wimpy first light & fun with near death experience ;-)

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

Original poster: "Christoph Bohr" <cb-at-luebke-lands.de> 

Hello all!

One hour ago I set my new maggy up for the first time. I ballasted the 6MOT
stack to around 2,5KVA and
set the RSG to a gapsize that I could use it as a static gap for testing
purposes to find the primary tuning point.
This worked pretty well and I got 40cm strikes to a grounded target with tha
variac at 40%. When I thought I had found the sweet spot I turned the
RSG on, but the RSG would only fire erratically, so I changed the phase
setting in small steps but this had only small effects.
I know I should use a phase controller, but I am missing the variac and the
neccessary caps at the time.... after all with some adjustment it should
work without a phase controller....
After all that did not work, I decided to remove the ballasting choke from
the xformer and give this a try... ( OK, not too intelligent ).
10%...30%.. 40%... nothing happened. Then at around 60% variac setting the
thing suddenly came to live accompished by a massive roar
some 5 or maybe 8 1,5 foot arcs struck the ceiling. But the sound was
different, just like the RSG smashing the electrodes together...
I pressed the emergency shut down and observed the scene. The bad thing is:
the roar was not the RSG but the MOT-Stack arcing under oil!
No nafety gap fired at that time... I will have to do some closer
examinations tomorrow, but for now I am just glad this thing did not catch
fire.

Now I would be very glad about any tips how to phase a 200BPS RSG with
offset electrodes as suggested by richie burnett on his website... how do I
know
if the right electrodes are alligned or the other pair without risking my
equipment?
With my normal RSG I just set the phase by performance and a bit by
hearing.... but this fails  as this "offset" SRSG has a pretty much
different sound.

Nevertheless, a small succes as the maggie itself survived and I had no
problems with arcing overs and such stuff.

Best regards.


Christoph Bohr