[TCML] first light!

[Joe Mastroianni <joe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

<http://yfrog.com/878ecz>

Thank you JavaTC!  I had been having problems with flash over between turns of my primary...

After worrying my self to death about my secondary and my ground - I spent last night recoating the secondary with Minwax Polyurethane (as suggested in Dan M's book) and let it dry overnight.  This morning, I pounded an 8' ground rod into my wife's garden just outside the garage at 6AM.  I wired up the ground with automobile jumper cable wire, which is basically stranded cable, about 25 strands of 16 gauge copper.  I figured I couldn't get much more of a ground than that.

I had previously tried decoupling the secondary from the primary by raising it.  No positive effect.

I tried connecting the coil to the house ground.  Oh boy.  This was a bad idea.  A detuned coil connected to the house ground injected god-knows-what noise into my home grounding system.  Luckily, it only trashed one item which is a device I made myself and can fix readily.

But things were still not working.  Then I read Dr. Resonance's reply to me about how out of tune I was...I selected my tuning location based on measurements I had taken with a frequency generator and an LED box (like Dan's book) but apparently I didn't try enough range on my primary.  JavaTC suggested I needed to be on the 15th turn of my primary (my primary only has 13 turns, but I'm about to add 2 more).  I put the clip out to the furthest spot on the primary.  And there you have it.  My first arc.  Not much to brag about, but it's a start!

Thanks to everyone on the list.

More coiling to come for me...onward to bigger arcs, rotary gaps,  and solid state!

Joe


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