Re: Magnifier conversion

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

Original poster: "Terry Fritz" <teslalist-at-qwest-dot-net>

Hi All,

We ran the magnifier conversion tonight.  The arc length of the magnifier 
was about 80% of the two coil setup.  There was a lot of corona, some odd 
safety gap behavior, and I have no idea what the quenching was doing.  So, 
this should be considered as preliminary.

The two coil system was putting out it's usual ~28 inch arcs.  I seem to 
have blown the MOV array in the protection filter so we had to bypass 
it.  I just tested it a few week earlier so not sure what is wrong there.

We then put in the magnifier stuff.  Primary to secondary arcing was a 
problem so we wrapped a whole package of poly sheeting around it almost an 
inch thick.  That stopped the arcing but there was still some low power 
sparking and corona going on.  Also had a lot of glow around the secondary 
to extra coil wire.  But basically it was working.

The safety gaps sometimes fired as expected, but they often had some far 
lower power arcing going on continuously too.  Not sure what that was about...

The tuning for best arcs was right where it should have been and the power 
conversion was just right (full power on the variac just barely fired the 
safety gaps).  The C2 capacitor worked perfectly with no problems at all.

The Kill-A-Watt meter had a pretty bad night.  I don't think it was 
grounded well (not sure if it even uses ground internally) but it kept 
flipping out and was mostly unusable.  The might have had something to do 
with bypassing the coil's filters but there were certainly many line 
filters too.  In fact there were four stages of line filters between it and 
the coil.  Maybe bad grounding really hurt it.  Last time on a far more 
direct coil, it seemed to due much better...  Now it reads all kinds of 
funny numbers without any load.  I'll see if I can figure out where the 
trouble is.  These are fantastic meters so they are worth trying to use 
with Tesla coils.

So things seemed to work well but no great performance gain was 
observed.  I still need to go check all kinds of things however.  Probably 
more questions than answers tonight...  But as usual, great fun was had!!

Cheers,

	Terry