough.  It sounds like you would have to generally scale 
them up to handle the power as well.

HTH,
Dave

Tesla list wrote:

>Original poster: "Winston Krutsch by way of Terry Fritz 
><twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <u236-at-earthlink-dot-net>
>
>Hi All,
>
>     First, my questions:  Will tungsten RSG electrodes give me bigger
>sparks than the steel ones I'm using?
>
>     How easy/hard is it to thread "pure" tungsten welding rods???
>
>     I fired my new 6" coil with all of its parts for the first time last
>night.  After tuning and fiddling with the rotary phasing (it still
>isn't quite right), I was getting two simultanious 6.5' ground strikes!
>After about 5 seconds of this, the rotary begins to overheat, and output
>dwindles to a single 5-6' streamer, with occasional ground strikes.  A
>15 second run brings the stationary electrodes to a nice, bright red
>heat ;-(.