Though no one asked, I'll offer my theory. The air between the electrodes
in a sucker gap is at a lower pressure than the surrounding atmospheric
air. As the pressure is reduced, the breakdown voltage of the gap is
reduced. A lower breakdown voltage delivers smaller bangs, and lower
performance. Just a theory though - I haven't run my sucker gap in many
years and I haven't personally witnessed this.
Regards, Gary Lau
MA, USA
On Fri, Nov 25, 2011 at 6:29 PM, Jonathan Peakall<jpeakall@xxxxxxxxxxxx>wrote:
I found with my sucker gap that too much vac actually decreased
performance. There was a sweet spot somewhere around the 20-30% power mark,
as Gary describes.
Jonathan
----- Original Message ----- From: "Carl Noggle"<cn@xxxxx>
To: "Tesla Coil Mailing List"<tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, November 25, 2011 8:04 AM
Subject: Re: [TCML] tesla coil blowers
Thanks, Gary--after 20 years of running my coil I never thought of
that. Probably make for longer motor life, too, although in that time I
have only had to replace it once. Still, I had egg on my face in the
middle of a show. A small step-down autotransformer would work well, too.
---Carl
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