[TCML] Switching on for the first time

["Stephen J. Hobley" <shobley@xxxxxxxxxx>]

We did the final assemble and checks on our Tesla coil on Saturday night, we rolled it out into the back yard and switched it on...
 
Nothing is as scary as that first time...
 
And...
 
http://www.stephenhobley.com/Tesla.jpg
 
Nothing exploded, imploded, melted, smoked or fried...
 
First off, a big big thank you to all the people on the list for helping us to get this coil going. We never would have finished the project without you...
 
We were able to tease 7" sparks out of the toroid with the safety 'wand'. We tapped the primary on the recommendation of Teslamap - but we're not trying to fool ourselves that this thing is tuned. We just built the oscillator tuner based on the 555 chip and we're going to try and tune it properly.
 
The static gap is quenched with a tough little AC blower and set to about 0.18 inches. After operating for about 30 seconds the tungsten electrodes did not see very warm at all.
 
So after getting the tuning as perfect as we can, what should we examine next? 
 
* Height of the secondary from the primary?
* Height of the toroid from the secondary
* Spark gap distance / more quenching?
* Addition of a rotary gap? (this is NST based, and so I'm not sure if this is safe...)
 
Our setup is: 
 
Variac -> RF filter -> NST (12Kv) -> Terry Filter -> Static gap -> MMC (16 series with 100K bleeders) -> 0.25 copper tubing primary (15 degrees 12 turns total) -> 4" 24 gauge wire secondary (19.5 coil height) -> 12" / 3" spun toroid.
 
Thanks again!
Steve Hobley and Pete Kuhns
 

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