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Re: Large Tesla Coil - First Light

Original poster: "Barton B. Anderson" <bartb@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>

Congratulations on that coil Cameron!
S0 you had David there, eh? Cool! David has made some BIG sparks in his time!!! I've seen his videos, and they are fantastic! It's one of those RAW "how'da like that" spark videos. Very cool! Your coil looks good, but your toroid looks great in that shot! Like some kind of alien metallic glass. I'm sure you'll get some longer sparks soon, but it looks like that toroid is performing. Certainly, there is always "fine tuning" to do. We all do some days, and other days, well, we don't care and just let it rip!

Those racing sparks are easy to get rid of if your coils setup for the adjustment. It's a simple matter for some, and Armageddon for others. When you get to that point, and if you need advice, just ask. There's a lot of experience in that area on the list (we've all had to deal with it, one way or another).

If you get a chance sometime, I personally would like to know your coil specs in detail. Just send offline my way unless others are also curious.

Great job! Enjoyed the photo!

Take care,
Bart





Tesla list wrote:

Original poster: "Cameron B. Prince" <cplists@xxxxxxxxxx>

Hey guys,

This evening I made the final primary connections and we fired off the coil
for the first time. I must say, I am very pleased with the results even
though we did have a few problems.

David Rieben came over from Memphis and helped me get everything setup. He's
pretty good at driving 8 foot ground rods into the ground too. :)

Jonathan Moral also came over with his professional photography equipment
and took some great pictures. He's still working on them, but has sent me a
few. My favorite of which is this one:

http://www.epitra.com/tesla/images/jon/_MG_9389-01crp-m.jpg

That's about a 5 foot gap between the top terminal and the small grounded
sphere. This was about the most we could get out of the coil without those
bad racing sparks across the secondary coil. The first one blew out the
ASRG's bridge rectifier. We had to revert it to AC. We also had one of the
phases in the AC line filter short out.

I have some work to do to further tune and optimize the system. I was only
able to push the variac to 60-70%, so I know we can get more out of it once
I solve some design issues. More on this later. On a good note, the reactors
didn't go over 95 degrees and the resistor turned out to really be a great
help just as Richard Hull suggested. The coil produced greater output that
was less choppy when it was engaged.

You can see more new photos here:

http://www.epitra.com/tesla/index.html

I look forward to any comments or suggestions.

Thanks,
Cameron