I built my first tesla coil with my uncle some 35 years ago. I was in high school and very interested in electronics. I had a copy of Audel's "Radioman's Guide" beside my bed for at least a year. Though, after the first few pages of theory, I rapidly got lost in the terminology.
It's that way with a lot of learning. The opening chapters of most books are completely within our grasp, and then suddenly, it seems the author launches off into the stratosphere leaving us on the ground. Some guys don't have a problem with that. They can just follow along all the way to the end. Those were the ones that graduated college 2 years early and got their PhDs by the time they were 22. Some guys can't even get past the first page. They went to work on Wall Street and now own the mortgages of everyone else. Guys like me usually got lost after chapter 2. We weren't smart enough to graduate early, nor disinterested enough to take up liberal arts. We just plodded along.
Because I was that type of person, I wasn't satisfied with not being able to understand the theory. I knew I would be an engineer no matter what, because at the end of all of it, engineers build things. And I always built something, no matter how scientifically unsound the underlying theory was.
I built crystal radios that worked, but honestly, at that time I had little concept of how RF could generate enough motive force to vibrate the high impedance earpiece I was listening to. I built go carts and mini bikes from lawnmower engines and baby pram wheels. I made tiny amplifiers to drive speakers I prized from old transistor radios from my phonograph with parts and diagrams I got from Allied Radio Shack.
And I built tesla coils.These were very poor performers because I had no clue what the principles were of actually tuning a coil or powering a coil. What I mean is I knew that tuning was necessary, and I knew the mechanics of how to do it, but I had no clue what was actually happening, physically. Because my knowledge was limited, there was only so far I was ever able to go. But I was able to get tiny violet brushes of ionization from the top. Usually I put a 10-penny nail at the top of the secondary, figuring a tiny point was the best way to terminate a coil.
I "learned" the 10-penny nail topload configuration from my uncle, who was an ironworker, and a master constructor of all things. Unfortunately, my uncle also didn't understand the principles of electricity, but he knew how to realize nearly any imagined blueprint, and he had a certificate from an electronics technician's course he had taken back in the 1960's where he learned to fix televisions. And as a guy who made a living walking on beams 100s of feet over the earth, he had a great intuition for safety. All the tesla coils he had seen in his life made tiny brushes of violet light at the top and lit fluorescent bulbs at a distance of a couple inches. That was all they ever did, as far as he knew, and every coil he built (he built many) only ever did that.
One weekend my parents dropped me off at my aunt and uncle's place, which was a major joy for me. My uncle would arrange some sort of electronics project and we would spend saturday scouring the parts stores for things. I would try to guess what we were making from the parts he collected, but I never could.
We made my first tesla coil from transformer wire, wound around a plastic water pipe and laquered in place with varnish. A small neon sign transformer was our power supply. I have no idea what the rating of that was, but it was physically smaller than any transformer I have seen us talk about here on TCML (of course, it was a long time ago and my memory may be faulty on t hat). Our primary was a helical coil of 14x2 romex, insulation left on, with all the conductors shorted. And for a primary cap we used an 8"x10" sheet of window glass with two steel plates pressed against each flat side. He had welded conductors to the plates and we sandwiched the plates and glass together, holding them together only at the bottom only between two pieces of wood. The spark gap was simply two 10-penny nails aimed toward each other.
I believe my uncle got that design from a 1950's copy of "Popular Science" or "Boy's Life". He followed the dimensions rigorously. Had he not, there would likely have been absolutely no sparking at all. But he was able to reproduce the same violet brush of ionization at the top in all his coils because he was such a careful and skilled craftsman. There was no means to "tune" that coil. It simply worked or didn't. And it always worked, exactly the same.
Unlike all the other projects we built together in those days, I was not allowed to bring the coil home with me after the weekend. (Nor the Jacob's ladder we also made.) My uncle and parents felt it was too dangerous for a 13-year old kid, and truth be told, I probably would have started fires with the spark gap or dared my little brother to put his head into the discharge.
Later in life I went to school to learn engineering. I collected several degrees. Yet even when I left graduate school, though I could solve partial differential equations and knew how to optimize the gain/bandwidth product of certain op-amp based circuits, I still hadn't been taught the rudiments of construction that would have allowed me to reliably build a tesla coil the way my uncle did.
All of which is to say, be careful. Build away. Figure out JavaTC, and use it to get the proper dimensions. Keep your little brothers and sisters away from it. Best, Joe On 8/16/2012 5:52 PM, Zachary wrote:
I may have underexaggerated a little. I do have some experience with electricity from an introductory class that I took. But it was only a few days and it was mainly talking about safety, difference between amperage, voltage, different kinds of circuits, different componenets, identifying how much resistance a resistor has, a little about AC/DC, grounding, stuff like that. On Thu, Aug 16, 2012 at 5:58 PM, Jon Danniken <danniken@xxxxx> wrote:On 08/16/2012 12:35 PM, Zachary wrote:Ok. Well I have pretty much no experience with electricity. I'm just a senior in highschool so my resources are limited. I'm just wondering what are the best books or websites that I should use.With no experience in electricity, I would suggest holding off on building a TC until you at least have a fundamental grasp of the basics. Start with DC, and read about Ohm's law; this describes the relationship between Voltage, Current, and Resistance. Get a multimeter and learn the difference between parallel and series circuits, then get a few resistors and test leads from radio shack and test the theory by connecting the resistors in different ways, and using the multimeter to confirm the theory. At that point, get a battery and an LED, and learn about that circuit. Get in the habit of keeping notes for even the smallest observations, and don't be afraid of starting a fresh page. I know this might sound really basic and probably boring, but it will not take long, and it will form the foundation upon which everything else is based. You will find a lot good learning here, from these basics to complicated circuits: http://www.allaboutcircuits.**com/vol_1/index.html<http://www.allaboutcircuits.com/vol_1/index.html> Good luck! Jon ______________________________**_________________ Tesla mailing list Tesla@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.pupman.com/mailman/**listinfo/tesla<http://www.pupman.com/mailman/listinfo/tesla>_______________________________________________ Tesla mailing list Tesla@xxxxxxxxxx http://www.pupman.com/mailman/listinfo/tesla
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