Small gauge secondary works!

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

Original poster: "Eahab El Naga" <lileahab-at-hotmail-dot-com> 

Hello to all,

Hey I’m glad to say that my new coil is up and running. The catch is that 
this one’s secondary is wound with 37 awg blue enamel magnet wire. It is 
wound on a 2” by 12” PVC form with 10” of winding length. With a 5kv 60 ma 
xfmr, just 300 watts, I am getting 10” streamers with 14” sparks to a 
ground rod. The coil runs at 165 kHz (unexpectedly low) with a 12” toroid 
that has a 4” cross-section (made out of a slinky and lots of masking tape 
covered with aluminum tape, turned out pretty good, sturdy, strong, light). 
The primary is made out of 24 awg bare copper wire and works great. Right 
now it is at school but I decided to keep it running all of lunch (45min.) 
and at the end only the breakout bar was warm and both coils were at room 
temp. I had a little mini rotary interrupter with a 4” wheel (it’s really 
cute).I guess that this coil could count as a table top. So the point of 
this coil is to prove that secondaries with small wire works without a 
problem and the primary coil doesn’t need to be as huge as many coilers 
have set in their mind. I hope to try Litz wire in the future to see if 
there is any significant improvement in the coil. I’ll take pics once I 
bring the coil home.

Right now I am working on yet a smaller coil that is wound on ½” x 6” pvc 
and make a “pocket sized” tesla coil running at 100 watts with a smaller 
5kv xfmr. This is something that I had been looking forward to for a very 
long time. The question is, how will the sparks behave at such high 
frequencies like at around 1 MHz? Watch out AM radios!! If this works it 
will be a great gift idea because the primary cap will be at around 1-8nf 
so that it could easily be made with around the house items. Perhaps those 
5kv transmitting vacuum variable capacitors would be something cool to play 
with. “Tuning on the fly” and actually see the sweet spot of the coil by 
tuning while it is running.

About the water capacitor, thanks to all that gave me advice and what I 
have decided to do is to try the capacitor without any coating first and 
hopefully be able to have 1 attempt in a high voltage charge (DC). If that 
works then I will coat the vari-cap and try it at near RF or RF.

Thanks again,
Eahab El Naga


http://eahab1.port5-dot-com

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