Formless secondaries

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

Original poster: "Mark Snoswell by way of Terry Fritz <teslalist-at-qwest-dot-net>" <mark-at-cgCharacter-dot-com>

G'day ... just thought I'd come out of the dark and start letting people
know what I've been up to.

It's been almost 28 years since I made my last Tesla coil -- that was
back in 1975 or so... won a physics scholarship for doing it to  ...
Back then there was little more than the published works of Tesla
really. Now there is tons of information -- some quite solid information
also... and the materials available are better -- as are my resources :)


anyway... Just setting up again and doing a little testing of secondary
winding techniques. I just wound two 4.5" x 25" coils with 0.6mm magnet
wire... gonna wind a few more yet for testing. (bloody spelling chekker
wanted to change gonna to gonad ! -- need to add Australian slang to the
checker some time)

The first was regular one on PCV pipe - coated with solvent based
polymer -- pretty normal.

The second one (well the third actually as I did a short test one to
test the formless method) is almost finished -- the second coat of 2
part resin is just drying. Removing the coil from the form worked
surprisingly well.

OH... and as to how you remove the form - simple. You just slot the form
(cut it lengthwise) and insert a spacer when you are winding the coil. I
use a 3mm spacer. After winding the coil and coating it (single light
coat of 2 part resin) you can easily remove the form.

The coil is very stiff and strong in its own right and there will be no
need to use any additional support.

...anyway. Just thought I'd let people know that it seems pretty easy to
make formless coils and they appear to be very stable physically. I will
post pictures in a bit (week or so) -- when I reactivate the personal
part of our web site.

I do have a question -- does anyone have any really good comparative
empirical data for different polymer and resin coatings -- dissipation
factors?

I will measure Q's of various coils and publish the results -- soon I
hope.

I am also setting up my coil winding jig to wind future coils with a
space between the turns (optionally). Most of the top potential
generated is due to resonant rise of potential in the secondary circuit
-- It's funny that we see so much activity on the power supply side when
it would appear that there are significant gains (several fold?) to be
made by improving the Q of the secondary circuit. -- Take a close look
at the Q Variation Experiments at
http://www.abelian.demon.co.uk/tssp/qvar070402/
The peak Q from the various coils varies by 200% or so with the best Q's
up around 20 in that report.

That's all for my first serious post to the list.

Se ya!

Mark

---------------------------------------------------------------
Dr Mark Snoswell.
Creator & Head Dude                        www.cgCharacter-dot-com
Contributing Editor Design Graphics.  www.designgraphics-dot-com.au
Adelaide, Australia
----------------------------------------------------------------