RE: Can anyone diagnose problems with our coil? (fwd)

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---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 11 Dec 2006 19:12:33 -0600
From: Brian <brianv@xxxxxxxx>
To: 'Tesla list' <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: RE: Can anyone diagnose problems with our coil? (fwd)

You may be loading the system down with the ball I am not sure how big it is
and what wattage your transformer is. I would not ground the secondary to
the house ground as this could be asking for trouble there is a possibility
of destroying what ever may be plugged into the circuits...TV, computers,
just to name a few. It sounds like a ground issue and if you have a water
pipe...actually if you can find the water meter ground the system to it on
the side of the meter that goes out of the house not the side that feeds the
building, if your meter has a jumper wire which some do so they do not
ground through the meter then you will either have to remove it temporarily
or create another RF ground with a separate ground rod, but for safety
reasons do not ground it to your mains ground. I know some people do it and
I am not sure why.
Brian 

-----Original Message-----
From: Tesla list [mailto:tesla@xxxxxxxxxx] 
Sent: Monday, December 11, 2006 6:28 PM
To: tesla@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Can anyone diagnose problems with our coil? (fwd)

Original poster: List moderator <mod1@xxxxxxxxxx>



---------- 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.