Transformerless magnifier and coil

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

Original poster: "Antonio Carlos M. de Queiroz by way of Terry Fritz <twftesla-at-qwest-dot-net>" <acmq-at-compuland-dot-com.br>

Hi:

I decided to give a new chance at my PVC tube capacitor, that
was used as secondary capacitance in my transformerless
magnifier. The original setup was (I posted the wrong picture
name in a previous post):
http://www.coe.ufrj.br/~acmq/tesla/567mrn.jpg
The capacitor is the tube at the left, with a lot of corona
around the external plate.
http://www.coe.ufrj.br/~acmq/tesla/567c2.jpg
My idea was to cover the problematic edges, where a plate ends
while the plate at the other side continues, with wax, to route
through a solid dielectric the intense electric field that appears 
there. So, I melted some carnauba wax and applied it around the
plate edges with a brush.
I then powered the system. The initial result was excellent, with
no visible corona in the capacitor and good output at the third
resonator. But this didn't last much. Soon some corona started to
appear at the inner plate. After some time the system stopped
working and the gap noise an light become suddenly more intense.
(This system works with the gap surprisingly quiet.)
A look at the capacitor showed a black puncture in the PVC tube.
Apparently, corona started under the wax, where it peeled out
of the PVC, heating and weakening the PVC until it failed.
Back to the drawing board on this capacitor. A plate capacitor
immersed in oil or an MMC are things to try. 

To see if the other elements were ok, I reassembled the 
transformerless system:
http://www.coe.ufrj.br/~acmq/tesla/mres4.html
It worked well. As this time I was using a blower to keep the
gap cool, I could run the system for more than a few seconds, and
observed that really long streamers start to form only after some
seconds of operation. I experimented some different top loads 
instead of the disk and antenna. The best results were obtained with 
a half-sphere covering the top of the antenna. Long streamers started 
to develop at the edges of the sphere and at the disk, some reaching
20 or 30 cm. Impressive. No pictures yet.

Antonio Carlos M. de Queiroz