[TCML] 2009 Tesla Fest

[DC Cox <resonance@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

A big "Thank You" for all the help and demonstrators who showed up for Tesla
Fest 2009 with their cool Tesla coils, climbing arcs, plasmodic singing
arcs, and other machines.

The festival made both Friday's and Monday's edition of the local Baraboo
News Republic with a full story and two photos in each article.  We drew
approximately 450 public visitors and lots of demonstrators.

Scott Krauss, father Lynn, and son Anthony, hauled down their fire-breathing
monster coil that ran at 14 kVA and fired 15 ft long sparks into the
rafters.  It also arced powerfully into the "Cage of Death" (Ed W.'s
terminology) to scare awaiting visitors and reporters.  Scott's nice classic
type coil was featured on the front page of the newspaper.

Roger Smith drove from Ohio to demonstrate his unique 3CX2500A vacuum tube
coil.  It operates off two MOTs, is non-statacco, and produce 40 inch long
continuous discharges that are similar to a statacco dual 833 coil, but
these sparks were continuous so they had a beautiful flame effect.

An experimenter from Racine, WI, demonstrated his "mini twin tower" coils
and also a few larger coils.

A local Boy Scout group demonstrated several coils and climbing arcs.

Engineering students from the Univ. of Wisconsin --- Madison had a DRSSTC
and also a "plasma mode" coil that featured "singing" sheets of flame.  Very
clever design.

We had a large group of plasma spheres, crackle tubes, and lightning tubes
on demo.  We also had a 200 kV Cockroft-Walton voltage multiplier that
performed some neat "hair-standing" experiments on visitors.

It was open to the public, so we had hordes of visitors who seemed spell
bound by the Tesla coils.  A few younger visitors were very inspired by the
Scouts work, and we talking excitingly about soon building their own coils.
I guess that's how we all got started --- by being impressed by someone coil
and then trying to build our own.

It cooled off and started lightly raining around 4 PM, so thank heaven we
did it all indoors this year in the huge 250 ft x 80 ft fairgrounds hall.
With the doors closed and no windows it was very dark in the hall and the
sparks really jumped out at you.

A local videographer set up dual cameras and shot time lapse video (every 20
sec) of the entire event from setup to teardown.  This DVD should be edited
and available from me sometime next week.

Thanks again to everyone who helped set up the displays and explain the
concepts to the amazed public.

Dr. Resonance
_______________________________________________
Tesla mailing list
Tesla@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.pupman.com/mailman/listinfo/tesla