Re: physically large coils

["Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Original poster: "Thomas Coyle" <zxcasd@xxxxxxxxx>

Imagine a flat primary on a piece of (plywood/poly/whatever). Now 
imagine sawing it into quarters. These could stack for storage quite 
easily. To reassemble, you'd need connectors, which wouldn't be as 
difficult as trying to do it with a secondary. I imagine, 
potentially, cutting short "tubes" of larger copper, then 
drilling/tapping those and the underlying tubing, using machine 
screws to connect them... something like that, perhaps?

I was thinking the same thing for a large toroid. You could imagine, 
first, splitting it in half, and then splitting each half into four 
quarters, with edges that would "nest" into the next piece. Just a thought.

I'm not going to tackle the secondary. :)


On 3/7/06, Tesla list <<mailto:tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>tesla@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Original poster: Jim Lux <<mailto:jimlux@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>jimlux@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>


The whole area of "how do you build a big coil that can be moved
conveniently" is a fascinating one.

By now, it's fairly straightforward to build a pig powered coil with
a 12-16" diameter secondary and having it work fairly well "out of
the box" (assuming you've built a few coils before, and you are
reasonably careful with the models).

The problem is that the thing is going to be a beast, and non-trivial
to move around.  Not everyone has a big panel truck in which to
transport their coil. Although, I have seriously thought about
getting a small trailer to build a big coil on, and then parking it
at a RV storage yard.

So, you look to designs like that one in England that had the nesting
secondary segments, or something that can at least breakdown into
"carryable by one person" chunks (e.g. the OSHA 55 lb, 25kg
one-person-lift limit).

You also want something that won't take 8 hours to assemble, and it
needs to be fairly rugged after assembly.  Say you had your 16"
diameter secondary, and it's say, 7 ft long overall.  You could break
it into 2 foot segments that lock together with some sort of
electrical connector (a sort of nontrivial design exercise in itself)

What about the 4-5 ft diameter primary?  Can it be made to collapse/fold/stow?

The HV supply can be made fairly small and light.

Think about "how would I fit this whole thing into the back of a 
station wagon"