RE: High midnight at the Texas corral

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

Original poster: "by way of Terry Fritz <teslalist-at-qwest-dot-net>" <tesla729-at-cs-dot-com>

"Tesla list" <tesla-at-pupman-dot-com> wrote:

<OK, somebody out there show me ONE conventional coil running a 0.015 ufd
<cap making 15 foot sparks.  Just one.  Then I'll say conventional coils <can
<match magnifiers' performance.

<I helped Wild Bill Emery build the Wart Hog, a big conventional coil, and
<it makes pretty impressive 12 foot sparks, but jeez, we're pumping 15 kva
<from *two* pole pigs into it, and we have to use between 0.08 to 0.10 ufd
<capacitance to get that much out.  That's a lot of capacitors which <equates
<into a lot of dollars. (and Bill, you know I'm not saying anything bad
<about the Hog - it's a beautiful machine!)

Bert Pool, all,

Ah yea, it sounds like your getting similar results that Richard
Hull did with his "Maggies". BTW, Bill's "Warthog" sounds like a
slightly beefed up version of my "Medusa" which runs on a single
10 kVA pig and throws 8 to 10 ft. sparks. Medusa uses .083 uFD
for the primary cap and is topped with one of the bulk buy 9" X
30" spun toroids. The 12" secondary is  closewound w/ #16 magnet
wire and is only 38.5" tall but suffers NO racing sparks! I do
have trouble with a lot of the strikes hitting at the shield
ring around the primary coil though, due to its relative short
height. I can get 8 to 10 ft. sparks with about 7 to 8 kVA in.

.015 uFD is a very impressively low tank cap value for 15 footers
and I would say one would be hard pressed to get this kind of per-
formance from a classic two-coil system. What kind of spark gap
design do have for this system? I seem to recall that R. Hull
mentioned that monumental efforts at quenching were required to
get this kind of performance from a maggie w/out the detructive
"racing sparks" rearing their ugly heads. I assume that you are
running high speed asynch rotary?

Also, how brilliant are your 15 ft. sparks? Are they as brilliant
as the 12 footers from Bill's Warthog?

I would love to someday try my hand at a maggie if I had the
room. Maggies are space hogs, you know :-O

David Rieben