Original poster: "D.C. Cox" <resonance@xxxxxxxxxx>True quench gaps are sealed to the air. After a few dozen cycles of operation all the oxygen is "burned up" which leaves an atmosphere of nearly pure nitrogen. This gas acts as an insulator and helps proper quenching (turn-off) of the oscillatory currents so promote faster energy transfer in the primary circuit. The nitrogen also helps prevent oxides from forming on the copper plates.
We made a few using G-10 phenolic and some stamped out copper plates. They seemed to work very well and were very quiet up to 5 kVA. Our unit was approx 4.5 inches in dia. on the stamped copper plates. Sort of like a stack of pie plates ith G-10 separator plates. Three exterior clamping rods of G-10 rod provided the clamping force that allowed quick dissassembly for occasional cleaning.
Dr. Resonance
I only Know this term as "slang" of the time when private radio amateurs used spark gap transmitters and it describes this: http://www.telegraph-office.com/pages/quenched_gap.html Pretty much the same as the device Antonio showed us. Non-Professional thoughts about the CW operation: If everything ran perfect in a tesla magnifier you could ideed get close to CW operation, but would require very high breake rates in the same order of magnitude as the output frequency. best regards Christoph Bohr