Re: and oddity or a normality?

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

Original poster: Koen van den Berg <cerberus_rex-at-planet.nl> 

Well, given all the responses, I think Doc Resonance's sums it up perfectly
(it mostly does). I had this very problem with one of my coils. It's all in
the strike rail! I messed up my design, resulting in having the rail way to
close to the toroid for comfort. Combine this with a good helping of
overcoupling and voila! My beautiful secondary coil was worthless after a
few minutes of use. But the dissipation - like haze you're seeing won't
actually harm your coil. It's basically just an efficiency loss; output
leaking away. All you have to do is just lower the strike rail and keep it
ways away from the toroid. You can even use some old uninsulated electrical
wire, if you want to go ghetto style.

But, even as it is unintended, the effect does look pretty nice...

Good luck fixing your 'problem'.

Koen