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Re: noob question
Original poster: Vardan <vardan01@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Hi,
At 11:10 AM 2/27/2006, you wrote:
I've been looking for quite a while to find an answer to this
question and haven't had any luck. Please don't flame me too bad.
We won't :-)
I've built my first coil based on the schematic for the 12" spark
coil from information unlimited.
I have never seen this schematic and don't know anything about this
coil. Can you give more detail on it so we know what is going
on. There are thousands of different coils, so we can't say anything
specific without knowing which one it is.
I can run my coil for maybe 20 seconds or so (depending on the width
of my gap) but eventually the spark gap stops firing and the coil
stops working and won't start again until I turn it off and back on
again. I've tried shortening the spark gap but the problem will
persist and the more I try to run the coil the sooner the gap stops
firing. Can anyone explain to me why this happens and what can be
done to keep the coil running while the power is on. The only
explaination I have been able to come up with by myself is that my
capacitor is slowly dieing (I've had to replace the capacitor once
already) and the longer I run it it can't produce the breakdown voltage.
Did replacing the capacitor restore the coil to full operation
(temporarily)? If so, it sure sounds like the cap is burning up. If
we know more about the coil, we can find a cap that won't die.
It could also be the gap getting dirty, but simply cleaning the
electrodes would fix that. My guess right now is that the cap is not
able to withstand the coil. An MMC should fix that easily but we
would have to known the voltage and value and something about the
coil especially the type of transformer running it.
I have also seen arcing inside the secondary do this, but that makes
smoke and such.
Cheers,
Terry