[TCML] VTTC Trouble - Help

["David Rieben" <drieben@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey guys,

I have been spending the day re-packaging my vacuum tube Tesla
coil as the previous setup was not very asthetically pleasing i.e.
it was plain ugly. Well once I got it back together on a better look-
ing frame, of course I had a few bugs to iron out. I finally got it to
running a bit again but there is a real problem. The stacatto con-
troller circuit -looks like- it's on all the time. Before I repackaged the
system, the stacatto controller could be turned on or off and when it
was turned off, the VTTC output would just be in continous mode.
Now, as I said -it looks like- it's on all of the time as the blinking
LEDs stay on all the time regardless of the switch position. However,
the output will now NOT go stacatto even though it looks to be on 
all of the time. It seems that it has gone from bad to worse as I
had to remove the top 3" PVC end cap as it kept carbonizing inside
at the top of the 3" secondary coil. Since I took that off I've noticed 
that now it seems that the coil is suddenly badly out of tune as the
plate will glow very brightly and hum at a relatively low variac setting
but the output spark won't get but just a few inches long. The only thing
that's changed is that I took off the carbonzed end cap and was just 
letting the sparks come off of the end of the secondary wire lead.
I was originally getting close to 40" sparks in stacatto by "cheating" the 
20 amp panel breaker and taking a 120 volt circuit out of my Green 
Monster control panel with up to 100 amps capacity before having
to worry about tripping breakers, so things have really gone down hill 
for me since remounting the system on a better frame. I'm pretty much
a VTTC dummy and just built this one loosely following this design:
http://www.stevehv.4hv.org/VTTC5/833Aschematic.JPG
Any suggestions from the VTTC gurus would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
David
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