Please help!

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

Original poster: Ronnie Pittman <r3pittman-at-yahoo-dot-com> 

hello all,
It has probably been about 5 years since I last run my tesla coil and my 
memory is very bad.  Since then I have moved and the only things that I 
kept were the secondary, the spark and safety gap, and the toroid.

I am planning on trying to set up another coil for an Educational day my 
school is having monday morning ( I am a high school science teacher) and I 
am having a hard time remembering all the details.

I have made a new primary for this coil out of 12 turns of  3/8 copper 
tubing spaced 3/8" and at 30 degrees to replace the old one which was a 
cylindrical one made form 10 ga wire.  I also just finished a new cap made 
from 24 plates of 6X6" aluminum seperated by 4 sheets of 4 mil poly.  I 
have 8 of these banks submerged vertically in a tank of transormer oil with 
taps coming out the side that I can wire in any fashion.  The secondary is 
made on 4"pvc drain pipe and is 973 turns of 24ga wire.  The toroid is 2 
pie plates and dryer duct.   As for transformer, I have 4 good 15 kv 30 ma 
nst's, and one PT rated at 1kva.

My questions are as follows, If my calculations are correct, for 1 of the 
nst I would need to run four of the caps in series?  Should I try to use 2 
nst or possibly the pt with a welder in series and if so any suggestions on 
what to put the welder rating at?  Also If I remember correctly, the spark 
and safety gap are parallel to the transformer and the cap is behind the 
spark gap in series on one leg going to the primary? Also anything else I 
should use to protect the nst?

Any and all help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Ronnie Pittman