Re: Joining two rolls of wire on the secondary coil

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

Original poster: "Mark Broker by way of Terry Fritz <teslalist-at-qwest-dot-net>" <mbroker-at-thegeekgroup-dot-org>

To prove a few points at our summer 2001 teslathon, we did many bad things 
to a secondary coil (we had about 4, and chose the ugliest to die), 
including drawing arcs to a ground rod directly from the secondary 
windings!  At one point we had finally managed to short a couple turns 
about 20% from the top.  To rectify, I unwrapped a couple turns in each 
direction, clipped the wires so that I could make a nice, ugly pigtail 
splice (twisted the wires together).  I didn't even fold the splice over, 
but left the 2 inches pointing out radially.  At the next power on, there 
was a very faint green spark that lasted a second or two as the insulation 
was burned off the splice.  The secondary proceeded to work flawlessly for 
about another half hour....  We even attempted to discharge a pulse cap 
through the thing (4kV, 100uF or something like that).  We failed to 
electrically kill the coil.  I think we have video and pictures of it 
somewhere....

So, in summary, it doesn't have to be perfect, or even LOOK good to work 
well....

I've never spliced wire on a TC secondary, but would think that scraping a 
flat spot a half inch long or so would make the easiest and least 
conspicuous joint.  A small clamp could hold the two wires together at one 
end of the splice....

The previous night of that teslathon featured R. Scott Coppersmith's coil 
killing a PC (it took a while, and some manual intervention)....  but 
that's an entirely different story.

Regards,

Mark Broker
Chief Engineer, The Geek Group