RE: HV Disease

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

Original poster: "sundog by way of Terry Fritz <teslalist-at-qwest-dot-net>" <sundog-at-timeship-dot-net>

Ya know, I used to be a normal, fairly geeky guy.  I ride motorcycles.  I 
scuba dive.  I have a wonderful SO (with no patience for my HV habit), and 
a fairly large garage to store it all in.

   It started with a modest enough web search, and I stumbled onto a Tesla 
Coil link.  I read it.  Then a few more.  Then a few more.  On the kitchen 
table, I fiddled with a pair of nasty old ignition coils, a dimmer, and a 
motor run cap.  I built a Jacob's ladder with it.  I wanted more.  I 
scrounged up a dozen NST's from the local vendors' dumpsters.  On the way, 
I ran into my buddy Dave, of D&M's High Voltage.  He helped me wind a 
secondary, told me how to wind a primary.  I made salt water caps.  my 
first spark gas was two lengths of copper tubing attached to a block of 
wood with carriage bolts.  I bought over a hundred Panasonic caps from 
Terry, and over 700 dollars in 10kv .1uF Chenelec caps.  I bought hand 
tools. I bought a drill press.  I learned to make RSG discs easily.  I 
learned to modify plain induction motors for salient pole operation.  I 
bought a pole pig.  Dave of D&M's HV made an inductive ballast for me that 
rocks like nobody's business.  I built a 10" coil.  I ran it.  I managed to 
get the police, fire department, and paramedics on my doorstep because of 
that.  I've p***** off my neighbors a few times running coils.
   Then I discovered Vacuum Tubes, by my buddy James.  He sold me 2 
833A's.  I got my first VTTC running a week or so later.  I bought 2 more 
833A's, and a GU10A 10kW tube.  I gathered more gear.  An O scope, a signal 
generator. I ran a dedicated 240V drop to my garage.  I scrounged all the 
vacuum tube gear I could lay my hands on.

   The end result?  I've got persistant HV-itis. Through lack of time and 
money, I've learned to control it.  But it's always there... The itch to 
fire off a coil and watch the streamers dance... The soft warm glow of 
vacuum tubes that becomes a harsh, blaring light as the plates redden with 
abuse, the incandescent flash and thick smoke of a toasted component, the 
ear-splitting scream of a triggered spark gap running at 4Khz.  Ah, my 
imagination sees my thumb depress the deadman switch, and the lights 
flicker as the 20kW Jacob's ladder snaps and hums, the two foot power arc 
gracefully flowing upwards on the coathanger electrodes in the pole pig's 
HV bushings.   The sublime, faint odor of charred paint and Ozone, the 
sharp pang of various Nitrides produced in a spark gap....

   It's not a sickness, it's an addiction.  Without your fix, you become 
jittery, watching the skies as your wait for lightning, staring with 
undisguised longing at pole transformers as you drive.  You catch yourself 
thinking of what you can make into components for your coil as you walk 
through Home Depot, in search of paint for a bedroom in your house.  You 
wind flat spirals out of paper clips while on the phone at work...

  As of yet, there's no cure.  The disease can only get worse, or you can 
quit cold turkey.  There is no "tapering down", no "Cool turkey"...  Only 
the strongest willpowers can resist the sires call of raw electricity 
tearing apart ordinary air into a thousand degree inferno where current can 
flow...

    I have no such willpower...
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Shad (Sundog)
G-5 #1373
"Ever stop to think, and forget to start again?"
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