Re: St.Louis Coilers - Looking for transformers

["Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Original poster: Ed Phillips <evp@xxxxxxxxxxx>

Hey Jim,

Might I suggest that you grab the yellowpages and get the addresses of the
neon sign companies in your area.  Swing in and visit them and see if you
can sweet-talk them into letting you scrap-out their scrap yard.    You see,
neon sign companies take down almost as many signs as they put up.  Those
old signs sit in their scrap yard until they get an employee to disassemble
them for recycling.  It's no skin off their noses if you take a few NSTs out
of their old signs.  In fact, the old non-GFI type NSTs are the ones that
work best for coils.  Here's a tip; if you want the sign companies to take
your request seriously, wear a pair of steel-toed boots, or they won't let
you enter their yard because of OSHA regulations.

I have a pile of NSTs if you would like to contact me off list.  However,
the shipping cost on these things are pretty high.

Cordially, Hal in Tucson"

   Good suggestions.  One of my nephew's teaches honors science 
classes at a high school near San Diego and got some of his students 
interested in building coils.  I in turn got him interested a number 
of years ago.
He is an enterprising guy and visited sign companies in San Diego and 
found a couple who let him and his students do exactly as you say - 
scrounge through "the old signs out back".  What they got were almost 
all 12 kV, 60 mA transformers and they ended up with several 
dozen.  I have four here which are all Franceformers in good shape 
and they were just leftovers.
Ed