My tiny TC-based vacuum leak tester (grew from Early versions of Tesla's coil)

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

Original poster: "RMC by way of Terry Fritz <teslalist-at-qwest-dot-net>" <RMC-at-richardcraven.plus-dot-com>

If you go here http://www.richardcraven.plus-dot-com/leaktester/ you will find a
dozen shots (each is about 500kB in size) of the aforementioned device.

For scale reference, the sphere on top of the secondary is 19mm diameter and
the primary coil is 28mm diameter.

The primary cap is about 1.3 nF, a pair of series-connected Dubilier
Mica-based caps


The photogrpah names are self-explanatory: here are a few notes to go with
the shots.

Assembled - what the units look like when in "virgin" state. There is about
2m of URM67 coax connecting the head unit to the PSU.

cap - the Dubiliers mentioned above

coilform - this is a conical section ceramic former. I stuck some wax on the
top about 15 years ago.

disassembled - the insides laid out on an autopsy board

head_unit - contains the coilform, cap and gap. You bodge the end against
your evacuated vessel. After a while, the vacuum fails due to the pinhole
you've just burned into the glass. You can see the top of the spark gap
lever poking through the escutcheon plate.

pri - 3.5 turns on a 28mm diameter

pri-sec - shows the relationship between the two coils

PSU - the maker was who I remembered it to be. This box conatinas the mains
transformer

sparkgap - you can see the cam lever and sprung contact and tungsten faces

top - the 19mm diameter sphere

xfmr2 and xfmr - the mains power



These are all largish photographs so if anyone wants to resize them and
stick them on Terry's site, feel free. I have conirmed the pix are all
downloadable in both Opera and IE6 so hopefully there'll be no problems for
anyone.

Cheers

RMC, England