Super Small TC

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

Original poster: "Chris Fanjoy" <zappyman-at-hotmail-dot-com> 

I'm not sure whether this project was a waste of time or not. I had set 
aside work on my big coil because I can't afford a good pulse cap right 
now, but I thought I'd try something else in the meantime. I had purchased 
a large spool of #38 AWG magnet wire, for reasons which I can't even 
remember, and I wondered if I could use this to produce a super-small tesla 
coil. So I set to work to wind the smallest TC secondary possible, and in 
less than on hour this is what I had produced: approx. 450 windings on a 
1/2" wide, 2" long paper tube - with no breaks or overlap! According to 
various TC calculating tools, the resonant frequency was quite high - 
somewhere in the 4 MHz range. So I built a small flat-spiral primary (#16 
AWG) and a proper-sized tank cap - which only required three small PPS 
(poly-phenylene substrate, I think) caps. For a power supply, I used an old 
TV flyback transformer and set the spark gap to about 3kV. With! tuning, 
the best spark I could get from the secondary was about 1/16" (with no 
topload). Obviously there are some problems somewhere! As a newbie I'd love 
to know where I went wrong, though I'm sure there are plenty of errors in 
this unusual design. The first thing I'm thinking is that a flat-spiral 
primary isn't right for a coil this small, and maybe a helical one would 
work better.
Any advice would be appreciated.