Re: First light...Mixed Emotions

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

Original poster: "Brian by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <ka1bbg-at-webryders-dot-net>

Hi, wow, sounds like your off and running. some of the sparks might be
reduced by more tuning. Tuning is where the most for the money is. keep
track of the changes on a little note pad, if it is getting worse then you
can reset and try something different. I run a 9kv 60 ma and for a small
machine it does well in the spark dept. Sometimes a small toroid with a
spacer under the big toroid can help get rid of some of the corona and tends
to lift up the sparks, getting them away from the bottom of the coil.
I have photographed a spark that matches John Freau's formula from my #3
coil. cul brian f.
----- Original Message -----
From: "Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>
To: <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com>
Sent: Monday, November 18, 2002 9:19 AM
Subject: First light...Mixed Emotions


 > Original poster: "Chris Roberts by way of Terry Fritz
<twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <quezacotl_14000000000000-at-yahoo-dot-com>
 >
 >
 > Hi everyone,
 >
 > Well, tonight we fired up our second coil after many sleepless nights
 > building it. It worked, but this coil right now is really bad-tempered. We
 > got sparks almost EVERYWHERE. It comes off the wire that goes to the
 > primary and hits the secondary, sparks along connections between wires,
 > saftey gaps, primary to secondary, the secondary along itself, and oh yeah
 > - a little off the toroid =P. We were able to clean it up a littlle and
got
 > rid of most of the unwanted sparks, but we are still getting hits from the
 > primary to the secondary and along the secondary itself. Sigh - We are now
 > putting a few more coats of polyurathane along the secondary which should
 > insulate it better and will hopefully get it running again by tomorrow
 > night. I'll try and get some pictures posted soon. (once it works)
 >
 > Dimensions are here if anyone cares.
 >
 > Power supply: 9kv 120ma NST. This is a BIG NST. Only RF protection is
 > saftey gaps.
 >
 > Spark Gap: RQ spark gap w/ vaccum motor to pull air through it.
 >
 > Capacitor: LTR that has 2 strings of 6 geek caps with a total of .05mfd
 >
 > Primary: 13 turns of 1/4 inch refridgerator tubing spaced 1/4 inch apart
 > and tapped at about turn 8. The inner turn of the primary may be too close
 > to the secondary (1.5 inches) but we don't want to be cutting off inner
 > turns yet untill we're sure.
 >
 > Secondary: 6.25 inch outer diameter PVC wound for 24.5 inches with 22
gauge
 > magnet wire. We are triple coating the coil again to try and get rid of
 > those sparks.
 >
 > Toroid: 28 inch outer diameter with 4 inch flex duct. This probably needs
 > to be covered in aluminium tape and smoothed out as we are getting lots of
 > very tiny (10 inch) sparks all around the perimeter of the coil but no
 > actual streamers.
 >
 > Sorry if this post is a little long. I hope we can get this one to work
 > better than the last one. (12 inches at most, it was really sad)
 >
 >
 > -Chris
 >
 > "Learn from the mistakes of others. You won't live long enough to make all
 > of them yourself."-unknown
 >
 >
 >