Can anyone diagnose problems with our coil? (fwd)

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2006 15:03:05 -0800
From: john welch <jowelch@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: tesla@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Can anyone diagnose problems with our coil?

My student assistants and I just built our first coil. It kind of works, 
but we are getting little tiny streamers coming out from the top of the 
secondary coil and nothing from the ball on top.
We have tuned the circuit fairly carefully so that their resonant f's 
are very close. We have a multiple spark gap made of copper pipes. We're 
using 2 Condenser Products pulse discharge caps in parallel to get .01 
mF rated at 10,000V. We have a 6000V neon sign transformer.  We are 
grounding the secondary to a wall outlet ground - I've heard not to do 
this, but am not sure why and can't find much else to do indoors, and 
many people tell me that that's what they do.  Our secondary coil is 
22ga magnet wire around 3" PVC. The top end of the 22ga wire is 
connected to the ball, and the bottom end to a 5 foot length of 10 ga 
wire that I stick in the "3rd prong" of an outlet. Our primary circuit 
is the transformer directly across the spark gap, and the (cap and coil 
in series) also across the spark gap. We plug the transformer into a 
variac, and have both a line RF filter and a power factor capacitor.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.
thanks
-John

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John Welch

Cabrillo College Physics Dept.