2006 Midwest Cheesehead Teslathon

["Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Original poster: "D.C. Cox" <resonance@xxxxxxxxxxxx>


A very big "thank you" to all those who attended and helped out with 
our Midwest Cheesehead Teslathon.
Steve Ward's great solid state coil ran nearly flawlessly until the 
end when a MOSFET gate driver failed and blew up a IGBT.  Thanks to 
Steve and Sean Taylor who hauled the huge machine all the way from 
Chicago.  It worked great with our "Cage of Death".
Bert Hickman had an enormous display of beautiful "Litchenberg 
discharges" thru acrylic plates, rods, and hemispheres.  Thanks Bert 
for help making out Teslathon successful again!
Special thanks to Sean Taylor who dangled from the forklift like Tom 
Cruise stealing gems hanging from overhead cables.  Sean helped 
install and remove the 10 ft. dia. toroid atop Big Bruiser.
Big Bruiser ran at 85% power with awesome white hot sparks dancing 
off the 10 ft. dia. toroid (0.3 uF pri cap size).  Hope to get the 
power reactor rewound so we can run the full 125 Amps at 240 VAC 
input next year for even longer sparks.  30 kVA up from 20 kVA (this 
year) should look even more spectacular.
Thanks to all of the engineers & techs who helped haul out Big 
Bruiser and work with tables, chairs, parts, etc.
Great swap meet with $4.00 NSTs and $10 for 16 inch dia. 
coilform!  Lots of caps, variacs, sparkgaps, 813 vacuum tubes, and 
other assorted goodies!
I'm getting 2-3 CDs from all the photographers and will compile a 
group of the "best photos" for Terry F. to post in the archives.  If 
you have 3-4 good photos of Big Bruiser or other coils running please 
email them in 1-5 meg file format to me and I will tweak them in 
photoshop and post them in the archives.
If you shot some video you can email me 10-20 meg of your best 
sections of video as well, and I will send Terry an edited video 
chunk for him to post in the archives for all you lucky guys that 
have high speed coax internet.
I really enjoyed meeting all the guys and discussing their future 
projects and talking shop with everyone.
Best regards,


Dr. Resonance