Re: Small gauge secondary works!

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

Original poster: Troy Peterson <troypeterson-at-shaw.ca> 

Any tips on hand winding really small coils? I've got 5 pounds of 40awg 
magnet wire around here.. I've wasted  probably half a pound of it trying 
to wind a tiny secondary....  I think it would be cool to make a really 
small coil with something along that line though, like you said - small and 
easy to find capacitors n' such.

Cheers,
Troy

>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
>
>__