Re: First light at 4500VA

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

Original poster: "Rob Judd by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <canska-at-a5-dot-com>

Reading this post just gave me an idea. No doubt someone has already thought
of this, but I've not heard of it before, so here goes.

Couldn't one make an RSG without electrodes at all? Instead of placing
steel/brass/tungsten electrodes around the periphery of the rotating disc,
drill holes (or more likely, elongated slots) where the electrodes would
normally be. If the disc were a good insulator (perhaps 3/8" lexan), it
would easily quench and hold off gap conduction in between holes, and when a
hole is presented at the stationary electrodes, the air would break down and
conduct like in a static gap.

I suspect there are at least two likely flaws, however. 1. The presentation
time might be too short to allow thorough ionization and conduction, which
would be dependent on the rate of spin, and might cause incomplete capacitor
discharges. And 2. there would be more loss due to more heat/light/radiation
generated than a regular RSG. But the benefits would be cheaper construction
(no tungsten to buy), less maintenance, and less parts need to be precisely
machined.

None of this, of course, addresses the problem mentioned below of the
stationary electrodes overheating. Old fashioned forced air cooling seems
the easy solution there.

Rob Judd - rob-at-a5-dot-com - canska-at-a5-dot-com
http://homepage.a5-dot-com/~canska/tesla/


----- Original Message -----
From: "Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>
To: <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>
Sent: Tuesday, November 12, 2002 6:43 PM
Subject: First light at 4500VA


 > 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 ;-(.
 >
 > I obviously need a larger toroid (7" isn't big enough to give me a
 > single streamer).  The secondary coil performed flawlessly, and could
 > take more than the 0.157 coupling that I had it set at.  My Geek MMC got
 > to about (guessing here) 5 degrees F above ambient temperature after a
 > 20 second run.  I don't think that's much to worry about, but I hope
 > they don't heat up any more.  The SRSG obviously had trouble.
 >
 > Any comments are appreciated.
 >
 > Thanks,
 > Winston K.